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Stocking a bar doesn’t have to be intimidating—or prohibitively expensive. All you really need is a handful of home bar essentials (many of which you might already have in your kitchen) and the bottles required to make your favorite cocktails. From there you can add tools and spirits as you develop your bartending skills and expand your repertoire.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or giving your bar a much-needed refresh after two years of happy hour at home, here’s everything you need to make great drinks, plus a few extras to enhance your overall cocktail experience.
Bar tools
The secret to a great drink is balance, and in order to achieve the perfect ratio of boozy, bitter, and sweet, you need to properly measure your ingredients—especially when you’re just starting out. But leave the two-sided jigger to the professionals and get yourself a much more useful tiny measuring cup marked with every increment you need to make a cocktail. There’s a reason this is at the top of our home bar essentials list: It’s the best bar tool an aspiring home bartender can buy. If you get yourself just one thing, this should be it.
The little scoop on the end of a bar spoon is mostly there for show since the main purpose of this tool is stirring. In a pinch you can use a chopstick or even a butter knife to stir a drink, but a beautiful stir stick makes mixing cocktails more fun.
If you regularly fancy an Old Fashioned or plan to make anything with fresh herbs, like a Mojito or Mint Julep, you’ll want to have a muddler handy. (You can also use the blunt end of a wooden spoon, but beware: You might stain it with bitters or herbs.)
Shaken or stirred? That depends on what’s going in your drink. Anything with juice, dairy, or eggs should be shaken. Cocktails that contain only spirits, like a negroni, get stirred. And while you can stir your drinks in any sturdy glass, or even the bottom of a cocktail shaker, there are benefits to using a mixing glass—namely, the pour spout.
Like a mixing glass, a cocktail shaker isn’t technically necessary because you can use a wide-mouth mason jar with a Hawthorne strainer (see below). But if your favorite cocktails are shaken not stirred, a good shaker will make mess-free work of shaking, and especially pouring, cocktails like daiquiris and Margaritas.
There’s more than one way to strain a cocktail, and more than one kind of strainer to buy, but a Hawthorne strainer is the most versatile and foolproof. It fits snugly inside the top of a mixing glass, wide-mouth jar, or pint glass, and should filter out most of what you don’t want in your drink (except for fresh-squeezed citrus juice or little bits of mint, which may also require a fine-mesh sieve).
Garnishes are about more than just looks, especially if the garnish is a citrus twist. The fragrant oils released after it’s twisted add to the overall experience of a cocktail. But you don’t want too much pith (the white stuff) in your twist, which is where the Y-peeler comes in. This handy, affordable peeler makes easy work of getting just the right amount of lemon, lime, or orange peel from fresh fruit.
If you’re committing to making quality cocktails at home, you really should be using fresh-squeezed citrus juice in them (though I have been known to make an exception with only one brand of bottled lemon juice when making giant batched cocktails). You can also use this tool to make fresh pomegranate juice!
Okay, ice isn’t a tool, but it is an essential element of nearly every cocktail, and if you don’t have an ice maker in your fridge (or on your counter), you definitely need an ice cube tray. For a more elevated cocktail experience, go big here. That said, some drinks call for crushed ice, which professional bartenders often make in a Lewis bag. At home you can wrap regular ice cubes in a resealable bag or clean dish towel and crush them with a hammer, mallet, or rolling pin (and yes, it’s fun!).
Unless you’re really into creating your own cocktails, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel—especially when there are already so many amazing recipes in print (and, you know, online). These titles take the mystery out of mixology and give you plenty to work with.
Pint-size mason jars can be used to store your homemade simple syrup (also a home bar essential!), leftover mixers, or make-ahead cocktails. A wide-mouth jar can also be used as a shaker. If you’re using the jars for storage, be sure to label them so you know what’s in them and how long they’ve been in the fridge.
Glassware
I’m the last person to discourage someone from buying lots of beautiful glassware, but you really don’t need 17 types of stemmed glasses (think martini glass, coupe glass, margarita glass, etc.). If you’re just starting out or are short on space, you can drink almost anything you plan to serve “up” out of a versatile stemmed vessel.
For cocktails with lots of ice and a little effervescence—like a Paloma or a whiskey with a heavy pour of soda—you’ll want to have a couple of Collins-style or highball glasses. As Epi’s resident cocktail expert says, tall glasses make your bubbly drinks better.
The old fashioned glass (also known as a lowball or rocks glass) is perhaps the most versatile cocktail glass of all, so make sure you have a set. You’ll use these short glasses to serve classic cocktails like the Old Fashioned (yes, the glass is named after the drink), Negroni, Sazerac, and any spirit you drink over ice. Bonus: They can double as water glasses while you’re serving cocktails in stemmed glasses.
Base spirits
Selecting the best spirits for your bar cart is really a matter of taste. If you only want to drink Negronis the rest of your life, you can skip bourbon, tequila, etc., and stock your bar with gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. If you’d rather sip on a whiskey-based cocktail for eternity, skip the gin and vodka, but maybe consider branching out with a nice bottle of aged rum. Of course, if you want to be able to offer guests a wide selection of mixed drinks, these spirits are a great place to start. (Looking for nonalcoholic spirits suggestions? We have those too.)
Liqueurs, bitters, aperitifs, and digestifs
These aromatic bottles add depth to drinks (and we have recommendations for nonalcoholic versions too).
Angostura Aromatic Bitters is the go-to ingredient for adding warm, spicy notes to mixed drinks. Unless you plan to drink only gin and tonics for the rest of your life, this is a must-have for your home bar. (You can cook with Angostura too; read more in our guide to bitters.)
This bright red Italian aperitif is what makes a negroni bitter, but it’s good for so much more (including the boulevardier, the negroni’s arguably sexier cousin).
Orange liqueur, or triple sec, is the unsung hero of so many popular drinks, including the margarita, the Sidecar, and the Cosmopolitan. If you plan to work your way through a cocktail book, be sure to have a bottle on hand. Grand Marnier is perhaps the most well-known orange liqueur, but for cocktails try one of these.
Vermouth is a fortified wine essential to drinks like the Manhattan and the martini. You can even sip the good stuff on its own. For mixed drinks that call for dry vermouth, the ubiquitous Dolin will do, but it’s also worth it to spend a little more on a nicer sweet vermouth like Carpano Antica Formula (once you open it, keep it in the fridge!).
Extras
Mixers are a must for any home bar, but the ones you use will depend on what you and your housemates like to drink. It’s always a good idea to stock up on club soda and tonic water, but you might also want a spicy ginger beer for a Moscow Mule or a fancy soda to offer a guest (with or without booze). Some home bartenders keep a small stash of shelf-stable tomato juice or Bloody Mary mix and cranberry juice too. Juice-forward drinks like the Tequila Sunrise are better when you squeeze your own orange juice (and make your own grenadine). You can buy simple syrup, but it’s better when you make it, though thinned agave nectar is often a good substitute for simple syrup when you’re using an agave spirit like tequila or mezcal (and sometimes when you’re not).
If your meticulously measured and perfectly balanced drink still feels like it’s missing something, it’s probably a garnish. Again, how you garnish your cocktail will depend on what you’re drinking, but if you have your bar stocked with fresh citrus, the good maraschino cherries, martini olives, and maybe even cocktail onions (my personal favorite for a perfect Gibson), you’ll be set. But if you don’t want to stop there, you can always take your garnish to the next level with a cute cocktail pick.
