Co-written by Jane Salt & Jeremy Gladwin
Building a home bar can become complicated remarkably quickly.
You start by thinking that a bottle of gin and something fizzy will probably do. Twenty minutes later you are wondering whether you need three different vermouths, obscure bitters from Trinidad and a tiny bottle of something French that appears in precisely one cocktail recipe!
Good news folks! You probably do not.
A useful home bar is not about recreating the back bar of a five star hotel. It is about having a small collection of versatile bottles that you genuinely enjoy drinking and that can be combined in enough different ways to keep things interesting.
With the right foundations, five or six carefully chosen spirits can take you surprisingly far.
What does a good home bar actually need?
The first rule is simple: buy for the drinks you actually like.
If you never drink vodka cocktails, there is no law requiring a bottle of vodka to sit untouched at the back of a cupboard for seven years. Likewise, owning four types of rum is unnecessary if your cocktail repertoire begins and ends with a gin and tonic.
A sensible starter bar should instead cover a few different families of drinks. Something botanical, something based on whisky, something from rum or agave, and one or two bottles that add sweetness, bitterness or aromatic complexity.
The aim is versatility rather than volume.
1. A good London Dry Gin
If you are going to begin anywhere, gin is a very sensible place to start.
It gives you the obvious gin and tonic, but also opens the door to the Martini, Negroni, Tom Collins, Gin Fizz, French 75 and plenty of simpler drinks built around citrus and soda.
For a home bar, we would generally choose a classic dry style rather than something heavily flavoured. You can always add flavour later. It is rather harder to remove it.
Malvern Gin is a particularly useful example. Produced in Worcestershire with Malvern spring water, it keeps juniper firmly at the centre while bringing citrus and gentle herbal notes. In other words, it has enough personality to make a good gin and tonic but does not become difficult when you put it into a cocktail.
Another excellent local option is Sly Gin London Dry Gin, made in Herefordshire in very small batches and using botanicals including herbs grown around the distillery.
What can you make? Gin and Tonic, Dry Martini, Negroni, French 75, Tom Collins and Gin Fizz.
2. Bourbon or rye whiskey
Whisky deserves a place in almost any serious home bar, but this is where a little discipline helps.
You do not immediately need an Islay single malt, a Japanese whisky, an Irish whiskey, a bourbon and three different ryes. That is a whisky collection, which is a different hobby entirely.
For cocktails, bourbon is probably the most versatile starting point.
Four Roses Small Batch Bourbon is a good example of why. At 45% ABV it has enough structure to remain present when mixed, with ripe fruit, spice, caramel and oak giving you plenty to work with.
The classic place to start is an Old Fashioned. Bourbon, sugar, bitters, ice. That is essentially it. The International Bartenders Association's Old Fashioned recipe is a useful reference if you want the classic structure before experimenting.
From there you can move into Whiskey Sours, Manhattans and Boulevardiers once you expand the bar with the appropriate modifiers.
What can you make? Old Fashioned, Whiskey Sour, Manhattan and Boulevardier.
3. Rum
Rum is where the home bar starts becoming fun.
It is also where things can become confusing, because rum is not one single style. Light, dark, aged, Jamaican, Barbados, agricole and navy strength rums can behave very differently.
If you are keeping the collection small, choose something with enough character to be interesting but enough versatility to mix.
Black Tot Rum combines Caribbean rums from Barbados, Guyana and Jamaica and brings tropical fruit, spice, coffee and darker flavours without relying on excessive sweetness.
That makes it particularly good for drinks where you actually want to taste the rum rather than merely detect that alcohol has been added somewhere along the way.
A Daiquiri is the perfect test. Rum, fresh lime and sugar. Three ingredients, nowhere to hide. It is also proof that a Daiquiri does not have to arrive frozen, fluorescent and accompanied by a paper umbrella!
The classic IBA Daiquiri is an excellent starting point.
What can you make? Daiquiri, Rum Old Fashioned, Mojito, Cuba Libre and, with a few additional ingredients, Jungle Bird.
4. Blanco Tequila
A bottle of proper tequila makes a home bar much more useful.
And by proper tequila, we mean something you would willingly drink rather than something associated primarily with salt and lemon!
Blanco tequila is generally the most versatile style for cocktails because its fresh agave character remains clearly identifiable when mixed.
Tapatio Tequila Blanco is an excellent example. It is peppery, vegetal, spicy and unmistakably agave driven. At 40% ABV it has plenty of presence in a cocktail, which is precisely what you want when lime and orange liqueur enter the equation.
And yes, that means Margarita.
The classic combination is tequila, orange liqueur and fresh lime. The IBA Margarita specification is a very good template, but once you understand the basic balance you can adjust acidity and sweetness to suit your own taste.
Add grapefruit soda and you are already moving towards a Paloma.
What can you make? Margarita, Paloma, Tequila Sour and various highball style drinks.
5. One good liqueur
This is where people often make the mistake of buying too much.
Liqueurs are seductive. There are bottles flavoured with almost everything imaginable, and suddenly you have twelve of them while still lacking anything suitable for an Old Fashioned.
Start with one.
Ideally, choose something you can use both in mixed drinks and on its own. Our own awards-winning Awesome Amaretto, made in Trieste by Piolo & Max exclusively for Hay Wines, fits that brief nicely.
Amaretto brings almond richness and sweetness and can work with whisky, coffee and darker spirits, as well as simply being enjoyed over ice.
One particularly simple combination is an Amaretto Sour. Another is the French Connection, which combines Cognac and Amaretto. And should your evening reach the stage where pouring a small glass of amaretto over ice seems considerably more attractive than finding the cocktail shaker, nobody sensible will judge you.
What can you make? Amaretto Sour, French Connection and numerous coffee based or after dinner drinks.
6. Vermouth, eventually
Vermouth deserves a small warning because people routinely treat it like a spirit.
It is not.
Vermouth is an aromatised wine, and once opened it should be kept refrigerated. Leaving the bottle beside the gin for nine months and then wondering why your Martini tastes tired is not the vermouth's fault.
For anyone interested in Martinis, Manhattans or Negronis, vermouth soon becomes essential. Dry vermouth opens one set of doors, sweet vermouth another.
But there is no need to buy both before you know which drinks you enjoy. Start with the style required for the cocktails you make most frequently, keep it in the fridge after opening and replace it while it still tastes fresh.
When we are asked for a recommendation, we always point our customers towards the Piolo & Max Vermut del Porto Vecchio. A rich, aromatic and versatile artisan red vermouth from Trieste, made by Piolo & Max in tribute to the city’s historic old harbour.
7. The shortcut bottle: a ready made Negroni
There is also a perfectly respectable seventh option: cheat intelligently.
A well made bottled cocktail can be extremely useful in a home bar, particularly when guests arrive and you would rather speak to them than spend fifteen minutes measuring ingredients behind the kitchen counter.
Hay Wines Negroni Now is made exclusively for us by artisan distiller and mixologist Paolo Basolo. Gin, bitter and vermouth are already blended, so the complicated recipe is essentially this: add ice.
Orange zest helps.
Confidence while pouring also helps. 😉
This is not a replacement for learning how to make cocktails. It is simply recognition that sometimes the best cocktail is the one that reaches your guest before they have had time to ask whether dinner is nearly ready.
Do you need vodka?
Maybe.
Vodka appears in some hugely popular cocktails, including the Espresso Martini, Moscow Mule, Bloody Mary and Cosmopolitan.
But the idea that every home bar automatically requires vodka is worth questioning. If you regularly make those drinks, absolutely include it. If you do not, spend the money on a bottle you are more likely to use.
The same principle applies to Cognac, mezcal, Irish whiskey, Scotch and every other spirit category. They are excellent additions when your cocktail repertoire gives them a reason to be there.
A home bar should grow because your interests grow, not because an internet checklist told you to fill a shelf.
Do not forget the ingredients that are not alcoholic
The bottles are only half the story.
A surprisingly good cocktail setup can be built around a few inexpensive extras:
- fresh lemons and limes;
- good tonic water;
- soda water;
- ginger beer;
- sugar syrup;
- angostura or aromatic bitters;
- oranges for zest and garnish.
Fresh citrus is particularly important. If there is one easy way to transform a perfectly good spirit into a disappointing cocktail, bottled lime juice is waiting patiently to volunteer.
What bar equipment do you actually need?
Again, less than you think.
A shaker is useful. A measuring jigger is even more useful because free pouring 50ml after two cocktails can become an increasingly philosophical exercise!
Add a bar spoon, a small strainer and a citrus peeler and you have most of the important jobs covered.
You do not need twelve different glasses either. A good tumbler, a tall glass and a wine or coupe style glass will cover a surprisingly large proportion of drinks.
A simple home bar shopping list
If we were building a compact home bar from scratch, the first shelf might therefore look something like this:
- London Dry Gin: Malvern Gin or Sly Gin London Dry Gin;
- Bourbon: Four Roses Small Batch Bourbon;
- Rum: Black Tot Rum;
- Tequila: Tapatio Tequila Blanco;
- Liqueur: Awesome Amaretto;
- Vermouth: Vermut del Porto Vecchio;
- Optional shortcut: Hay Wines Negroni Now.
That is enough to build a genuinely useful drinks cabinet without turning the spare room into a bonded warehouse.
Build your home bar slowly
The best home bars tend to evolve.
You begin with gin because you like gin and tonic. Then you discover the Negroni. That leads to vermouth and bitters. Someone makes you a good Margarita, so tequila appears. Six months later you are explaining to a guest why the Jamaican rum on the shelf is completely different from the Barbados one and you suddenly realise how this happened.
That is part of the fun.
There is no definitive collection of bottles that every home must contain. The essentials are simply the bottles that allow you to make the drinks you and your friends genuinely enjoy.
Start small, buy better, learn a few classic recipes and add bottles when they give you something new to do.
For everything else, there is always another shelf.
Explore the full Hay Wines spirits and liqueurs collection for more artisan gin, whisky, rum, tequila, liqueurs and other bottles to build your own home bar.
