Building a Home Bar - Liquor

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Both The Other Williams and I are drinkers. My preference is wine and The Other Williams prefers craft beer. Recently, though, we've been trying to build our home bar.

Both of us enjoy a cocktail on occasion and the more we entertain the more we like being able to mix our friends their favorite drink. As for us, I'm a Crown and Coke kind-a-girl from waaaaay back. When questioned about her go-to liquor drink, The Other Williams said "Beer with a shot of bourbon". Yea, up until now we've been pretty simple liquor drinkers.

Lately, we've slowly been purchasing a bottle of fine spirits here and there in the attempt to "stock" our bar. The end-goal is to create 5 cocktails that are our "House Drinks" and always have those ingredients on hand. However right now we're in the development stage and having a little too much fun experimenting with several different types of liquor. We're quickly realizing the challenge of stocking a home bar is keeping it stocked!

So here is our temporary bar set-up.

Above: Liquor we currently have on hand. I don't really like the look of this and I'm searching, brainstorming, and taking suggestions to making this more pleasing to the eye. The top idea so far is just buying smaller bottles to display and refilling from the larger bottles, which it's cheaper to purchase.

Above: Mixers and garnishes we currently have on hand. From left to right: Maraschino cherries, diet coke, coke, sprite, tonic, seltzer, ginger ale and limes in front. Not pictured (because I forgot about them), pineapple juice in small cans, and cranberry juice in small bottles. We also normally have lemons. We don't drink soda and juice on a regular basis so I don't mind paying extra for the tiny cans of soda and individual beverages and juices. This keeps everything from going flat or going bad before we can get to it.

 Above: Tools. Shaker (with strainer lid), cocktail straws, measuring shot glass (1/2 oz, 1 oz, 1 1/2 oz), and wooden muddle. We also use our regular kitchen tools when needed.

Above: Glassware. I try to keep this to the basics but I have a love of glass and dishware. I try to have 4-6 of everything. Here are some of our glasses. White wine glasses, Red wine glasses, Martini glasses, Snifter glasses, shot glasses, and old fashion glasses/tumblers. We also have champagne and beer glasses.

We started out experimenting with some of the classic cocktails and have moved into some more fun and eclectic cocktails. We're increasingly getting more and more interested in complex cocktails that require a little time and effort behind them, along with homemade and infused spirits.There have been some successes and one or two fails but several cocktails have been really good!

So we're going to start adding our favorites here to the blog. Most will be recipes we've gathered and have tried with some being our own creation. It should be a lot of fun! In a few days we'll begin this new series, dubbed "Cocktail Hour", with a cocktail we recently had that blew our socks off. Here's a hint: BACON!

What's your go-to cocktail?