Home Bar
Home bar setup, cocktail basics, and the tools that matter. Skip the 12-piece kit.
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5 Cocktails Every Home Bartender Needs to Know (The Only Ones)
These are the 5 cocktails every home bartender needs to know, full stop. Learn these five and you can make an enormous range of other drinks, because almost everything else is a variation on one of them. You don’t need fifty recipes memorized, you need these five down cold. The 5 Cocktails Every Home Bartender…
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Home Bar Setup Guide: The 4 Things You Actually Need (Not a 12-Piece Kit)
This home bar setup guide skips the matching 12-piece kit and gets straight to what actually matters: tools, glassware, ice, and a starter shelf of spirits. That’s it. You can build a home bar that makes genuinely good drinks with those four things and nothing else, and most of what gets sold as a “complete”…
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The Only 4 Wine Accessories You Actually Need
There are only 4 wine accessories you actually need to open, pour, and store wine well: a proper corkscrew, a preservation tool, a decanter, and a decent glass. Most kitchen drawers end up with a lot more than that, foil cutters, drip rings, a thermometer bracelet, all bundled into a gift set that looked useful…
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Vacu Vin Wine Saver Review: Honest Take After 4 Months, Still Worth It?
Quick Answer Short version of this Vacu Vin Wine Saver review: it’s a vacuum pump plus rubber stoppers that pulls air out of an opened bottle so the wine keeps a little longer before it turns. We’ve used ours for 3 to 4 months as a direct replacement for older push-down vacuum stoppers that did…
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A Bar Above Weighted Boston Shaker Review: Is It Worth It?
Quick answer The A Bar Above weighted Boston shaker is a two-piece, 304 stainless steel shaker with a circle-welded base and a tighter seal than the cheap shaker sets sold in most starter bar kits. It replaced a three-piece cobbler shaker whose built-in strainer kept clogging on ice, which meant I was already popping the…
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The Only 5 Bar Tools You Actually Need
The Only 5 Bar Tools You Actually Need There are five bar tools you actually need to make almost any cocktail well: a jigger, a Boston shaker, a Hawthorne strainer, a bar spoon, and a Y-peeler. Cocktail kits sell you twelve so the box looks impressive — here’s what each of the five is actually…