The First Five Bottles for a Home Bar

Most home bars are assembled one favourite at a time and end up making surprisingly little. Buy for coverage instead and five bottles will outperform ten, because what decides whether you can make a drink is not how much you own but whether you own every ingredient in it.

The five

1. Gin (London Dry)

More classic cocktails call for gin than for anything else, and a London Dry is what those recipes were written for. It gets you the Dry Martini, the Gimlet, the Tom Collins, the Gin And Tonic and, with the next two bottles, the Negroni.

Buy a standard London Dry rather than a contemporary gin leading with cucumber or rose. Those are good and they quietly change every classic you put them in. Everything in the gin category assumes the standard style.

2. Sweet vermouth

The cheapest bottle on this list and the one that unlocks the most. It is a third of a Negroni, a third of a Manhattan and half an Americano.

Buy the small bottle and keep it in the fridge. It is wine, it oxidises, and it is at its best for about a month after opening. This is the most common reason a home Manhattan tastes flat, and it is covered properly in how long vermouth lasts.

3. Bourbon or rye

The second spirit, and the one that turns the vermouth bottle into a second set of drinks. Bourbon is rounder and faintly sweet, rye is drier and peppery. Either gives you the Old Fashioned, the Whiskey Sour, the Manhattan and the Mint Julep.

Pick one. Owning both before you own the rest of this list is exactly the variety-over-coverage mistake.

4. Orange liqueur

Cointreau or a good dry curacao at 40% ABV. It is the most-called-for modifier in cocktails and it is the sweet corner of an entire family of sours: the Sidecar, the Margarita, the Cosmopolitan and the White Lady are one shape with the base swapped.

Do not buy the cheap one. At 15% ABV it is mostly sugar and water, and the difference is the subject of triple sec vs Cointreau.

5. Aromatic bitters

A bottle of Angostura costs very little, lasts years, and is used a few dashes at a time. It is seasoning rather than an ingredient, and an Old Fashioned without it is just sweetened whiskey.

This is the highest return per pound on the entire list. Everything in the bitters category depends on it.

What that gets you

Add fresh lemons and limes, sugar for simple syrup, and a bottle of tonic and soda, and those five spirits cover the Negroni, the Martini, the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Whiskey Sour, the Gimlet, the Sidecar, the Tom Collins, the Gin and Tonic and the Americano. That is most of the classic canon from five bottles.

The next three

• Campari if you liked the Negroni. It opens the whole bitter aperitivo family and pairs with what you already own.
• Light rum for the Daiquiri and the Mojito.
• Dry vermouth if you are drinking Martinis, and only then, because it is the second bottle of wine on the shelf and it will go off if you are not.

The principle

A sixth bottle is worth buying when it finishes drinks, not when it is interesting. That is a question about what you already own, not about the bottle, and it is why the same list would be wrong for someone whose shelf already holds tequila.

It is also, more or less, what the Soda Vault app does: you tell it which bottles you have and it works out which recipes that completes and which single bottle would complete the most more.