I wouldn’t open a bar and serve drinks in any old glass, but my focus is making cocktails at home so I look at it this way: if I have friends over and give them handmade cocktails, they won’t care what the drinks are served in but they will feel happy, impressed and a little […]

My First Bar Tool Purchases series continues with the strainer. Here are links to the first two parts on cocktail shakers and jiggers. In your kitchen you’ll probably have stand-ins for tools like spoons, knives, something to muddle, etc. so once you have at least the cocktail shaker, jigger and strainer, you’re good to go! […]

I covered shakers in my first of this series of posts on stocking the tools for a home bar. The next tool is a jigger. 2. Jigger You’ve probably seen bartenders work without measuring tools. They use pouring spouts to control the flow, flip the bottle over the cup and count to themselves to determine […]

Fifteen years ago I received a bar set as a wedding gift. It had all these tools stuck into one ice bucket with a smiley-faced mixer and some other strange looking tools. I had no idea what to do with it, except to put ice in the bucket. After it collected dust for a few […]

As I mentioned in my first post, taking the BarSmarts Wired course was a revelation. Here are the top six things that I didn’t know before the course.

Ever order a drink and then the bartender/server responds with a question that makes you realize that you’re already in way too deep? “Would you like that up?” “Do you want that with a twist?” “Would you like that with a water back?” Simple questions, but if you don’t know what they mean, you might […]