The Home Wet Bar (no, not a speed bar or a Flair practice bar)

Updated: July 1, 2004

The Home Wet Bar
(no, not a speed bar or a Flair practice bar)

By Philip Duff, Netherlands via Ireland

God protect us from bartending books, usually written by Euphonious T. Snodgrass, assistant professor of Home Economics at the Buttfuck College of Further Education in some unlikely place like Belgium, where they still point at planes. These glossy tomes usually contain a ten page section on Your Home Bar, which can summarized thus: build a complete bar in your home or you’ll only ever be able to make shitty drinks. This is, like much of the written word (ahem) nonsense. For a working home bar, you need perhaps 10 bottles, a couple of bits and pieces of fruit and glassware, and a tray of ice. A shaker is nice to have. You can use a knife as a bar spoon (or, indeed, a spoon). Skip the blender, because everyone knows blended drinks are for wusses.

The magic ingredients, without which you would be as useless as Robbie Williams without his marching powder, are freshly squeezed lemon juice, lime juice and sugar syrup. With these three ingredients, you can make quite literally anything taste good. Invest a big 20 bucks in a juicer and some of the aforementioned fruit: after you’ve squeezed it, it stays good for perhaps two days. Sugar syrup you make by dissolving twice as much sugar in half as much warm water, e.g. 1 kilo of sugar in 1⁄2 liter of water = 1.1 liters of sugar syrup, and it’s good for a week.

Then you need to have some glasses. If you’re stealing them from the local pub, get some long drink glasses (good for everything from beer and sodas to on-ice cocktails) rocks glasses (some cocktails, liquor straight up or on the rocks) and wine glasses (straight up and frozen drinks). And that’s it.

Should you actually have a wet bar in your home? Well, you could have a bar, but it screams “inexperienced youth” almost as loudly as it does “mid-life crisis”, and it only tends to impress girlies who think a Bacardi Breezer is a cocktail and that ‘N’ Sync in dinner jackets is the very height of sophistication. Far better to just have a couple of shelves with some reassuringly expensive brands on them, and a large freezer for the glassware and vodka.

You will then, of course, need to make the drinks. There is one recipe that works for absolutely everything, from Jagermeister and Unterberg to Galliano and Mongolian pig-sweat, and that is the Sour. The drink itself is even easier than your little sister: 2 shots of whatever you like, 1 shot of freshly-squeezed lemon juice and 3⁄4 shot of that sugar syrup. Shake it with a bit if ice, and serve it on the rocks or straight up. On the rocks with a splash of soda on top and voila, you have a Collins. Play around with the proportions until you find one you like, and stick to it. If you want to be really fancy, stick in some mashed-up fresh fruit like strawberries and then the liqueur that matches, like Crème de Fraise (strawberry) or Crème de Cassis (blackcurrant).

Which brings us neatly to the question: what do I buy? Unless you’re a drinks writer like us, you all have to go through the humiliating ordeal that is paying for booze. Let us make it less painful for you. You will need a decent blended Scotch – we like Famous Grouse, mostly because it’s good, also because we have 6 million experts backing us up: Grouse is the best-selling Scotch in Scotland. You will need a good bourbon, and they don’t come much better than Jim Beam, also available in an excellent extra-aged Black Label version. You will need a decent gin, and we like Tanqueray in it’s 47% alcohol version (well, why do you think people drinks martinis slowly?). Rum’s a no-brainer: Mount Gay, from Barbados, is a lovely, amber rum that goes down like an English girl – worryingly easy. No modern drinks cabinet is complete without a tequila, and we like Jose Cuervo Gold and Sauza Hornitos both very much, Hornitos having a slight peppermint taste as it slips down your thirsty gob. And to round it all out, some Absolut vodka and some Bols liqueurs: at a very minimum get the Triple Sec, the Crème de Bananes and the Coffee. Even if you buy everything in 750ml sizes, you won’t have much change out of 2 – 300 bucks, but you will have enough booze to make well over 100 top-notch drinks, and booze never, ever goes off (unlike wine, ha ha!). And do yourself a favor – don’t go buying Famous Gash Wisky Drink or Jimmy Beamo’s Finest American Burrban from the Love-You-Long-Time-Distillery; cheap shit B-brands taste just like they sound, not quite right and vaguely sick-making. Stick in some orange juice, cranberry juice, the aforementioned citrus juices, soda, 7UP, cola, tonic water and any weird stuff you like such as mango puree and you’re all set. Garnishes? Bollocks to them, only wusses garnish drinks (or wusses who think the drink needs to be camouflaged). Straws? A few, so Sweety doesn’t hurt her dental braces. You can add all the other stuff (like cognac, champagne, wine and crap like Irish cream liqueurs that only your granny and that cute 16-year old from the shop on the corner like) later, as budget dictates. And remember the first rules of drinking at home, as espoused by PJ O’Rourke in his seminal “The Bachelor’s Home Companion”: it isn’t a real party until you’ve given the dog a martini. Ruff!