Home Bar: How to Bring the Bar Into Your House

Ever had people over and felt like you wished you were more of an entertainer? Have an empty shelf in your kitchen that is serving no purpose? Getting the right ingredients into your house can transform your house into a bar pretty easily. We talked to Adam Gottschalk of Ron Mexico and Caroline Tan of Scarlet A to see what the pros recommend you stock your bar with at your home.

“Anytime there are guests over, people start making cocktails” Adam tells us. “I usually try to encourage people to play around with whatever they find lying around in my kitchen or refrigerator. It starts out serious and usually spirals into chaos- Tabasco, Baijiu, leftover noodle broth, it all comes into play.  We usually take turns pouring rounds of drinks.  In fact, this turned into one of the concepts behind Ron Mexico; there’s a page in the menu where you can build your own cocktails, using anything we’ve got on the shelf or in the fridge.  This idea came directly from how much fun we used to have trying to one-up each other at home.” Adam makes almost everything at home, so it seems.

Spirits and Syrups
If you’re not sure where to get started, these are the basics you should have at the ready “bourbon, rye, gin, spiced/white/dark rum, vodka, and tequila” Adam says. Caroline adds, it also really depends on what kind of drinks you normally like and spirits base you prefer. The basic spirits would be vodka, gin, tequila, light rum, dark rum, bourbon whisky, rye whiskey and scotch whiskey. My favorite cocktails to make are the old fashioned and the negroni.”

Adam continues “if you’re just looking to have some fun and make stuff that tastes good, there’s loads of flavored liqueurs and syrups out there; the most versatile, in my eyes, are triple sec (orange liqueur), peach liqueur, Kahlua (coffee liqueur), passion fruit syrup, and Amaretto. Make sure you've got soda water, it's a lot more versatile than sprite or sweeter carbonated mixers.  If you want to get a little more serious with your drink-making, get some Angostura bitters, Luxardo maraschino liqueur, Orgeat (almond), and have a good range of fresh fruits. Luxardo also sells incredible maraschino cherries in small jars, get one of those- it’s not even in the same category as the birthday-cake stuff most people use.  Also, one secret I’ve found here is Martinique cane sugar syrup; it’s an incredible replacement for other sweeteners, and it’s really inexpensive for a bottle.”

Equipment
Besides getting in the right bottled stuff, you’ll also have to prepare the right equipment. This will easily take your cocktail making to the next level.

Adam tells us he went to get his stuff at the new Dongjiao market on the East 5th Ring Road. “Go in the door on the far left, it took exactly ten minutes to buy everything I needed from literally the first shop I found inside. Grab a couple of cocktail shakers, a long bar spoon for stirring, a jigger to measure pours, a muddler, and a strainer. Beyond that, make sure you’ve got a cutting board and a knife.”

Caroline went for the online approach: What you’ll need in terms of equipment is “a mixing glass, a bar spoon, a shaker, a strainer, a muddler, a jigger and some nice glassware. There are a few cool stores on Taobao that sell pretty decent stuff for home use.”

And last but not least
If you’re planning to entertain for the night, ice is a pretty vital ingredient. Adam has kindly offered to help people source it through Ron Mexico, “if you think you can get through a cocktail party with a couple of plastic trays of freezer ice, you’ll be disappointed and thirsty in about twenty minutes.  Having a full liquor cabinet at home but no ice means you’ll quickly be running to the convenience store for Tsing Taos.” We’re pretty glad that, prior to researching this article, it wasn’t just us dashing to the nearest shaomaibu for Tsing Tao’s as soon as the night heats up.

More stories by this author here.
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Photo: Uni