Wet Bar Essentials to Become Your Own Mixologist

Our butler’s pantry has become a great place for storing wet bar essentials in our home. We store everything from our glasses and some booze, along with everyday essentials like placemats and napkins in this one area. With the help of my personal Mikesologist, we’re sharing some wet bar essentials today.

While neither Michael or I are experts on this matter, he has done enough experimenting and researching as of late to have a pretty good sense as to what we’d call “essential”. This list is certainly not all inclusive, but based on our experiences, this is a great place to start. We’ll break it down by category to keep it even easier! Keep reading to help stock your bar or bar cart with some essentials in order to make a variety of drinks.

GLASSES

Michael’s first two recommendation for types of glasses to have in your wet bar would be rocks glasses and highball glasses. You can use these two glasses for most things and you’ll have both a short and a taller style. If you want to add in a third, he’d suggest coupe glasses.

There are a handful of speciality glasses you could have on hand, if you want, for things like margaritas, moscow mules, and juleps, but they wouldn’t be considered essential necessarily.

 

BOOZE

A lot of yall have asked us what types of alcohol you should have at home in order to make a lot of the cocktails Michael has shared on MIKESology. First off, it kind of depends on what you want to make, so keep that in mind when making your own decisions.

That being said, we’ve broken this into two main categories: liquor and liqueurs. And yes, those are two different things… I asked, too 😉

For LIQUORS, your basics would be bourbon and/or rye (rye being more versatile according to most), white rum, vodka, and gin, which is the most common for cocktails. If some of your favorite drinks require tequila, brandy, or dark rum, you may want to keep those around as well.

For LIQUEURS and other drink ingredients, having both sweet and dry vermouth on hand, a good versatile bitters (such as angostura), and an orange liqueur (Cointreau, generic triple sec, etc) is best. It’s also smart to keep lemon juice, lime juice, mixers, simple syrup or sugar cubes for muddling available.

 

ACCESSORIES

Michael’s bar accessory essentials are listed and linked below to make it extra easy for you. Some of these are probably more important than others, so we’ve broken up the list into top and secondary priority for yall.

TOP: Boston shaker (or another kind of mixer), jigger, barspoon, hawthorne strainer, mixing glasses

SECONDARY: 2″ ice cube molds, muddler, bar mat, metal straws of varying size (to fit a shorter rocks glass and a taller highball glass)

This bar set is exactly what Michael uses and is a great starting point for those of you who may not have any tools yet. It includes everything from the shaker, jigger, strainer, barspoon, muddler, and more. A fantastic value for so many essential mixology accessories.

We’d love to hear if there’s anything else that you find essential to your own wet bars or bar carts. We’re slowly adding to ours as we try out new things and learn more about mixology.

Cheers!

 

 

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