Home Bar Essentials: 13 Bottles to Start With

Why thirteen bottles?

Because thirteen is where the maths stops being silly.

Buy three bottles and you can make about four drinks, all of them variations on the same thing. Buy fifty and you've built a very expensive shelf of liqueurs you'll use twice a year. Somewhere in between there's a point where each new bottle stops unlocking one drink and starts unlocking five, and that's the point we're aiming at.

We ran the numbers on our own recipes to find it. These thirteen bottles will make you nineteen of the cocktails on this site right now, assuming you've also got the citrus and the syrups sorted (more on those below, and they're the cheap bit). That's not a marketing number, it's the actual count. We'll show you the list.

Two of the thirteen won't make you anything at all yet. We're going to tell you which two and why they're still on the list, because a stocking guide that pretends every bottle earns its place immediately is just a shopping list with opinions.

What these thirteen will actually make you

Nineteen drinks. Here they are, and every one of them is a link to the full recipe:

That's an Old Fashioned, a Martini and a Manhattan for the quiet nights, a Sidecar and a Clover Club when someone's coming round, and a Piña Colada for when the sun's out and you've stopped caring what anyone thinks.

The thirteen

1. Rye whiskey

Our pick: Rittenhouse 100 proof. Rye is the spicier, drier, more assertive half of American whiskey, and the bottled-in-bond Rittenhouse at 50% is the one bartenders actually keep behind the bar. The proof matters. A 40% rye disappears under ice and vermouth; this one still has something to say after dilution.

Makes: Manhattan, Scofflaw, Ward Eight, 12 Mile Limit.

2. Bourbon

Our pick: Evan Williams or Eagle Rare. Where rye is spice, bourbon is sweetness, vanilla and oak. Evan Williams is the value play and there is no shame in it whatsoever. Eagle Rare is the one to buy when you want the Old Fashioned to feel like an occasion.

Makes: Whiskey Sour, Old Fashioned, Suffering Bastard.

3. Scotch

Our pick: Monkey Shoulder. A blended malt built specifically for mixing, which is exactly what you want in a starter bar rather than something peaty you'll feel guilty about pouring into a cocktail.

Right, honesty time: Scotch currently makes you nothing on this site. We haven't published a single Scotch cocktail yet. It's on the list because a home bar without Scotch is a home bar you can't pour someone a dram from, and because the Penicillin, the Rob Roy and the Blood and Sand are all coming. Buy it thirteenth if you're counting the pennies.

4. Gin

Our pick: Ramsbury Gin. Gin is the hardest working bottle on this list and it isn't close. Juniper, citrus and whatever botanical rabbit hole the distiller went down, and it plays with almost everything.

Makes: Martini, Gimlet, Clover Club, Pegu Club, Juliet and Romeo, Suffering Bastard.

5. Light rum

Our pick: Plantation 3 Stars, or Veritas if you can find it. That one is genuinely special. Light rum is the other workhorse. Clean, faintly grassy, and the backbone of more classics than people give it credit for.

Makes: Daiquiri, Mojito, Traditional Mojito, Piña Colada, 12 Mile Limit.

Start with the Daiquiri. Three ingredients, nowhere to hide, and it'll tell you more about your rum in one sip than the back label will in a paragraph.

6. Dark rum

Our pick: Diplomático or Plantation Dark. Second honesty moment: dark rum on its own doesn't unlock anything here yet either. It turns up in our Mai Tai and our Hurricane, and both of those want a second specific rum alongside it.

So why is it in the thirteen? Because it's a float, a sipper and a fixer. A dash on top of a Piña Colada changes the whole drink, and the moment you add one more rum to the shelf it stops being decorative.

7. Brandy

Our pick: Pierre Ferrand Cognac. Massively underrated in a modern home bar and absolutely central to a pre-Prohibition one. Cognac is where the sour family actually started, before whiskey took over.

Makes: Sidecar, 12 Mile Limit.

8. Tequila or mezcal

Our pick for mezcal: Ojo de Tigre. For tequila: Olmeca Altos Plata. We use mezcal in our Margaritas and we're not sorry. The smoke does something to lime and orange that plain tequila can't. If you'd rather have the classic version, any 100% agave blanco does the job and Altos is the one most bars reach for.

One bottle, either way. The recipe works with both and says so.

Makes: Margarita.

9. Vodka

Our pick: Ramsbury Single Estate. Vodka gets sneered at by people who've decided flavour is a personality, and then those same people drink Moscow Mules all summer. It does a specific job: strength without argument, letting the ginger and lime do the talking.

Makes: Moscow Mule. And you'll want it for the Espresso Martini the moment you add a coffee liqueur, which is the very next bottle we'd tell you to buy.

10. Sweet vermouth

Our pick: Cocchi Vermouth di Torino. Here's the thing nobody tells you: vermouth is wine. Once it's open it starts dying. Keep it in the fridge, buy the small bottle, and if it's been open since Christmas, pour it away.

Makes: Manhattan.

11. Dry vermouth

Our pick: Cocchi Dry Vermouth. Same rule, same fridge. A Martini made with oxidised vermouth is the single most common reason people think they don't like Martinis.

Makes: Martini, Scofflaw.

12. Dry curaçao

Our pick: Ferrand Dry Curaçao. This is the orange liqueur we reach for in nearly everything, seven recipes on the site and counting. It's brandy-based, drier and more complex than a standard triple sec, and it makes a noticeably better Sidecar.

It does not cover every orange liqueur going, and we're not going to pretend it does. Triple sec is a different bottle: clearer, sharper, no oak. Our Singapore Sling asks for it by name and means it. Everywhere else on the site, this is the bottle.

Makes: Sidecar, Margarita, Pegu Club.

13. Angostura

Our pick: there is only one, that's rather the point. Plus an orange bitters alongside it. These are the cheapest bottles on the list and they do the most work by a distance. Angostura turns up in fifteen of our recipes, more than any other single ingredient, and a bottle lasts years.

If you've seen a recipe call for "aromatic bitters" or "old fashioned bitters", that's this. Same bottle, different name, and we've stopped pretending otherwise.

Makes: fifteen recipes lean on it, including the Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Whiskey Sour and Pegu Club. Orange bitters carry the Martini and the Scofflaw.

What should I buy next?

This is where it gets fun, because the fourteenth bottle is worth more than the tenth. We worked out which single bottle unlocks the most new drinks at each step:

Five more bottles takes you from nineteen drinks to twenty-nine. That's the best value shopping list on this page, and notice how much of it is rum. If you only take one thing from this section: the rum category rewards depth more than any other spirit, which is why serious tiki bars have thirty rums and four gins.

You'll need the cheap stuff too

None of this works without the bits that cost almost nothing.

Citrus. Fresh lemons and limes, squeezed the day you use them. Bottled juice is the fastest way to make an expensive drink taste cheap. This is the single biggest quality jump available to a home bartender and it costs about a pound.

Syrups. Make them, don't buy them. It takes five minutes and they're better and cheaper:

• —Simple syrup, one sugar and one method, three strengths depending on how much sugar you dissolve
• —Demerara syrup for toffee and caramel depth in rum and whisky drinks
• —Grenadine, real pomegranate, not the "sweet red" stuff
• —Orgeat for almond, and the tropical drinks that follow
• —Passion fruit syrup and cream of coconut when you go tropical

On the first two, our recipes will tell you which strength we've used, semi-rich for simple and rich for Demerara. Don't let that stop you. It's the same bottle of sugar and the same five minutes, and if you've got one strength made up, use it and adjust the amount slightly. Nobody has ever ruined a drink by using 1:1 where we said 1.5:1.

Ice. Big cubes for stirred drinks, and more of it than you think for shaking.

So what can I actually make?

We built a tool for exactly this. Tick off what's on your shelf and the site tells you which cocktails you can make right now, which are one bottle away, and which single purchase unlocks the most new drinks.

Try What Can I Make?

Start with the Old Fashioned. Three ingredients, one of which is sugar, and it'll tell you more about your bourbon than any tasting note ever will.