Get your home bar in order for the holidays
During the pandemic, Bill Semins was happy to have a lot more free time on his hands. However, because all his favorite restaurants and bars were forced to close during the lockdown, he had nowhere to go for a great adult beverage.
So the Squirrel Hill lawyer took on a task he normally would have left to the professionals: creating and mixing signature drinks at home.
“I’ve always loved a good cocktail,” he explains, “and part of a great meal is the expertise [ of bartenders] I couldn’t do at home.”
Crafting a different one each day, Semins ended up mixing more than 270 custom cocktails before he stopped counting, earning him not just the admiration of family and friends, but also an invitation to join the “Cocktail of the Day” group on Facebook.
Many of his recipes, the 52-year-old says, are inspired by something he saw online. Others are the result of pure alchemy — measuring out a little of this to add to some of that to conjure up a drink both smooth and sophisticated. To add to the fun, many were given witty names that speak to the polarized times we live in, such as Smash the Peartriarchy (featuring bourbon, St-Germain, muddled pear and ginger syrup) and the Kentucky Kleptocrat, which stars Kentucky bourbon in an ode to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
“There’s really no excuse not to make cocktails at home because there are so many recipes out here,” Semins says of his creations, which are bolstered by his wife Hattie Fletcher’s homemade syrups and infusions using garden ingredients. This time of year, for instance, plums and nasturtiums join forces in a sweet and slightly peppery simple syrup. “It’s just finding the right balance.”
Being able to serve his hand-crafted concoctions in the vintage glassware he inherited from his great uncle Meyer Paris and great aunts Rose and Violet Semins only adds to the experience.
With the holiday entertaining season fast approaching, maybe you’d like to try your hand at home cocktailing, too. You’re in good company, according to a 2021 study on emerging home design trends by Houzz, an online design source. It found that searches for home bars and wine cellars both were up nearly four times from 2020 to 2021.
Thankfully, expert mixologists such as Milk Street editorial director J.M. Hirsch, who spent much of the pandemic field-testing and writing the new cocktail book, “Pour Me Another: 250 Ways to Find Your Favorite Drink” (Voracious, $27), say it’s not as hard as you might think.
Just as home cooking has gotten easier with better access to quality ingredients and great equipment online, so too has starting and growing a well-appointed bar setup. Another reason for the home bar’s growing popularity: As Semins demonstrated while whipping up an Aperol spritz in his dining room on a recent Wednesday, most cocktails can be made in 5 minutes or less.
Raising the bar
Sure, you can get obsessed and go down the rabbit hole. But in terms of supplies, you need just a few core building blocks to set up a great home bar. Most cocktails draw on a limited array of liquors and liqueurs — Hirsch’s list includes white and aged rum, gin, blanco tequila, bourbon and rye, along with a bottle of orange and Angostura bitters. Since they’re being mixed with other ingredients, you don’t have to splurge on premium bottles. Solid middle shelf is absolutely fine, “so it’s not a huge investment,” he says.
The same goes for equipment. All that’s really required is a shaker of some sort, a stirring glass, a mesh strainer and — most important — a 1- or 2-ounce measuring device. Hourglassshaped Japanese-style jiggers can be a little clumsy for home use, so Hirsch recommends a single-bowl measure with easy-to-see graduated marks, like those offered by OXO.
Then, as you grow more confident, build on your bar with specialty items such as a stirring spoon, large-cube ice trays and a muddler to crush ingredients, and secondary spirits such as Drambuie and vermouth.
As for glassware, Hirsch says it is both essential — and not important at all. A coupe glass is the practical go-to for many cocktails because its wide rim allows you to enjoy the drink’s aromatics, while long pours with a lot of ice, like a Tom Collins or bloody Mary, need the volume of a highball glass. But unless a certain cocktail would otherwise look silly, you don’t need every type of glassware to make terrific drinks.
“At the end of the day, drink a cocktail in what you like,” says Hirsch, which for him is often a repurposed Glade candle holder. “If all you have is a sippy cup, that’s OK.”
That said, know your audience. A boisterous crowd might require rocks glasses because they’re much harder to knock over than a coupe or cocktail glass.
You also need to take in account how much room you have for a home bar.
Semins has plenty of room to house his bottles and glassware in separate corners of his dining room, but you might only have space for a single bar cart. Don’t buy more bottles or glasses than you can easily fit.
Everyday ingredients
One of the best aspects of making cocktails at home is the ability to personalize them with your favorite flavors. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Most people, Hirsch notes, have “tons of ingredients” in their kitchens that can be used in amazing and transformative ways.
A bit of strawberry or raspberry jam, for instance, can add a sweet and fruity viscosity to a cocktail, while a few grains of kosher salt will make a drink taste fuller and brighter. Super-intense teas and coffees are also underrated cocktail mixers, and never underestimate the flavor-boosting power of muddled fresh fruit or the velvety goodness of fatwashing a glass with melted butter or a strip of bacon.
Many of those techniques and ingredients are included in “Pour Me Another,” the pandemic follow- up to Hirsch’s first cocktail book, “Shake Strain Done: Craft Cocktails at Home,” which was nominated for a 2021 IACP Cookbook Award. Along with offering recipes for the five classic cocktails, it shows amateur mixologists how to use them as a flavor guide to finding new favorites.
From each of those iconic drinks — a tequila Margarita, Gin and Tonic, rum Daiquiri, vodka Martini and bourbon Old Fashioned — there are 50 iterations that share a combination of flavor characteristics (sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, etc.), from boldest to faintest.
Any liquor can present itself in diverse ways, depending on how and what it’s mixed with. But the result is not always intuitive to the home bartender. Sweet vermouth is a perfect example, says Hirsch. Other than the word “sweet,” many people have no idea what to expect when it’s added to a cocktail.
Yet if you love a warm and spicy Manhattan, you might also find that a rum-based Poker cocktail or warm and creamy gin Bijou will win you over, says Hirsch.
“At times I felt like a serial killer drawing red lines [between drinks] on the wall” while researching the book, Hirsch says with a chuckle. The result is a guide that allows cocktail lovers (and those who mix and stir for them) to explore cocktails they wouldn’t have tried otherwise because on the surface they didn’t seem to fit the profile.
“I wanted to demystify and simplify the process,” he says.