The bar

A good bar is one where a correct drink can be made again. The ice is cold. The measure is visible. The citrus is today’s. The vermouth is alive. You can reach the bottle you mean without a speech. A wall of bottles and a drawer of gadgets is a photograph. It is not a bar. An amateur and a professional use the same tools. The professional keeps more of the ones that run out, and buys the perishable things smaller and more often. Neither of them needs a smoking gun before a jigger.

The tools

• A jigger with lines you can read. Ounces or milliliters, including the quarter and the half. Free-pouring is a show. It is a bad way to learn, because you cannot repeat the accident.
• A barspoon. Long enough to reach the bottom of a mixing glass. The back of the spoon guides the ice. It does not beat it.
• A mixing glass, and two tins that seal. A Boston shake, tin on tin. A cobbler shaker with a built-in strainer sticks, leaks, and teaches impatience.
• Strainers. A julep strainer for a stirred drink. A Hawthorne for a shaken one. A fine mesh when there is mint, egg, pulp, or a milk wash.
• A peeler and a knife. The peeler takes a coin of zest with no pith. The knife is for fruit you are actually putting in the glass, and for nothing else on that board if you can help it. Onion on the board becomes onion in the drink.
• A press or a reamer you will use. Juice to order. A hinged press is faster. A reamer is enough. Bottled sour mix is neither.
• Ice you made, and a place that is not a puddle. Wet ice from a warm bin dilutes before it chills. A bar that buys ice and lets it sit is already behind.
• A small mister, once the drinks are correct. Bitters or a citrus oil, in a fine spray, is a tool of perfume. It is not the first thing you buy.

Leave these until a drink asks: a smoking gun, a sphere mold as an identity, an electric frother, a dozen bitters, pour spouts. Spouts are speed. They are a bad teacher. Measure until the spec is in your hand, and only then decide if a spout earns its place in service.

The glass

You do not need a museum. You need a rocks glass, a small coupe or a Nick and Nora, a highball, and a copa or a large wine glass if you serve a gin and tonic the way the dressing lesson means it. A mug for anything hot. Four of each if people come over. A working bar needs enough that two of the same drink look like a decision, not like whatever was clean. A Nick and Nora the size of a wine glass is the wrong object, whatever the shop called it.

The floor

These bottles make the templates. Stop here until you can make those drinks without looking up the jobs.

• One bourbon or rye you would sip. One London dry gin. One unsweetened white or lightly aged rum. One blanco tequila.
• Sweet vermouth and dry vermouth. Small bottles. The fridge. If it smells flat or woody, it is finished.
• Aromatic bitters and orange bitters. Dashes, not a collection.
• One orange liqueur you have tasted alone. Some are candy. A margarita, a sidecar, and a cosmo all change when that bottle changes, because it is doing the sugar’s job and the perfume’s at once.
• Lemons, limes, and oranges for the peel. Sugar. Salt. Cold soda, and a tonic you would drink. Small bottles of mixer. They die.

When a drink asks

Buy the next bottle because a spec you already make is missing a voice. Not because a shop looked complete.

• Brandy you would sip. A sidecar, a milk punch, an Alexander. Cognac is one brandy, not a higher species.
• A red bitter. Campari, or another you have tasted. A negroni and a spritz are otherwise a rumor.
• Sparkling wine, the week you will open it. A spritz and a French 75 do not come from a bottle that has been open since a party.
• Mezcal. When smoke is the idea. A drop in everything is how a bar starts to taste like one candle.
• One amaro you like, small. Taste it straight first. An ounce is a voice. A teaspoon is seasoning. Know which you poured.
• Coffee liqueur, only if you make the dessert. It is not required to look like a bar. Honey, for the drinks that want honey. Cream, the day you need it.
• A third bitters only when you can say what the aromatic and the orange do not do.

What does not belong

• Sour mix. It is someone else’s sugar and someone else’s acid, and the oils never arrived.
• Spiced rum, if you wanted rum. The spice is already a recipe.
• A row of flavored vodkas. They are costumes for a spirit you chose because it was quiet.
• Cream liqueurs and syrups you opened and forgot. Date them, or don’t buy them.
• A backbar arranged for a photograph. If you cannot reach it, it is not in service.

Home, and a bar that serves

At home: one of each on the floor, the vermouth small, the ice made ahead, four decent glasses. At a bar that serves: a backup of the four spirits, bitters that will not run out in the middle of a night, glass that matches, a clean towel, a sink, and the specs written down. A bar without specs is a memory. The speed rail holds the bottles your hand actually touches. Everything else can live on the shelf until a ticket asks for it.