Guides

How to stock a bar, what to buy first, and what to do when you are missing something.

A method for turning a random shelf of bottles into a list of drinks you can actually pour tonight, without buying anything.

The five bottles that unlock the most classic cocktails, in the order worth buying them, plus what each one adds.

What a bartender app should actually do, how Bart works, and how it compares to a recipe list you could get from any website.

How to swap a missing cocktail ingredient without wrecking the drink, plus the substitutions that come up most often.

What to buy, in what order, at three budgets — and the cheap items that block more drinks than any missing spirit.

The ingredients that appear in the most cocktail recipes, ranked by how many drinks they actually unlock.

What each base spirit is good for, the classics built on it, and which one to buy if you only buy one.

The five ratios behind most classic cocktails, plus an oz to ml conversion table and why the jigger matters more than the bottle.

Ten cocktails that cover every technique and template, so learning them teaches you the rest of the menu.

The four tools worth buying, the three glasses that cover almost everything, and what each glass is actually for.