Hello, I’m a British person, so I have a lot of gin.
No, seriously.
I mentioned it in my Thanksgiving post, but thought I’d share with you a few things that make the cocktail cabinet collection (it’s too big for a bar cart!) easier to manage and use.
You probably already have some bottles of booze in the house already of your favourite spirits and a few random gifts that you’ve received. To pad out the collection, I would suggest looking up a few favourite cocktails and making sure you have the ingredients for those – for example, last summer we were drinking negroni’s quite a bit so we made sure to pick vermouth rosso and Campari to go with the gin we already had.
Another really useful thing to have is an app to find cocktails using what you have already in the house. I like the app Cocktail Flow (free on iOS) because it takes you through a few screens where you can tick off what you have, but there’s also the site cocktailbuilder.com where you, again, tick off what you have in the cupboard.
Alex likes to collect
Finally, because I like things in pretty bottles, I bought a few small glass bottles for things like lemon juice and simple syrup (why does anyone buy this? It’s just equal parts water and sugar heated together and stirred until there’s no more sugar) and we have some decanters for whiskeys. I was struggling to find a good way to label everything until I picked up this Brother label maker that can print on ribbons. I had been looking for a new label maker anyway and I found this at just the right time. I think the bottles look much nicer with a little ribbon around them to show what’s in there, than a sticky label on them!