Bar Necessities
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The Reading Room
Building a bar

Start with a bundle, not a bottle.

The fastest way to having a bar that makes real drinks isn’t a long shopping list of spirits. It’s a bundle that includes the right mixers — the few ingredients behind one drink you love, which turn out to make two or three more.

Buy a single bottle and, more often than not, you still can’t make a drink. Most cocktails need three or four ingredients at once, pulled from the 177 different ingredients used in these 255 drinks, so one bottle on its own is almost never enough. The move isn’t to buy more booze. It’s to buy the right few ingredients together. That’s a bundle: the handful of things that go into one drink, which — because cocktails share parts — gets you more than just one.

  1. Old Fashioned Bundle

    Bourbon · Angostura bitters · Lemon juice

    Makes you Old FashionedWhiskey Sour

  2. Margarita Bundle

    Tequila · Lime juice · Triple sec · Agave syrup

    Makes you MargaritaTommy's Margarita

  3. Gimlet Bundle

    Gin · Lime juice · Soda water

    Makes you GimletGin Rickey

  4. Negroni Bundle

    Gin · Sweet vermouth · Campari · Soda water

    Makes you NegroniAmericano

  5. Daiquiri Bundle

    White rum · Lime juice · Fresh mint · Soda water

    Makes you DaiquiriMojito

  6. Espresso Martini Bundle

    Vodka · Coffee liqueur · Espresso

    Makes you Espresso MartiniBlack Russian

We assume you’ve got sugar, water and ice on hand (and that you can make simple syrup with your sugar) — so a bundle is just the spirit and the few extra things that turn it into a drink.

How a bundle works

a star and its supporting cast

Take the Old Fashioned bundle: bourbon, Angostura bitters, lemon juice. The bourbon is the Old Fashioned’s whole identity — that one’s yours. The other two are workhorses: Angostura bitters season dozens of drinks, and lemon juice covers half the sour family. So the bourbon and the bitters give you an Old Fashioned, and the bourbon and the lemon give you a Whiskey Sour — two drinks from three bottles. That’s the shape of every bundle: one bottle is the star, the rest are shared parts you’ll reach for again and again. It’s the same reason the six templates work — a few structures sit underneath almost everything.

Then it compounds

every bottle after the first does more

The first bundle is the slow part — you’re buying a star and its supporting cast from scratch. The second is where it pays off, because it shares those workhorses. The Margarita and Daiquiri bundles both lean on lime; the Negroni and the Gimlet both want gin. So each bottle you add after the first unlocks more than it would have alone, and the count of what’s within reach climbs faster the more ingredients you have on hand. Choosing what’s next really comes down to three questions: which bottle unlocks the most drinks, which best fits what you already like, and which fills a gap your bar doesn’t cover yet. (That’s exactly what Bar Builder does in the app — it leads with the bundles that fit your taste, then ranks your next bottle by your bar and your taste.)

Buy the drink you love, and the bar builds itself.

Browse all 255

More in the reading room — short pieces on how cocktails work.

Sources. The makeability facts — that a lone first bottle unlocks almost nothing, and that a bundle of three or four compounds — come from this catalog’s own data and Bar Builder’s design audit. The bundles here are generated straight from the app’s Bar Builder Starter Bundles, so the two can’t drift; the ingredient counts (177 distinct across 255 drinks) are computed live from the catalog.