It’s the home bartender’s curse: Buy some esoteric new spirit to try out the latest cocktail recipe, then helplessly watch it gather dust because you don’t know what else to do with it. Pro bars have the real estate to give those one-off bottles a home, and the time to experiment with them—plus the resources to send failed experiments down the drain with a clear conscience. Not so easy for the rest of us.
Enter House Cocktail Hack. Every season, we’ll challenge some of our favorite bartenders to get creative with just two spirits, three modifiers (think vermouth, amaro, etc.) and two easy-to-make simple syrups. The result: Five (or more) house cocktails to add to your repertoire for the season.
To make it even easier, we’ve teamed up with our buds at Merchants of Beverage to skip the liquor store altogether. They’ve bundled each season’s shopping list into one handy package—a hack sent straight to your doorstep. (Buy the full Drink Hack kit here.)
This season, Atlanta’s Greg Best and New York City’s Pamela Wiznitzer (Seamstress) and Matt Piacentini (The Up & Up), tackle our basic shopping list to come up with an easygoing spring cocktail menu.
The Spring Shopping List:
Beefeater gin
Brugal white rum
Pierre Ferrand dry curacao
Cocchi Americano
Dolin dry vermouth
Rhubarb syrup [Recipe]
Lemon syrup [Recipe]
Additional items to have on hand:
Mint
Lemons
Limes
Oranges
Angostura Bitters
Orange Bitters