Let’s face it: it is expensive to go to bars and get drinks. You have to pay for the Uber, take the bus or walk, you have to pay anywhere from $3 to $10 for just one good drink, and odds are you are going to want more than one. And since everyone is going out at the same time as you are, odds are if you take an Uber, it will cost extra. The alternative is to drink with friends at home. The only issue is it is hard to know what kinds of alcohol you should buy, what kinds of mixers you should keep on hand and what tools you need (and what would be nice to have).

Tools:
It doesn’t take a lot of tools to start your own bar at home. You can really boil it down to just a few essentials: you need to be able to measure, you need to be able to mix and you need to be able to drink.
To measure alcohol, you have two options: you can either go with a jigger or a speed pourer, or both if you prefer. A jigger will allow for you to get very precise with how much alcohol you have in a drink; most come with two sides. Typically, one side is one jigger (the equivalent of 1 shot, 1.5 fl oz) and the other is a half jigger. The benefit to this is that you can pour an exact amount every single time and know exactly how much alcohol is going into your body. The detriment is that you can only measure in half drinks. On the other side is a speed pourer. This type of measuring has a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn it well and consistently, you won’t even have to think about it. A speed pourer is a nozzle that is usually sized to fit onto a fifth (750 mL) or a liter bottle of liquor that controls the flow of the alcohol into a consistent stream, unlike pouring directly from the bottle. This means that you have to learn how long, based on how you hold the bottle, that you should count to get 1.5 ounces. For many bartenders, this number can be between a 3 and 6 count, you just have to practice it to find out. You can do this by filling an old bottle with water and pouring into a shot glass or a measuring cup with the speed pourer on, then practicing until you can consistently fill the glass exactly. Then, for any recipe, you can just add or subtract a bit of time to give you the perfect pour. The only detriments to this are that you aren’t ever going to be 100 percent sure of the exact amount of alcohol and that most speed pourers don’t fit on bottles larger than one liter (because the mouth is a little larger, preventing a seal from forming).
To mix alcohol, the most tried and true method is a Boston shaker. These are two cups (usually stainless steel) that fit into one another so that you can shake your drinks (think James Bond’s vodka martini, shaken not stirred). You could choose any kind of cocktail shaker, but this is the most popular for drinks that call for shaking. The other benefit of this is that, in theory, you can substitute a Boston shaker for any two cups that fit into each other mouth to mouth and create a seal. For non-shaken cocktails, you will probably want a bar spoon. This is a spoon that works both for stirring better and for adding floaters. A bar spoon works well because of how the spoon is shaped and because of the spiral put into the handle of the spoon.
The final tool you will want are specialty glasses. If you are building your at-home bar in pieces, the first kinds of glassware you’ll want are rocks glasses and shot glasses. Rocks glasses are usually reserved for cocktails and sipping liquors (or anything on the rocks, which just means add ice or stainless-steel cubes). Shot glasses are great because there may be times you want to take shots or drink a car bomb, and you really can’t do that without a shot glass. There’s plenty of other glasses designed to enhance the taste of certain drinks: martini glasses (for martinis, duh), highball glasses for drinks with lots of mixer, flutes for champagne-based cocktails, the list goes on and on. But all of these other specialty glasses you really only need to fulfill your personal tastes. To start with, you can just have the shots and rocks (in addition to normal cups from your kitchen).

Liquor:
You can really break liquor down into a few very broad categories: Tequila, rum, whiskey, gin, vodka, brandy and cordials/infusions. There are a lot of much more detailed subcategories for each of these, but these categories will work for just starting your bar. What you should absolutely have, of these, is the first four or five (depending on your preference): Tequila, rum, whiskey, vodka and sometimes gin. Having all five of these will allow for you to, with access to the proper mixers, make a pretty wide variety of cocktails, all the way from a vodka cranberry to a long island iced tea. It’s always great to have nicer brand liquor of each of these, more tailored to your personal taste, but we’ve laid out a couple of brands just to get you started. For tequila, an affordable brand with good taste is Jose Cuervo (you’ll probably want to try the silver first for mixed drinks). Tito’s is one of the most popular options of vodka. To fill your whiskey slot, either Jameson (if you like Irish whiskey), Jim Beam (if you like bourbon) or Jack Daniels (if you like Tennessee whiskey). Gordon’s London Dry Gin is a popular and affordable gin to start with. The most popular rum to start with is Bacardi (start with the silver); it’s what many bars use as their house rum because it’s not just affordable, but it is also amazing. Cordials and infusions are something that you would really buy for specialty drinks, but in some cases can be substituted for certain mixers. Brandy is the last variety of liquor, but it is probably the least common to have at an at-home bar. This isn’t because brandy isn’t used in many cocktails, but because it is not usually considered among starter liquors, even less so than gin, but if you want to add brandy to your bar, start with Paul Masson and work from there.

Mixers:
Mixers are probably the most fun part of a bar. It’s how you get to make drinks taste flavorful or fun. It is also how you let some sober friends enjoy mocktails instead. Some of these are also available in cordial form, but everything in this category is at least available in some non-alcoholic form. All of these mixers can also be broken up into a couple of categories: juices, sodas and other. For your juices, you can really just pick and choose any decent variety among your personal preferences. The most useful will likely be lime juice, lemon juice and orange juice, but many bars also have cranberry juice, pineapple juice, grapefruit juice and tomato juice (for Bloody Marys). Sodas also come a lot down to preference, at least as far as brands go, but every bar should have at least a cola, diet cola, lemon-lime soda, club soda, tonic water and ginger ale. The best way to keep these at a home bar is with cans or smaller bottles unless you expect to go through an entire 2-liter bottle. Finally, the all-encompassing other category. This is to fulfill a lot of add-ins to traditional cocktails. Simple syrup is the most important and also the simplest. If you don’t feel like buying simple syrup, you can easily make it by dissolving lots of sugar in boiling water (as saturated as you can). Other popular ingredients include grenadine (a pomegranate flavored syrup), bitters, sour mix (though this can be made with water, sugar, lemon and lime), blue curaçao and garnishes (orange slices, lime wedges and wheels and mint are popular options for many drinks).