How to choose bottles for your bar - Workhorse Spirits

today we're getting to a video that has taken me a long time to get to is something that I have been thinking through for a really long time because I didn't quite know how I wanted to approach it this is a very big subject and I was like I can go really small with this or I can go really big with this I decided to go big because as my grandma you used to say go big or go home right so today we're going to be talking about how to put together your home bar and I decided that we were going to do this into a multi-part video series where we really talk about the intricacies of putting together your home bar I decided that the video that would be the most helpful to you guys would be something where we would talk about how to stock your bar everything from Spirits to tools to make the widest variety of cocktails possible and I want to say this is kind of a little bit of a disclaimer building a home bar is really expensive and if you guys went out and bought everything that I recommend in this whole video series all at once you would spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars my own home bar is something that took me years of building and I geared the educated bar fly toward sort of building your home bar one cocktail at a time I think that it's very possible to just Center your bar on one bottle of spirits that you really like and then a few you know citrus juices and some simple syrup uh stuff that you can make at home and you can make a wide variety of cocktails of that and then you slowly kind of upgrade it and so we started with a serious Master of the classics where you can just go in and just go one classic at a time the thing is is that I realize a lot of people tend to look at the videos and then try and find just as many videos as they can on one bottle of spirits and they run out of those Spirits so I think that the most important thing and the reason why this is the first video is your Workhorse spirits that are high quality low-cost spirits that you can easily replace that aren't going to be a big drama these are the things that are going to be rotating in and out of your bar and they're at a reasonable price so I recognize that we have worldwide subscribership on this channel and I just want to say that I can only speak toward what's available in the markets that I know or in my own Market really and then what is what are the price points in my market these price points are obviously going to fluctuate depending on where you are in the country or where you are in the world and the same thing for availability I tried to choose some Spirits for you guys today that should be widely available and I also wrote an article for our website if you want to take a deep dive into this subject you can I've added a lot of runner-up bottles because a lot of people in the comments the last time we did this we're like what about this bottle what about this bottle and you know what everybody is right there are a lot of different bottles there's not just however many bottles I'm just showing you my picks I have actually alternate picks I just didn't want to put it into this video and make it 50 minutes long so go to our website check that out and you will be more than satisfied I think that's it Marius right did I did I gonna miss anything all right let's get into let's get into talking about the spirits the first bottle that I chose is old Granddad bonded bourbon this is one of my absolute favorites I've been using it for many many years what I really like about this bourbon is that it's 27 Rye in its Mash Bill and so it is a high Rye bourbon so it has all of those lovely qualities of bourbon you get the vanilla you get the caramel and you get the oak as well obviously but then you also get this really spicy dryness on the back palette it is a very big in flavor profile which really speaks to my personal tastes so in an old fashioned it really stands out it's spicy enough in a Manhattan that if you don't do your Manhattan with Rye it can kind of stand in for it it is very versatile in a lot of different cocktails it is my 100 favorite and you can get it for about 23 bucks a bottle it's easy to drink and yet you still feel the proof and it's really great quality for its price range so the next category we're going to be talking about is gin you definitely need to have gin in Your Arsenal there are so many different classic cocktails I would venture to say that most classic cocktails are made with gin if it's a light Spirit gin is your friend and You're Gonna Wanna Do a London dry gin so London dry gin is I guess what they would call gin in its purest form it can't have any additives it has to have a main flavor profile of juniper and a lot of the London drys brand to Brand use a very similar Botanicals in their distillation process so you get kind of an even flavor so I think a lot of the people that don't like Beefeater kind of get caught up in this view that it's an old man's low quality gin and nothing could be further from the truth it has a really nice Juniper flavor to it it's really bitey at 88 proof and it has a lot of citrus in its flavor profile which makes it very easy to either mix in something like a martini or in shaken drinks it is super versatile and at 16 a bottle you really can't say no to it there's somewhat of a gin Renaissance going on right now and a lot of distilleries are making it and if you get quality gin the price point is going to be a little higher you can easily spend 30 to 40 to 60 on a bottle of really good quality gin and so for something that is high quality versus versatile and low cost I think Beefeater is going to be your best friend so you're definitely going to have to have good quality tequila for your home bar and when we're talking about good quality tequilo we have to up the price range a little bit just because the increased demand of tequila means more expensive raw materials more expensive raw materials obviously translates to the bottle and you also want to make sure that you are drinking it ethically what I mean by that is that sustainability is a big problem when it comes to tequila and there's a lot of producers that are now trying to do things a little bit more ethically it takes Agave between 7 and 20 years to mature depending on the variety of agave you're growing and so it's really important to make sure that you support companies that do things in a sustainable way it's very easy to just cut all the Agave make tequila out of it and everyone else be damned but honestly if a lot of tequila producers do that then we're gonna have no more Agave it's going to go extinct and so I like to support a brand that has a hundred percent estate agrone Agave so enter tequila Arete is really really good quality it's going to be very versatile in all your drinks it has a nice light minerality to it with a little bit of citrus fruits on the back end it's just really nice and light it is very versatile in cocktails goes really well in margaritas and Palomas and at 1950 a bottle that's what I got this 1950 so I would say that the price range is probably going to be about like 19 to 25 dollars depending on your Market it is well below what most tequilas are at now which I think the median price range is probably about 34 bucks Especial Especially For those that are single estate grown so I would definitely pick up a bottle of this next bottle up Rittenhouse Rye this is one of my absolute favorite bottles obviously we're going to go back into the American whiskey category your collection's not complete without a bottle of Rye so many I would say all most whiskey cocktails that are Classics are a rye based because that was the most prevalent whiskey at the time this Rittenhouse Rye is uh 23 to 25 bottle this is a bourbon drinkers Rye uh unlike a lot of other risers you're going to be really really really dry and really spicy on the back end this has a nice spiciness to it and a proofiness to it it has this inherent bourbon-ness to it and that's because of its Mash bill it's Mash bill is 51 Rye which is the legal minimum for something being considered rye whiskey or labeled as rye whiskey well labeled as straight rye whiskey anyway but it also consists of 37 corn so it's a high corn Rye which is going to give you that a little bit of sweetness and you kind of get that bourbon feel to it it makes a fantastic Manhattan that makes a fantastic old-fashioned and this is my absolute go-to bottle for the price you cannot pass it up now it's time to talk about some rum you are definitely going to need some rum for your home bar and white rum is probably the most versatile the plantation three star is what I keep on hand for a lot of different cocktails now I've been avoiding talking about this particular subject because I consider myself a novice when it comes to Rum Marius is telling me to twist the bottle so you guys can see the label which is a very good idea I was avoiding talking about rum because I consider myself a rum novice embarrassingly when I was working at Kohl's I kind of just took the rum that we had on hand and learned a little bit about Jamaican rum learned a little bit about rum from Barbados a little bit about Bermuda rum and then uh whatever white rum we had in there but I didn't really pay attention to the category up until about three or four years ago and then I really started to expand my own rum collection and then also pay more attention to it really take a deep dive into it but I still consider myself quite a novice what do I say about plantation 3 star it is a blend of rums from Jamaica Trinidad and Barbados it's just a really nice light flavor profile it goes well in a lot of cocktails you can make a mojito with it you can make a Queen's Park Swizzle with it you can make it's basically like any well-run drink the thing is is that when it comes to rum drinks rum is such a category that is so diverse region to region and there are absolutely no hard and fast rules about how it's created that really no two rums are equal and I will I will tell you that you know if you go down the rum Rabbit Hole you are going to end up with a massive selection of rums because all of them are so diverse and so different for something that's in this price range at about 23 bucks it is versatile enough and cheap enough that you can readily replace it and make a lot of cocktails with it alright guys so that's our video on Workhorse spirits and part one of how to build your home bar join us for the next episode which will be on tools all the tools you're going to need to have a fully functioning cocktail bar at your house

Channel: The Educated Barfly

Views: 83,012

Keywords: easy drinks, drink recipe, easy cocktails, easy cocktail recipes, best cocktail recipes, simple cocktails, cocktails at home, homemade, how to drink, drinks, easy, quick, tasty, nice, binging with babish, cocktail chemistry, easy recipe, top 10, top 5, steve the bartender, masterclass, master class, cocktail, cocktails, educated barfly, cocktail recipes, anders erickson, anders bartender

Id: q-4240Yq9gc

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022