I make the drink properly, at home, better than the bar.
Shake. Stir. Serve.
The tools for making the classics properly at home — the weighted shaker for anything with citrus, the mixing glass for spirit-forward drinks that should stay crystal-clear, big ice that chills hard and melts slow, and lead-free crystal to serve it in. Buy the few things that matter, learn the technique, and skip the bar.
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Everything a home bartender should think about
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Before you buy
Questions, answered
- What should I buy first?
A shaker and a mixing glass — together they cover almost the entire canon. Shake anything with citrus, juice, egg, or dairy (a sour, a margarita, a daiquiri); stir the all-spirit drinks that should stay crystal-clear (a Martini, Manhattan, Negroni, Old Fashioned). Add big-cube ice and a couple of good glasses and you can make most classics well.
- Shake or stir — how do I know which?
The old bar rule: if it has cloudy ingredients — citrus, juice, egg white, cream — you shake it, to chill, dilute, and aerate. If it is all clear spirits and liqueurs, you stir it, to chill and dilute without the cloudiness and air bubbles shaking introduces. Shaking a Martini isn't wrong, it just makes it cloudy.
- Is crystal glassware safe to drink from?
Traditional leaded crystal can leach lead — dramatically so when spirits are stored in a lead-crystal decanter for months (studies measured lead climbing into the thousands of µg/L). A quick pour from a lead-crystal glass is far lower risk, but there is no known safe level of lead and no reason to gamble when modern lead-free crystal (titanium/zirconium Tritan) gives the same brilliance and weight with zero lead. That is why our Pour picks are lead-free.
SourceGraziano & Blum, The Lancet 1991 ↗Appel et al., Am. J. Public Health 1992 ↗