How to stock a bar cart

Stocking a bar cart is a shelf-area problem disguised as a shopping problem. Start with the arithmetic and the shopping answers itself.

A standard 750 ml bottle is published at 11.8 inches tall and 2.95 inches in diameter. A 24 inch shelf therefore takes eight of them edge to edge, touching, which nobody does. Six is the real number. Everything below is built around six.

Step one: six bottles, in this order

1. A base spirit you actually drink. Gin, whiskey, tequila or rum — whichever one you would pour tonight. This is the bottle the cart exists for.
2. A second base spirit you drink differently. If the first is a sipping spirit, make the second a mixing one, or the reverse. Two bottles that do the same job is one bottle of dead shelf.
3. A vermouth. Sweet or dry depending on the first two. This is the bottle that turns a spirit into a cocktail, and it is the one most home bars skip and then wonder why nothing tastes finished.
4. A bottle of bitters. Small, cheap, lasts years, and does more per milliliter than anything else on the cart.
5. A citrus liqueur or a syrup. The sweet-and-sour axis. One bottle, not three.
6. One long mixer. Tonic, soda or ginger. This is the bottle that lets you make someone a drink at 3pm.

Stop at six until you have finished one. The seventh bottle is where a cart stops being a bar and starts being storage, and it is where the arrangement stops looking composed — see how to style a bar cart. The longer reasoning is in the bottle list.

Step two: two glass shapes, four of each

A 12 oz double old fashioned covers spirits neat, spirits on ice, anything short and water. Libbey publishes the Ocular at 4 1/8 inches tall and 3 1/2 inches across the top, which fits under any realistic shelf gap.

A coupe covers everything served up. Here the height is the decision, not the prestige: the Libbey Embassy is 4.5 inches, the Libbey Perception is 6, and the Riedel Veritas is 6.69. If your shelf gap is 7 inches, the first two stand up and the third is tight.

Four of each. Eight glasses is enough for four people to have two drinks, which is more entertaining than most homes do, and it is about as much as a shelf holds alongside anything else. Full comparison in the glassware roundup.

Step three: five tools

A jigger, a shaker, a strainer, a bar spoon and a muddler. That is a complete home bar and the reason to buy an eight-piece set rather than the five-piece is usually the pourers rather than the tools.

The jigger is the one that matters. Measured drinks are repeatable and eyeballed drinks are not, and the difference shows up on the second one. Everything else on this list makes the process nicer; the jigger makes the result better. Footprint comparison in the tools roundup.

Step four: ice, and where it goes

A double-walled bucket keeps ice through an evening; a single-walled one keeps it through a drink. Height is the specification to check, not capacity: the buckets we compiled hold the same three quarts at 8 inches and 10.4 inches tall respectively, and 10.4 will not stand under most middle shelves.

Full ice needs to be near the glasses and near the pouring hand, which usually means the top shelf. That takes about 8 inches of your shelf width — a quarter of a 24 inch shelf — which is why ice is the thing that most often forces a cart's arrangement.

Step five: the tray

Last, and the most transformative single object. A tray groups the bottles into one thing instead of six, catches drips, and lets you lift the whole arrangement to clean underneath. A standard tray is around 12 by 16 inches, which needs about 15 inches of cart depth to sit flat — a threshold six of the sixteen carts in our dimensions table do not clear.