The South African home bar starter kit

Six bottles that unlock the most drinks

Buy for coverage, not for collection. These six put over half of the classic canon within reach:

1. A dry gin. The single most useful bottle in the room — Negroni, Martini, Gimlet, Bee's Knees, French 75. South Africa makes some of the best in the world right now, so this is one to buy local.
2. A whiskey. Bourbon or rye covers the Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Whisky Sour and Boulevardier.
3. A white rum. Daiquiri and Mojito, and the Daiquiri is the drink you use to test whether your technique is working.
4. Sweet vermouth. The cheapest way to double your menu. Keep it in the fridge after opening — it is wine, and it oxidises in weeks, not years. This is the bottle most home bars get wrong.
5. Campari. Negroni, Americano, Boulevardier, Jungle Bird.
6. A triple sec or curaçao. Margarita, Sidecar, Cosmopolitan, Corpse Reviver No. 2.

Add a brandy seventh if you are South African — it is the country's spirit, and it does more than sit next to a Coke. See the brandy cocktails.

Four tools, and one you can skip

• A shaker. A two-piece Boston tin is better than a three-piece cobbler: it seals more reliably and it does not freeze shut.
• A strainer. A Hawthorne for the tin, and a small tea strainer for double-straining anything with citrus or egg in it.
• A scale. The tool almost no home-bar list mentions and the one that changes the drinks the most. Measure by weight and the ratio stops drifting. See how to measure without a jigger.
• A citrus press. Bottled lemon juice is the fastest way to make a good recipe taste bad.
• Skip: the six-piece boxed set with the gold-plated tongs. The tongs, the muddler and the "wine pourer" will not come out of the drawer again.

Two glasses cover everything

A rocks glass for anything served over ice, and a coupe for anything served up. Six of each is a party. A highball is a useful third for Rock Shandies and fizzes, and it doubles as a water glass, so it is never wasted.

Ice is an ingredient

The most common reason a home cocktail tastes thin is not the recipe, it is the ice. Small, wet, freezer-burnt cubes melt fast and dilute the drink while you are still stirring. Freeze fresh water in the biggest tray you own, use it cold and dry, and use fresh ice in the serving glass rather than the ice you mixed with.

Syrup, in five minutes

Equal parts white sugar and boiling water, stirred until clear, cooled, kept in the fridge for a couple of weeks. That is 1:1 simple syrup and it is in more cocktails than any other ingredient except ice. It has a density of 1.11 g/ml, so 15 ml weighs 16.7 g — worth knowing if you are measuring by weight.

What it costs, roughly

Six bottles at South African retail will run somewhere between R1 500 and R2 500 depending on how ambitious you are about the gin. Tools, bought sensibly and separately rather than as a boxed set, come to a few hundred rand plus whatever a kitchen scale costs. Glassware you may already own.

The order to buy in

Gin, vermouth, Campari — that is a Negroni and an Americano on night one. Then whiskey for the Old Fashioned. Then rum and citrus for the Daiquiri, which is where you find out whether your measuring is any good. Everything after that follows what you have discovered you actually like drinking.