From the article: Essential Bar Tools
Many bartenders have their favorite tools that they find they cannot work without. If there's a particular shaker, juicer, spoon, or a random device you find essential when you're working in the bar that many of us would not even think of using when mixing drinks. Or, is there something you wish you could have that would make your job easier. Share with us your recommendations, tips, and tricks for the essentials of managing your bars. Share Your Bar Tool Trick
I love tubs!
- I run a mobile cocktail bar and apart from large and small tubs being an integral part of the cocktail kit they have many other uses from storing and carting stock and equipment to a make shift wash up/slops station. I'm always finding another use for these versatile black hard plastic champions of the mobile bar.
- —Guest 2010
Juicer
- For a home bar I have several of those old fashioned juicers like your grandma used. They can be found cheaply in junk or antique stores. They collect the juice and make it easy to remove seeds and pour into a measure
- —CycleSouth
Thinking Outside the Box...errr...Bottle
- Dashes are difficult. For a perfect Pisco Sour you need three...not one, not two, and certainly not four. But even the best bitters bottle can make this a dicey challenge. One solution our Pisco-meister friend Johnny Schuler of Pisco Porton advocates is to leave the cap screwed on, and heat up a pin and make a tiny, tiny hole...then exactamente, uno, dos, tres gotas? No un problema!
- —Guest Steve Raye
Dashing About
- Some drinks call for a dash or two of ingredients like absinthe or grenadine. I save and reuse empty Angostura dasher bottles for this very purpose.
- —BlairF27
2 Things..
- A good bar-back - When you're flying around the bar, pouring, shaking, and serving drinks, you really don't want to be distracted by issues like empty glasses on the counter, (or worse yet, no clean glasses left), or the fridges running low. So it's always essential in a fast paced bar to have a decent bar-back to take care of this for you. Speed rails that don't stick out at knee level - These should be called a&e rails, cause thats where your headed if you slam your knee full tilt into one of these bad boys. Essentially the idea of a speed rail is to keep the bottles you need close to you at all times, which is fine, until somebody has the bright idea to have them jutting out of the bar where you will (and I mean you WILL) be colliding with it on occasion. The end result being more spent time hopping on one good leg, cursing at the piece of steel shaped dent in your leg, in front of a bunch of bewildered and frightened customers, than is necessary
- —tom_caton
