Introducing The Reluctant Bartender project
Are you a Reluctant Bartender? Looking to learn more, but not sure where to start? Join us, and discover how to make craft cocktails simply and easily at home.
This is The Reluctant Bartender, a newsletter for beginning cocktail afficionados! Our goal here at The Reluctant Bartender is to provide the burgeoning—but reluctant—home bartender with the resources and skills to make great mixed drinks at home with minimal fuss, stress, and effort. With our help, you won’t spend hours searching the internet for recipes, trying to locate rare ingredients, worrying if your friends and family will like your drinks, and then fumbling through complex assembly techniques without the skills or tools that you need.
Let us introduce you to the ingredients, basic tools, and basic skills needed to make great cocktails at home without investing a fortune in rare liquor and gimmicky tools, or wasting precious hours of your time trying to cobble together information from multiple different sources with their own agendas.
We will help you remove the doubt, worry, and stress and instead focus on a methodology that is simple and fun!
Have you ever had that perfect mixed drink? The one that hits your lips, makes you sigh, and contemplate the wonders of a properly concocted cocktail?
Have you ever wanted to walk up to a collection of various ingredients at a family event or friend’s house, and confidently create a drink that even casual cocktail fans will admire?
Chances are, it’s a lot easier than you think!
Here at The Reluctant Bartender, we’ll be focusing on the gear needed to get started, some basic techniques, and recommending simple and great-tasting recipes that can be made with ease right at home.
As we progress, The Reluctant Bartender will tackle more sticky subjects that make the home bartender worry, such as how to remember cocktail recipes, how to select wine, wine pairing, bubbly, vermouths, bitters, garnishes and more!
We’ll show you easy two- and three-ingredient cocktails that can be made in a flash. We’ll then take those fantastic initial recipes and show you how to build on them as your skills increase.
We’re going to talk about the gear to have on hand for making cocktails at home, and provide an exact list and where to find these important, yet inexpensive tools.
Our first series will address simple cocktails that you can make for the upcoming holiday season. Instead of handing your grumpy uncle a light beer for the pre-dinner festivities, why not a classic Manhattan, or a Fifty-Fifty? Or how about some easy champagne cocktails for Thanksgiving morning? What about an easy port pairing to go alongside that pumpkin pie?
As we get deeper into the Holiday Season, we’ll give you some ideas for easy holiday-inspired cocktails, batch cocktails, and more.
Sign up and come along for the ride!
Your guests will wonder how you had time become a cocktail expert, and you will be freed up to enjoy your holiday with friends and family. You’ll no longer have to spend hours seeking out hard-to-find ingredients, wondering which drinks to make, and worrying over how to make them.
Our first entries will hit Substack as soon as November 14, 2022 so sign up today and start making the move from Reluctant Bartender to Home Mixologist Expert!