Hello, and WELCOME to the Modern Bar Cart podcast, a weekly radio show where we demystify the tools and techniques that make great drinks.

I’m your host, Eric Kozlik, and today I’ve got for you one of the FOUNDATIONS episodes in which we review the essential tools that every good bar cart or home bar should have.

I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find an episode of this podcast that DOESN’T contain at least some small tidbit of advice about how to optimize your home bar, but this episode is gonna be a central repository of the most crucial bits of advice so you can access it all in once place and review it anytime you like.

When it comes to building your home bar or bar cart, I like to use a computer analogy, in which the consumable cocktail ingredients are like computer software, and the various tools that you reuse again and again to make your cocktails are like computer hardware. The idea being that you purchase a piece of hardware once—the physical computer—and that hardware can then be used to run an almost infinite array of software.

For this episode, and other foundations episodes, the show notes are going to be really important if you’re looking to put any of our recommendations into practice. So if I spend any significant amount of time discussing a specific brand or product style, you can expect to find more information (in the form of links, pictures, or videos) in the show notes, which you can find at modernbarcart.com/podcast.