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25 Essential Bar Accessories: 16 - 20
Tool #16: Pitchers and Decanters
Serving straight from the bottle isn’t appropriate for all drinks, especially wines and certain kinds of blended beverages. With a classy decanter for your wine, you add elegance while also letting the beverage breathe. Martini and blended drinks also can be served from pitchers.
Hide labels and dirty bottles by decanting wines and putting your blended drinks in pitchers. Taste, quality as well as serving ease are at stake!
Properly decanted beverages last longer, and they also offer ease to you as a host for serving. Some wines need the air of the decanting process to fully peak. Additionally, if you want your bottles to remain anonymous, decanters and serving pitchers are a classy solution.
Tool #17: Bottle markers
Some bottles should be anonymous, while others desperately need labeling. You can make your notes on the contents using special bottle markers to write directly on the glass.
Label peelers and poorly printed labels can sometimes make it hard to remember which wine, mixer, or liquor a bottle contains. Eliminate mystery bottles from your home bar with these handy tools.
Writing directly on the bottle, you don’t have to worry about id tags falling or taped labels wearing away. You can make mixing notes or remarks about vintages with your markers.
Tool #18: Drink labels
These are sometimes classified as a novelty item, but slide on drink labels can make serving and tracking drinks much easier. Your guests will appreciate being able to claim their own drinks with a paper label or pewter charm to separate themselves from the masses.
Lost drinks are often abandoned, resulting in waste. Confusion over who’s drink is whose can also can arguments and nasty unpleasantries at parties that could have been easily avoided with a simple drink label.
Drinks are clearly identified to both you as the host and to the owner of the drink. This can help you keep track of special mixes and also prevent guests from walking away from their own drinks and losing them for the night.
Tool #19: Cork retrievers
It’s one of the more frustrating elements of wine. The cork doesn’t always stay in one piece in the opening process, and in re-corking wine corks can go a bit too far and drop into the liquid. Cork retrievers have an interesting spider leg look to them, but they can also save the evening for a host.
Cork in the wine in unpleasant and unappreciated. With a cork retriever, you can ensure that your corks stay where they belong—outside the bottle!
When you use a cork retriever, you don’t have to empty the bottle of wine to attempt to retrieve the cork. This protects the wine from environmental exposure and you from potential embarrassment and spills.
Tool #20: Bottle stoppers
Sometimes viewed as a decorative feature, bottle stoppers come in a variety of shapes and styles. Some are topped corks, while others work on a pressure lever system to push out oxygen and reseal the bottle. Though they can be used with many different bottle types, they are most commonly associated with wines.
Finishing a bottle in one go can be a challenge, and letting good wine or liquor go to waste is certainly a crime. With a bottle stopper you can add days or weeks to the life of your open wines.
Bottle stoppers remove the temptation to finish more wine than your guests can really handle, and they remove the guilt of leaving wine until the next day. They can also cut costs by eliminating waste, an extend the pleasure of a good vintage.
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