mgMilligram Bar

The kit

What you actually need

Nothing here is exotic and most of it you probably own. Each entry says what it changes about the drink, because a tool you do not understand the point of is a tool you will not use.

No smoker, no sous vide, no rotary evaporator. If a list like this ever tells you to buy one, close the tab.

No links yet. When they go in, they will earn a commission, and it will never affect what is listed or what we say about it. It can never apply to the drinks themselves, since the retailers that run those programmes prohibit THC products.

Tools

A jigger is the only one of these that is genuinely non-optional.

  • A proper jigger

    Two-sided, marked in quarter ounces. The single most useful thing on this list.

    Free-pouring a mixer is fine. Free-pouring anything dosed is not, and the habit of measuring transfers. A jigger marked at quarter ounces is what makes a recipe repeatable, which is the whole difference between a drink you liked once and a drink you can make again.

  • Cocktail shaker

    Needed for exactly one recipe here, and worth it for that one.

    Only the Black Cherry Sour needs it, because aquafaba foam requires hard mechanical agitation. Everything else on this site is built in the glass on purpose.

  • Hand citrus press

    The difference between a drink that tastes made and one that tastes assembled.

    Bottled juice is pasteurised, which flattens the top notes that make citrus read as bright. Almost every recipe here asks for half an ounce of fresh, and that half ounce is the most noticeable ingredient in the glass.

  • Large cube ice tray

    Two-inch cubes, for anything bitter you intend to sip.

    Surface area governs dilution. One big cube melts far more slowly than the same volume of small ones, so a bitter drink stays bitter instead of turning into cold water.

  • Soda siphon

    Optional, and the one genuine luxury here.

    Freshly charged soda is dramatically more carbonated than anything from a bottle that has been opened once. On a low-dose drink, where carbonation is carrying most of the sensory experience, it is more noticeable than it sounds.

Glassware

Shape is function here, not decoration. Each one does something specific to the drink.

  • Collins glasses

    Tall, narrow, and the right shape for anything built over ice and topped with soda.

    Height is doing real work. A narrow column keeps carbonation from escaping across a wide surface, which is why a highball stays lively for twenty minutes and the same drink in a tumbler goes flat in five.

  • Coupes

    The shallow bowl that makes a foam-topped sour look like it came from a bar.

    The wide surface is the point: it shows off the foam head and delivers aromatics to your nose before the liquid reaches your mouth.

  • Heavy-bottomed rocks glasses

    For the bitter, sipped drinks that live or die on dilution.

    Weight is thermal mass. A heavy glass holds its chill, so a drink you nurse for half an hour does not warm up and fall apart halfway through.

The pantry

The bottles and jars the recipes lean on. This is where a cheap substitution shows most.

  • Non-alcoholic bitter aperitif

    Ghia, Sanbitter or similar. The backbone of the best drinks here.

    This is the thing that makes an alcohol-free drink taste adult rather than sweet. Bitterness is the structure alcohol usually provides, and a good NA aperitif supplies it without any of the interaction problem that makes mixing THC and alcohol a bad idea.

  • Angostura bitters

    Two dashes turns a cola into something considered.

    Bitters are concentrated spice, and a couple of dashes pulls a sweet mixer back toward the spice notes already in it. Worth knowing that bitters contain a trace of alcohol, roughly what is in a ripe banana, so skip them if you want a drink that is strictly alcohol-free.

  • A genuinely spicy ginger beer

    Fever-Tree or Cock n Bull. Not the sweet supermarket kind.

    A mule is a vehicle for ginger heat. If the ginger beer is sweet rather than hot, there is nothing holding the drink together, and no amount of lime rescues it.

  • Real vanilla syrup

    Made from vanilla, not vanilla-flavoured.

    The synthetic kind reads as sweet and nothing else. Real vanilla carries a faint woody bitterness that stops a dessert drink from being cloying.

Good glass is the cheapest upgrade a drink ever gets.

Everything on this site is built to be made with what is listed above and nothing more. If a recipe needs something unusual, that is a fault in the recipe. Back to the recipes.