Irrelevant Rubbish

Eric Felten writes on the key elements for you at bar at home in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req):

The home bar may be vaguely illicit, but it is also eminently practical -- a designated place for bottles, glasses and the rest. The English novelist Kingsley Amis liked a good drink or three and wrote a couple of books on the hobby. In "On Drink," he includes a section on how to outfit a bar at home. For the most part he focuses on the tools needed -- bar spoons, lemon squeezers, corkscrews and a "really very sharp knife." (Amis suggests: "If you want to finish the evening with your usual number of fingers, do any cutting-up, peel-slicing and the like before you have had more than a couple of drinks, preferably before your first.") But No. 1 on Amis's list of "Bar Kit" essentials is a refrigerator of one's own.

"Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food," Amis writes. And what might he have had in his bar refrigerator? Among the bottles might be some freshly squeezed cucumber juice, which he would have used to make a proprietary cocktail named after his first novel, the Lucky Jim. It's a curious, and not unpleasant, twist on the dry Vodka Martini, a drink that would look fine sitting on one's own slab of vintage mahogany.

UPDATE: Jonathan from Mangled Cat posts a pic of his basement bar and, other than the barstools (which will be appearing in Lileks' next book on horrible interior design), it's a beaut.