The Five-Bottle Bar: A Simple Guide to Stylish Cocktails

By Jessica Schacht

From the co-founder of Ampersand Distilling Company, a collection of cocktail recipes that relies on just five bottles to build your bartending style with ease and confidence.

Think of it as the capsule closet for cocktails. Five bottles around which your inner bartender can emerge with skill, savvy and a little flare for the dramatic when it’s called for.

Playwright, columnist, and co-founder of Ampersand Distilling Company, Jessica Schacht knows we all contain multitudes and believes with a little curation and mastery of the basics, we can succeed at elevating the everyday and cultivating a good cocktail hour.

The bottles: gin, whiskey, sweet and dry vermouth, and Campari (plus bonus recipes for bubbly). The setting: living room, backyard, window seat, and the wild beyond. The mixologist? Oh, that’s you.

In this beautifully photographed collection, Jessica Schacht, co-founder of Ampersand Distilling Company, presents her take on classics (like the G & T, the Old Fashioned, the Martini, and the Negroni), collections (sours, punches, and such), and contemporaries (a few inventive new drinks to pique your creativity). There’s a chapter of zero-proofs in part inspired by the abundance of new alcohol-free spirits on the market now, and another dedicated to keeping your vacation drinks game classy, from the airplane to the B&B to the beach.

In addition to the recipes The Five-Bottle Bar supplies a solid foundation in bartending basics (tools, techniques, thoughts on glassware and garnishes), the condensed history of spirits, and tips for setting up your minimalist bar cart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771513777

Jessica Schacht

Jessica Schacht is the cofounder of the multigenerational family-run Ampersand Distilling Company and author of the History Glass column in the Cowichan Valley Voice. When she’s not whipping up new recipes for the distillery, you can bet she’s tending to her garden or walking in the woods. She is grateful to live in the Cowichan Valley in the home she shares with her husband and sons.

Book preview

Cover: The Five-Bottle Bar: A Simple Guide to Stylish Cocktails by Jessica Schacht

The Five-Bottle Bar

A Simple Guide to Stylish Cocktails

Jessica Schacht

Logo: TouchWood

To all the gentlewomen in my life

Contents

Well, hello there

The Five-Bottle Bar

Accoutrements

The Classics

Collections

Contemporaries

Shims

Zero Proof

Bon Voyage

Bonus Bottle

Aperitifs/Digestifs

This Is the Life

The Five-Bottle Bar by Region

Parting Shot

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Conversions

Index

✴✴✴

Well, hello there

Life’s too short to drink bad cocktails. It’s also really busy. As the epicurean you are, you want to know you’re reaching for something delicious when cocktail hour comes around, and that it won’t take hours of meticulous extracting, straining, and mixing to get there. You love a good speakeasy, but whether you’ve got tons of cash to drop at the bar or not, why shouldn’t you get to delight in some of that luxury at home?

But no one’s got time for kitchen chemistry lessons every time they want to sip on something sophisticated.

That’s why I’ve written The Five-Bottle Bar: to help you master the simplicity of timeless, delicious cocktails. Think of your five-bottle bar as the capsule closet of the cocktail world. With just five bottles and a few accoutrements, the combinations are endless and endlessly elegant. Everything works together, and you can dress it up or keep it low-key, safe in the knowledge that it will work, every time.

I’m Jessica Schacht, cofounder of Ampersand Distilling Company, an award-winning craft distillery in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. We launched in 2014, and I’ve been developing recipes for spirits and cocktails ever since. Our gin and vodka have been voted Best in BC (and the world! What?!) and are staples on bars across the province. In 2016 I started writing about classic cocktails for my History Glass column in the Cowichan Valley Voice. This focus on the history of classic cocktails led me to notice a few bottles I kept reaching for again and again, and from there, The Five-Bottle Bar was born.

It’s been my experience that though there are many kickass womxn making inspiring drinks, spirits, bitters, and books in this industry, making cocktails often appears to be a boys’ club. (Is it me, or does it seem like every good drink in a movie is delivered by a guy with a moustache and suspenders—and those surely unnecessary arm garters?) Thankfully, the cocktail world is far more diverse—and accessible—than Hollywood representations and some bell-jar-wielding barkeeps might have you believe. A few of my favourite folks have even agreed to share their very own contemporary cocktail recipes with you here. As with every industry, there are those who guard doors and those who open them, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the Five-Bottle Bar cocktail club, where the only rule is: A simple drink can still be a stylish drink.

This book is here to support and guide you in creating an elevated yet simple intimacy with the cocktails you drink and serve: from mini history lessons to the simple joy of a frozen cocktail glass, from cocktails-on-the-go to the go-to cocktail classics, get ready to bring easy luxury to your everyday cocktail experience. Pass the olives. Or the Cheetos. Whatever’s your jam. Jam’s good too.

Oh, and whilst it goes without saying in this club of ours, remember to drink responsibly, dear friends.

Good health, happiness, and cheers.

Signature of Jessica Schacht

The Five-Bottle Bar

Bottle One: Gin

Gin is a versatile spirit made by steeping botanicals in a neutral spirit and then redistilling. The predominant botanical must be juniper for it to be called gin. (Some people scoff when I say this, but gin is basically a flavoured vodka—it just has a specific set of flavours.) Other common botanicals include citrus peel, coriander, orris root, and angelica. Of the five bottles in our bar, gin is the foundation of many of the most popular classic cocktails.

Gin has a long and complicated history on which many books have been written, but the tl;dr is that the British ripped off a Dutch recipe and made it their own. This is the basis for the names Holland gin (genever)—malted barley spirit steeped with juniper—and London dry gin, which uses a neutral spirit instead of malted barley for steeping botanicals. Like many spirits recipes, gin has its origins in medicinal tinctures—in this case, juniper—from a time way back when monks and medicine makers used alcohol to extract herbs. Cocktails like the Gimlet and the Gin and Tonic actually originated as palatable ways to take medicine (citrus for scurvy, and quinine for malaria. The more you know!).

Gin has also had less positive effects since its invention. In fact, it has gone through phases where it’s been outlawed altogether. It came to be known as Mother’s ruin in Britain during the Gin Craze of the 1700s (though to be fair, gin referred to all kinds of grain alcohol), when alcoholism and debauchery were rampant. Easy access to distilling licences led to people producing shoddy and dangerous product— often causing illness or death. This led to things like the Gin Act of 1736 in Great Britain, which severely restricted who could make spirits.

Thankfully, people cleaned up their act (and the spirits they were producing) and the pendulum swung to the great gin palaces of the 19th century. Even with the Prohibition outlawing alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933, we got some great cocktails out of these time periods. In recent years there has been yet another resurgence of gin in various styles. Nowadays there are three main gin categories: new western gin, London dry gin, and genever.

Born in Portland, Oregon, new western gin has become synonymous with contemporary gin. These gins shy away from juniper and often incorporate local ingredients, such as lavender, cucumber, rose, hops, seaweed, and grand fir. New western/contemporary gins are innovative products of their environments.

London dry gin, also known as