Best bartender kits

A kit has exactly two genuine advantages. The first is that everything matches, which sounds trivial and is the main reason people buy them - a mismatched bar cart looks accumulated rather than chosen. The second is that it is one decision instead of six, which is worth real money if you are buying a gift or furnishing a bar from nothing.

The disadvantage is structural and unavoidable: a kit is assembled to a price, so something in it is compromised. It is almost always the strainer, occasionally the jigger. And every kit contains at least one tool you will not use - usually a muddler, sometimes a set of pourers that will live in a drawer forever.

The dividing line is simple. If you own nothing, a good kit is an efficient start and the compromises are survivable. If you already own tins and a jigger, you are buying duplicates to acquire a muddler, and you should buy the muddler.

Kits are easy to judge badly because photographs flatter them. We compared on published specification and construction rather than on presentation, weighting:

• Whether the tools are the maker's real tools. Some brands sell a kit-only grade that looks identical and is not. Barfly and Viski both ship their catalog pieces.
• Material and gauge. 18/8 stainless at a real gauge, not thin stamped steel that dents on a tile floor.
• Strainer quality. The first thing to be value-engineered, and the piece that most affects the drink.
• What is missing. Every kit has a gap. A shaker kit with no mixing glass and a mixing kit with no tins are both half a bar, and you should know which half you are buying.
• Storage. A stand or case that keeps wet tools off the counter is a genuine, boring, everyday benefit.

Before comparing kits, it is worth knowing the shortlist a kit is trying to cover. The whole essential set is five items.

Notice that no kit on the market covers all five well. Shaker kits skip the mixing glass because it is the expensive item; mixing kits skip the tins. That is not a flaw in any particular product, it is the economics of bundling, and knowing it in advance stops the disappointment.

• Pourers. Free-flow spouts belong behind a busy bar. At home they oxidize an open bottle faster and encourage free-pouring, which is the habit a jigger exists to fix.
• Ice tongs. Charming, slow, and a clean hand works. An exception: a shared ice bucket, where tongs are about hygiene rather than elegance.
• The muddler, usually. Unless you make juleps or mojitos regularly, a muddler is the tool that gets used twice a year.
• Twelve-piece 'professional' sets. The piece count is the marketing. Every additional item past the five above is there to make the box look better.

None of that makes a kit a bad purchase. It just means the honest way to value one is to count only the pieces you will actually use and ask whether the kit is a good price for those.

Buy the kit, use it for a month, then replace the strainer. It is the cheapest single upgrade available and it changes the texture of every shaken drink you make, because a dense spring holds back the pulp and ice shards that a loose one lets through.

If you want to go one further, a fine-mesh strainer held under the Hawthorne - double straining - is what produces the genuinely silky texture in a bar's shaken sour. It costs very little and it is the technique most home bars have never tried.

Everything else in a decent kit will outlast your interest in it. See best barware sets for the cross-category view, including glassware and ice, which no tool kit covers.