Building a Home Bar and getting ready for summer’s festivities.

We’ve just been to Puttgarden in Germany and visited Bordershop, a floating liquor store with everything needed for setting up a home bar, at the same time getting ready for spring’s and summer’s all gatherings that could potentially call for a cocktail. In this article series we will give our suggestions for ten solid bottles to pick up at Bordershop. We’ll talk about why we chose them, what you can mix with them, and what some alternative bottles would be.

But let’s start talking about how to get to Bordershop, assuming you start in Sweden (or Denmark like we did). It’s not very complicated in the end, and it’s a fun day trip involving both some road-time and some ferry-time. We picked up a car in Copenhagen and drove for 90 minutes through Danish highways (going over some pretty spectacular bridges along the way) to get to Rødbyhavn, a port where Scandline’s ferries depart from. Either you leave your car here, or you can easily bring it onto the ferry, making the shopping at Bordershop extra convenient. We had prebooked our ferry tickets and when we arrived to Rødbyhavn we only scanned a barcode, waited in a short carline and then drove onboard the ferry.

Once on the boat a 45 minutes passage to Puttgarden in Germany awaits. Since we were hungry, we quickly went to one of the ferries restaurants and had some fish and chips. Portions were generous, so we left full and happy – ready for our three hours shopping at Bordershop.

Driving off the ferry was easy, the whole procedure is immaculately overseen and orchestrated by the boat staff, always pointing you in the right direction. Once off the boat we immediately spotted Bordershop, it’s literally just outside the ferries docking point. So, we parked our car (convenient free parking provided for all cars getting off the ferry), grabbed a shopping cart and went inside.

And just wow what a place! Bordershop is actually a ferry on its own, although permanently docked in Puttgarden. It has four floors, split between beer, wine, spirits and candy. Each floor is huge, and the assortment range is nothing but impressive.

For obvious reasons we stuck mostly to the liquor floor. Here, spirits are arranged by type, making it easy to see for example the whole gin assortment, or all tequilas available etcetera. We immediately started our mission; selecting the ten bottles we think are ideal to start up a home bar with.

Sure you can build your home bar on several more bottles, but the risk is high that some of them only get used once and then just sits there on the shelf. By selecting only ten bottles we’ve forced ourselves to think about usability, versatility and creativity. We chose bottles to maximize the number of different cocktails you should be able to make with them.

In upcoming parts of this article we will go through all bottles one by one, and we will suggest what cocktails to make with them. If you plan to visit Bordershop, their full assortment is listed on the webpage, including pricing.