What every home bar needs

Barello is a home cellar and bar app that tells you what to open tonight, what to keep, and what you can mix from what you have.

Every count on this page is taken from its cocktail library: 193 recipes, each carrying the rules that decide whether a bottle on your shelf satisfies an ingredient. That's the same engine the app runs on, so nothing here is an estimate.

The library and the matching tool are free and need no sign-up. The cellar side, with the drinking windows, is the app.

Half of a cocktail isn't a spirit. Limes block more drinks in this library than any bottle on the bar shelf does, and lemons and sugar are close behind.

So the first shopping list is lemons, limes, sugar or sugar syrup, soda water and mint. Everything below assumes you have them, exactly as the app does when it works out what you can make.

They also get you 12 drinks on their own. These are the non-alcoholic ones, built from juice, soda and citrus with nothing off the bar shelf in them.

Gin turns up in 46 recipes here and finishes 13 of them by itself: Bee's Knees, Clover Club, Gimlet, Gin & Tonic, Gin Basil Smash, Gin Fizz, Gin Rickey, Gin Sour, John Collins, Ramos Fizz, Saturn, Southside and Tom Collins. Nothing else in the library carries a list like that, because so many classics are a spirit, a citrus and a sweetener, and gin is the spirit that sits happily in the sour, the highball and the fizz alike.

The catch worth knowing before you spend: a second bottle rarely combines with the first. Gin and tequila between them make 20 drinks and not one of them uses both. That's fine. It's just not what "these two go together" usually means. The two-bottle table has the honest numbers for every pair.