Building out a bar should start with liquid ingredients. You can make decent if not good drinks with ingredients, and basic kitchen items you should already have. You don't need much more than a glass, a chopstick, and measuring spoons/cups. And good recipes, which Tipply can help provide.
Take the Old Fashioned as an example. You can easily pour two fingers of Bourbon into a pint glass, add two dashes of bitters, a teaspoon of simple syrup or sugar, some ice cubes, then stir it around with a chopstick. That'll make a perfectly adequate Old Fashioned.
Or pour 1 ½ tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 ½ tablespoons of orange liqueur (triple sec, Cointreau, etc), ½ tablespoons of sugar, and ¼ ups of cognac into a Mason jar, add ice, seal, and shake for 30 seconds. Pour that into a glass and enjoy a decent Sidecar.
But you can do better. Good equipment makes you efficient, it often just feels better, and you can enjoy the experience more. You just need a few items for a good home bar.
For my friends who are just getting into mixing drinks, I’ve laid out the following list of equipment in the order I think they should buy things. Like I wrote above, you don't need any of this to get started. You can stick to stirred drinks, using any glass and a chopstick. You don't need fancy ice, and you can juice citrus with your fist. In fact, I suggest you don't buy any of these things until you're ready. Perfect your Sazerac, Vieux Carré, and Old Fashioned first.
When you're ready to make even better drinks, and you're sure it's a thing you want to get into, work your way down this list.
There's a lot of fancy cocktail and bar equipment out there that you simply don't need. Insulated cobbler shaker? Nope. Diamond cut Japanese crystal mixing vessel? Nope. Fancy ice maker? (maybe, but not now). My goal is to get you into making drinks without having to spend much money. Save it for the booze.
You can make a lot of great drinks with a repurposed glass jar and your finger. But eventually, you'll want to make drinks that require different mixing techniques or you'll want to be more precise with your measurements. Or you'll want to make them faster, or with less stress. This is where a small set of bar equipment can come in handy, which should cost less than $150. And it doesn't have to be bought all at once.
But again, do you need to buy any of it to get into cocktails? Nope. Use what you have first, then find some drinks that you love enough that you want them to be even better. I don't care what you use to make a good drink, and neither does the Tipply app.
If you click any of the product links Tipply might earn a very small percentage of the purchase price. This goes to keep the server online. All of the equipment links I've included are based on my own experience using those actual products in the past 20 years. I have purchased each item myself or received it as a gift from someone who actually likes me. They are recommendations, not advertisements. In many cases, I've seen my preferences backed up by recommendations from other sources, bartenders, etc. I only hope you get the same mileage and enjoyment out of the products as I do.