It started with Ratty's.
About 15 years ago, shortly after my brother and sister-in-law bought a house, my brother set up a small home bar in a corner of their basement rec room, stocked it with bottles, glasses, and a jar of nuts, and dubbed it Ratty's, from his wife's nickname for him. The space wasn't fancy, but it was a great place to gather.
When I visited, the three of us would spend hours at Ratty's sipping Cosmos (I plead no contest: it was the 90s), talking about everything that mattered to our 20-something selves, and often hanging out and laughing for hours with whichever combination of their friends happened to be around.
One of my very favorite things to do is be out in the world sitting at an actual bar, watching the bartender, and chatting with whoever happens to hop up on the stool next to me, but these hours at my brother's basement bar made me realize just how awesome it is to also be able to offer (and experience) that same sense of joviality and camaraderie at home.
So for my 33rd birthday party, I hired a bartender to give my guests and me a crash course in mixing drinks, enlisted my friends to help stock my bar, and fell completely in love with entertaining—especially with good drinks—at home.
In the years since, my bar has morphed from being a handful of bottles tucked onto a bookshelf to an actual bar, and the glasses in which I serve my guests their drinks have gone from being the expendable multi-pack basics from Target to glasses with more history, more character, and more stories.
My goal with In Our Cups is to bring you vintage and classic cocktail ware for your own home bar (whatever form that might take), and to encourage you to put what you find here to use to entertain your friends, family, neighbors, and other people of interest more often.
We're so weirdly connected these days, with hundreds of friends on social media but sometimes very little time for and with the people we really dig in real life.
Let's bring out the good glasses, pour some great drinks, and change that.
