Täby · October 2026
Six whiskies, two mezcals and almost no mixers. Here is what the shelf holds, what it is worth, and the four bottles that open it up. Prices are Systembolaget, October 2026.
What the shelf is actually missing. A spirit you already have in another bottle is not missing.
Reading the shelf…
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Stir with plenty of ice until the glass frosts, about 30 seconds. Strain over one big cube. Squeeze an orange peel over the surface, then drop it in.
Equal parts, same as the original. Stir with plenty of ice until the glass frosts, about 30 seconds, and strain over one big cube.
Grapefruit peel rather than orange. Orange sweetens, and the point here is that the smoke and the Campari bitterness are both doing work, so you want a peel that sharpens instead of softening.
Use the Sinai, not the Ojo. The Sinai is 40% against the Ojo de Tigre’s 37%, and in an equal-parts stirred drink those three points decide it: the Ojo goes soft and the Campari walks over the top of it. The Sinai is also single-variety espadín, which is more direct than the Ojo’s espadín and tobalá blend, and that blend is built to be approachable rather than to hold its ground.
The Ojo keeps the Mezcal Sour, where lime, syrup and egg white round everything off and approachable is what you want.
Shake hard with ice for 12 seconds. Double strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish, drink it cold and fast.
Stir with ice for 30 seconds, never shake. Strain into a frozen glass. Twist a wide strip of lemon over the top.
Stir in the glass over one large cube until it loosens, about 20 seconds. Orange peel, expressed and dropped in.
Stir with ice for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. A cherry if you have one.
Stir with ice, strain over a big cube. A Negroni that swapped the gin for whiskey, and warmer for it.
Salt half the rim so you can choose. Shake hard with ice, strain into a chilled glass.
Shake without ice first for 15 seconds to build the foam, then again hard with ice. Strain. Three drops of Angostura on the foam.
Dry shake, then shake with ice. Strain into a coupe. The smoke and the foam together are the whole point.
Shake the first three with ice, strain into a flute, top with about 75 ml of cold cava. Lemon twist.
Harry’s version, October 2026. A different drink rather than a better one, and worth tasting against the classic once there is syrup in the house. Drop the sugar syrup and use triple sec in its place: 30 ml gin, 15 ml fresh lemon, 15 ml Cointreau, cava to top, poured straight from the shaker without straining. Syrup only adds sweetness. The liqueur adds sweetness, orange oil and some weight, and the orange has somewhere to sit between the lemon and the wine. It is also stronger than the classic, because a 40% spirit has replaced a soft ingredient in a drink that goes down like a glass of fizz.
The case for the syrup version is that a French 75 is meant to stay dry and light, and the liqueur works against that. If what you liked was the fuller gin, orange and lemon of it, that is the White Lady further down this list, which does the same thing without fizz to get in the way.
Cava, not the Bollinger. Here the wine is carrying gin and lemon and cannot be tasted on its own terms, so good champagne is wasted on it. Cava is made the same way and is drier than prosecco, which makes it the right bottle rather than the cheap one. Keep the Bollinger for the Champagne Cocktail and the Death in the Afternoon, where the wine is the drink.
Straining is optional and only changes the texture. Unstrained you get ice shards and a little lemon pulp in the glass, which goes slightly cloudy and keeps diluting as it sits. Double strain if you want it clear and want the bubbles to last. It tastes the same either way.
Shake with ice, double strain into a chilled coupe. Hendrick's cucumber suits this one better than Bombay does.
Shake with ice, double strain. Bombay rather than Hendrick’s here: the maraschino and lemon want a clean juniper behind them. The full classic adds crème de violette for the colour, which you do not have and do not need.
Build straight over ice in a tall glass, top with soda, orange slice. A Negroni you can drink two of.
Press the mint gently against the glass, do not shred it. Add rum, lime, syrup and crushed ice, churn, top with soda.
Dry shake, then with ice. Strain into a chilled coupe.
Sugar half the rim. Shake with ice, strain into a coupe. Worth deciding whether the 20-year Ararat is really what you want in this.
Shake hard with ice, double strain. Flame an orange peel over it if you are showing off.
Build over ice. The lime is not optional, it is the only thing separating this from rum and coke. White Cuban rum is the drink: Captain Morgan makes a spiced rum and coke, which is a decent thing but a different one, and the vanilla in it flattens the lime.
Shake with ice, strain. No orange liqueur, which is why you can make it tonight.
Build over a lot of ice in a big glass. Orange slice and a mint sprig. What they drink in Porto in the afternoon.
Soak the sugar cube in Angostura at the bottom of a flute, top slowly with cold Bollinger. It fizzes as the sugar dissolves.
Fill the glass with ice first so the tonic stays cold and fizzy. Cucumber ribbon, not lime, with this gin.
Neat from the freezer is the Finnish way. With cream it becomes a dessert.
Salt the rim, build over ice, top with grapefruit soda. Lighter and more drinkable than a Margarita.
The standard coffee liqueur and the one every recipe assumes.
The espresso must be fresh and hot, and you must shake harder than feels reasonable. That is where the foam comes from.
Systembolaget does not stock it in any form, checked twice. It would have to come from abroad or a trip.
Equal parts, shaken hard, double strained. One of the few great cocktails where nothing dominates.
Hemköp do not stock a no-added-salt tomato juice. Both they carry are 99.5% juice and salt, so the Fontana litre is carrying 0.5 g of salt in every 100 ml pour, about a twelfth of a day before anything else goes in. That is where the salt in this drink lives, not the hot sauce. Season with black pepper, lemon and the celery stick rather than reaching for more.
Roll it between two glasses rather than shaking, so it stays thick. Build over ice, taste, and correct the salt last. Celery stick if you are being traditional.
Tabasco rather than sriracha. Sriracha works, but it is chilli with garlic and sugar in it, so it sweetens the drink and sits on top of the tomato. Tabasco is cayenne and vinegar, and the vinegar is the thing that lifts tomato juice. It is also about a quarter the salt, 1.7 g per 100 ml against sriracha's 7.3 g, and you use a fraction as much.
The vodka you make yourself, see the projects below: one evening and a night in the freezer. The tomato juice, Worcestershire and Tabasco are the same three the Bloody Mary wants and you have none of them, so the Hemköp run has to come first, or the vodka finishes and sits there with nothing to go in.
The same build, with the vodka doing the work. A crisp rasher across the top instead of celery. This is the one worth making the vodka for.
Keep the vodka in the freezer and the glass colder still. Stir with ice for 20 seconds, no more, or you water it. Lemon twist, or three olives if you want it dirty. The Belvedere in the freezer makes this tonight. Grey Goose is the one you said you want for it, so that is what replaces the Belvedere when it runs out, not something to buy alongside.
The small bottle is the right one. Absinthe goes in by the rinse or the dash, so 200 ml is about 65 drinks, roughly 3 kr each. It is also the only absinthe Systembolaget holds in stock rather than to order.
Chill a rocks glass, pour in a splash of absinthe, turn it until the inside is coated, then tip the excess away. Stir everything else with ice and strain into the dry glass. No ice in the finished drink.
Express a lemon peel over the top and throw the peel away rather than dropping it in. The absinthe is only ever a rinse here, which is why the small bottle lasts.
New Orleans would use Peychaud’s bitters and rye. Angostura and the Woodford make a good one, and the Ararat makes the older cognac version, which is how it started.
The small bottle is the right one. Absinthe goes in by the rinse or the dash, so 200 ml is about 65 drinks, roughly 3 kr each. It is also the only absinthe Systembolaget holds in stock rather than to order.
Stir with plenty of ice for twenty seconds, strain over one large cube, lemon twist.
An Old Fashioned with the maraschino and the absinthe added, which is where the name comes from. You already own everything in it but the absinthe.
The small bottle is the right one. Absinthe goes in by the rinse or the dash, so 200 ml is about 65 drinks, roughly 3 kr each. It is also the only absinthe Systembolaget holds in stock rather than to order.
Stir with ice until properly cold, strain into a chilled coupe. Lemon twist, and a cherry if you have one.
A Martini with the maraschino and absinthe layered in. Check the Martini Extra Dry is still fresh first, because half this drink is vermouth.
The small bottle is the right one. Absinthe goes in by the rinse or the dash, so 200 ml is about 65 drinks, roughly 3 kr each. It is also the only absinthe Systembolaget holds in stock rather than to order.
Absinthe in the bottom of a flute, then top slowly with very cold champagne. It turns cloudy as it goes, which is the whole trick, the oils dropping out of solution.
Hemingway’s drink and his recipe. It is stronger than it looks and tastes strongly of aniseed, so one is the sensible number whatever he claimed.
Soak the sugar in the bitters, add a splash of whiskey and work it to a paste, then build on one big cube and stir for twenty seconds. Express an orange peel over the top. No fruit salad.
Press the mint into the syrup without tearing it. Fill with crushed ice, add the bourbon, churn with a spoon until the glass frosts, then mound more ice on top and bury a mint bouquet in it.
Order saved to this cabinet
Why the seasons are on there. It is not decoration. A cocktail is a way of handling the weather, and the two halves of the list do opposite jobs. Long, low-strength, citrus-and-soda drinks are built to cool you down and replace water, which is why a G&T or a Paloma is wasted in November. Stirred, spirit-only drinks are strong, warm and aromatic, which is what you want when it is dark at four. Autumn is the hinge rather than a style of its own: whiskey, cognac, smoke and bitterness, the drinks that start the cold half of the year.
These are Stockholm seasons. March here is still winter and September is already autumn, so the year is split four, two, three and three rather than into even quarters. Summer gets only June to August, which is about right. It is also why most of the long drinks sit idle for three quarters of the year, and why the stirred ones earn their shelf space.
Check the Martini Extra Dry before you pour one. Vermouth is wine. Once opened it fades in weeks at room temperature, and a tired bottle smells flat and faintly sherried. Both vermouths belong in the fridge door.
Four read off the labels · more behind them
Open the Rioja next, then the Merlot. The Navajas is a 2016 crianza, which is a style meant for three to five years and is now nine. The Zenato Merlot is a 2019 built to drink young. Neither is improving. The Valpolicella and the Franciacorta can wait.
Prices are what the current vintage costs today, not what these are worth. Vintages differ: the Merlot listed is a 2020 against your 2019, the Valpolicella a 2022 against your 2021, and the Rioja crianza a 2020 against your 2016. There are at least three more bottles in the rack I could not read.
The ones with alcohol in
The 500 ml London Pride is order-only and out at the supplier, so the 330 is the one to get. Worth knowing the alcohol-free Guinness is 22:40 against 29:90 for the real one, which is the first time I have seen the zero version undercut the original.
From your Booze free list, minus the dead ones
This is the section that matters most. You said the zero-calorie soft drinks worked because you came off alcoholic beer onto them. This is the same move with the beer flavour kept, and it has got genuinely good in the last few years.
Eight of the 25 on your Booze free list no longer exist. Lervig, Sierra Nevada, Leffe, Bianca and the Sparkling Tea are discontinued, and Corona Cero is in store only. I had the Guinness down as dead and it is not, it is simply out of stock at one channel, so that correction is made.
The bit extra
Equal weights, stirred until the water goes clear. That makes about 600 ml, which fills a litre bottle sensibly. A 100 g batch works but you would be remaking it every weekend, and this is the thing fourteen of the drinks need. Off the heat is fine, it does not need boiling. Cool it and bottle it. It keeps about a month in the fridge, and a splash of vodka in the bottle makes it keep longer.
This is the one to do first, before the bacon vodka and before the lime cordial. Fourteen of the thirty-six drinks on this list call for it, nine of which are flagged ready to pour, which they were not. It is the cheapest thing on the whole page and it was the reason the French 75 got made with triple sec instead.
Every measure on this page assumes 1:1. Rich syrup at two parts sugar to one of water keeps for months and is less watery, but then halve the amounts given in the recipes.
Only the fat goes in, not the bacon. The flavour is fat-soluble, so it is already in the fat. Putting the rashers in makes it cloudy and meaty and gives you sodden bacon at the end.
The whole pack, and low and slow. Four rashers was the instruction here until 17 October and it is wrong for Swedish bacon: rökt & skivat is sliced thin, so four of them is 50 to 60 g and renders about 15 ml however carefully you fry them. A 140 g pack is roughly 60 g of fat, but real yield is well under that once you count what stays in the pan and what clings to the rashers, so buy two and render both. Start them in a cold dry pan and then turn the heat on low, 3 or 4 of 9, for 15 to 20 minutes: the fat begins melting before the meat contracts and noticeably more comes out. Anything above about 5 browns the outside and seizes the meat with the fat still in it. Keep every drop. Swedish supermarket bacon is streaky already, which is what you want: back bacon renders almost nothing. Any surplus fat keeps for weeks in the fridge and is the best thing there is for frying eggs or potatoes. Let the fat cool to warm, not hot, then pour it into the jar with the vodka. Leave it at room temperature for four hours. Shaking is optional: fat washing works by contact, not agitation, so a stir and a cover does the same job. Longer does not make it more bacony, it makes it taste stale. Freeze overnight. The fat sets into a solid white disc you can lift straight off.
Whatever you use has to be wide. On Thursday morning you are lifting out a solid frozen disc, and through a bottle neck it breaks up and you end up fishing bits out with a knife. A mixing bowl under cling film beats any jar: more surface, and the disc comes away with a fork. Glass, not plastic, which holds the smell afterwards. Leave headspace so nothing strains in the freezer.
You want enough fat to cover the whole surface. This is the test to judge it by, not a number in millilitres, because you can actually see it. Frozen, it should set as one sheet you lift off with a fork in a single piece. On 17 October it came out as two small islands, which meant nothing could be lifted and the coffee filter had to remove all of it instead: an hour of dripping rather than five minutes. If the fat does not reach the walls of the jar when you pour it in warm, there is not enough.
If you end up short of fat, use less vodka rather than more bacon. The ratio is what matters, about one part fat to ten of spirit, so 15 ml of fat wants 150 ml of vodka and still makes three drinks. And if the bacon itself goes in by accident, it is not a disaster in this one drink: the meat infuses directly, which covers a shortfall in the fat. Lift the pieces out at the four hour mark before it freezes, expect it cloudier and saltier, filter it twice, and go lighter on the Worcestershire.
Strain the rest through a coffee filter into a clean bottle, and do not squeeze it. Forcing it through pushes the fat back in and the vodka turns cloudy. It drips slowly and that is fine. A third of a bottle gives five drinks, which is more Bacon Marys than anyone needs, and it keeps two months in the freezer.
Use the Absolut. The bacon is doing all the talking, so the Belvedere and the Grey Goose are wasted here, and the vodka category stays covered either way. Eat the bacon, but fry a fresh rasher for the garnish on the day: a reheated one goes limp in the glass.
Dissolve the sugar in the hot coffee and let it cool completely, or the heat will strip the spirit. Combine with the vodka and the split vanilla pod in a bottle. Rest it two weeks somewhere dark, then fish the pod out. It is better than Kahú and costs a fifth of the price, so the Espresso Martini stops waiting on a shopping list.
Peel the lemons in wide strips, taking as little pith as you can. Muddle the peel into the sugar, seal the jar, and leave it four to twelve hours. The sugar draws the oil out of the skin and turns into a bright, intensely lemon syrup. Strain the peel out. You buy lemons every shop already, and this is what the good bars use instead of plain syrup.
Weigh the lime peel, then add citric acid at 9% of that weight and malic acid at 6%. Blend with the peels, leave two hours, then add the juice and enough water to bring it to about 700 ml and blend again. Strain. It tastes like fresh lime, keeps for weeks, and gets six times the yield out of the fruit. You go through limes in the Daiquiri, the Margarita and the Gimlet, so this one pays for itself fastest.
Equal parts, plus the water to stand in for what stirring would have melted. Bottle it and keep it in the fridge. It is drinkable at once and noticeably rounder after a fortnight. Pour 90 ml over one big cube and squeeze an orange peel over it. Wait until the Campari lands on Thursday.
Start with the sugar syrup. Fourteen of the thirty-five drinks need it and there is none in the house, which is why nine of them were wrongly flagged ready to pour. Five minutes and about 40p. After that the bacon vodka, which is the only one here that makes a drink you cannot buy, and the bacon is already in the Hemköp order. The lime cordial is the one you would use most often after the syrup.
Photographed 13 Oct
One day, if you ever want to sip tequila. Especial Silver is a mixto at 35%, roughly half agave and half other sugars, which is exactly right in a Margarita and not meant for a glass on its own. José Cuervo Tradicional is 100% blue agave at 393 kr, about 68 kr more than what you already buy.
Later, not now. Green Chartreuse would finish the Last Word, but Systembolaget does not stock it.
About the prices. Plain figures are Systembolaget, October 2026. The five marked with a tilde came from elsewhere and are my estimates from other retailers: the Ardbeg is a travel exclusive that duty free sells around €90 while UK shops ask £120, and the Mezcal Sinai I could not find listed anywhere, so that one is a comparable rather than a quote.