10 Brilliant Ways to Use Mini Liquor Bottles

Unless you’re thousands of feet in the air making bootleg Gin & Tonics, tiny one-shot liquor bottles don’t come up much in every day life. But the adorable, pixie-sized spirit containers have a lot of potential uses. Whether you’ve unwittingly gathered a collection or you simply like their whimsical size, here are a few great ways to put those miniature bottles (both full and empty) to work.

FULL BOTTLES

Party Favors
The best cocktail party hosts not only serve killer drinks during their shindigs, they also send guests home with one for the road (metaphorically speaking, of course). Make your next party truly memorable by distributing mini bottles at the door on the way out, complete with custom labels to mark the occasion. If you’re batching up your own drinks for the party, fill empty bottles with your custom creation.

Infuse Small Fruits
Pro summertime partiers already know how easy it is to infuse a watermelon using a power drill and a full bottle of booze (just drill a hole into the melon, stick an upturned bottle in there and wait). The same trick works with smaller fruits. You can jam mini bottles directly into fruits like kiwis or peaches, or cut a small hole into fruits with tough peels or rinds like cantaloupes or grapefruits and then insert the bottle.

Make a True Minibar
Got a free drawer in your desk at work? Not anymore. Now you’ve got a pullout minibar. We’re not condoning drinking at work. We’re just saying spiking your coffee on the sly is easier when you’ve got the right supplies. Do what you will with that information.

Give Someone a Potable Arrangement
As much as we love tulips or daisies, we can all agree that liquor trumps flowers as a gift any day. While a bottle of something nice will do in a pinch, presentation goes a long way. Make a liquid edible arrangements gift basket by filling a basket with foam, gluing mini booze bottles to dowels, and sticking them into the foam. You can even get all fancy with tinsel or fake flowers to fill out the basket. Or just add more bottles.

Grown-Up Easter Egg Hunt
Running around a lawn party on a warm spring day looking for chocolate might seem juvenile to those of drinking age. Running around a lawn party on a warm spring day looking for booze, on the other hand, that’s just a great Saturday. Simply hide bottles (in plastic eggs or just on their own), say go and watch youthful glee wash over your friends.

EMPTY BOTTLES

Kitchen Annexes
If you find yourself constantly reaching for that massive bag of sugar or gargantuan bottle of olive oil for just a teaspoon or splash, try this kitchen hack: Pour ingredients into emptied and cleaned mini bottles. Relabel the bottles so they reflect their new contents or just remember that Jack Daniels now means soy sauce.

Salt and Pepper Shakers
Rimming your Margarita with salt or garnishing your Gibson with a dash of black pepper is even better when the seasoning comes from salt and pepper shakers made from empty mini bottles. Just drill tiny holes in the cap, fill the bottles and shake away.

Make Your Own Shot Glasses
With a razor, boiling water, ice water and a lot of caution, you can make yourself a custom shot glass. The crew over at the Tipsy Bartender created an easy how-to on converting mini bottles into shot glasses: Run a razor around the bottle where you want the shot glass to end. Then alternate dipping the bottle into boiling water and ice water. The bottle should split on the line. Just be sure to sand down the glass’s edge before taking a shot from it.

Bud Vase
Decorate small spaces, bar shelves or your next breakfast-in-bed tray with a single flower in an empty mini booze bottle.

Holiday Lights
Make your next holiday bash extra festive by swapping out boring twinkle lights for a string of light up liquor bottles. Drill holes in the bottle caps to fit your lights, screw on the bottles and flip the switch on your luminous liquor lights.