“The most awesome gifts in the world.”

And maybe they are.

When someone can actually afford them.

However, I’m not one of those in the business of spending upwards of $100 to open a crate.  With a crowbar.  And as much as I would have loved to have been, so I could purchase their Moscow Mule crate for my father’s birthday this past June, it just wasn’t in the cards.

So, I decided I needed to make my own.

On a side note: do you know how stinking popular Moscow Mules are?  I didn’t either.  But, a quick search on Pinterest leads me to believe they are quite.  I mean, once I plugged the term into the search engine, a plethora of images came up giving me ideas on how to create this gift set.

First things first, I knew I wanted to have a crate of some sort.  Well, I didn’t exactly know I wanted a crate, but I definitely knew I didn’t want to use a basket.  Using a basket just screamed “feminine” to me, and that was one thing that I wanted to avoid.  Lucky for me, my mother had a couple crates she uses for décor that weren’t being used, so I snagged one to fill, but you can locate them at Walmart or your local craft store for cheap.

A must-have in this gift were the copper mugs.  I mean, what’s a mule without them?  Except for the fact that my father’s been drinking a mule of some sorts every night for quite some time without one.

But we won’t go there.

We’ll just say that the copper mugs are needed for a Moscow Mule [or in this case an Italian mule].

Also, since my father’s been drinking Moscow mules, I thought we could branch out a little.  I mean, I’m more of an Irish mule drinker myself.  But I wanted something that I knew he had never tried before.  So, I found a recipe for an Italian mule and had my sister make up a print-out – because I’m dense when it comes to things like that.  Oh, and on top of that, it’s available for you to print out. Woohoo!

Italian mule recipe print out!

The rest of the basket was filled with ingredients to make the Italian mule.  I didn’t want the basket to be completely filled with large glass bottles, so I picked up airplane size bottles of vodka, a bottle of simple syrup, and a couple bottles of ginger beer and made the star of the show the Limoncello since that’s not typically an alcohol we’d have stashed away.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. However, if you really want to go all out, Ana White has a tutorial on how to construct a plywood gift crate.  Maybe I’ll keep that in mind for next year?  Or Christmas?

What man crate have you been interested in trying?