It’s spiced drinks season and no place mixes up spicier libations than Tullulah’s in Bay Shore, where the mixologists boast a lengthy autumnal cocktail list that reads like a Thanksgiving dinner menu.
Some of the 11 fall cocktails ($14 each) on the menu call for seasonal ingredients. For example, there’s pumpkin purée and spiced simple in the Autumn Addict, and apple cider and cranberry jam make an appearance in the Apple of My “Aye.”
“Fall’s definitely one of my favorite seasons for making cocktails,” says Bert
Wiegand, one of the bartenders clad in ties and suspenders.
Wiegand and his fellow mixologist Drew Conroy concocted the recipes a few weeks prior to the drinks being released. The cocktail and food menus are seasonal, but one featured drink’s available year-round.
That would be The Tullulah’s Old Fashioned, which consists of Redemption Rye, Demerara sugar, muddled lemon and an orange peel, Angostura bitters and cherry bitters.
The suggestions are as follows: try both the Rhubarb & Custard and the Pecan Jag. Conroy, who moved to the US about a decade ago, grew up eating rhubarb and custard as a child in the UK.
“It wasn’t a lavish dessert, but I wanted to make a drink that tasted like it,” he says. The cocktail calls for 1.5 ounces of Queens Courage, a New York Old Tom gin. A strawberry-infused Campari is then added.
“It’s got that bitter note as well from the Campari but the sweet from the strawberry,” he says. He then adds egg white to the mix.
“It has a nice consistency,” says Wiegand. “I think people are more appalled by thinking that it’s going to have a taste of egg, which it never will.”
The Rhubarb & Custard cocktail also consists of lemon juice, a rhubarb purée and Licor 43, which gives the drink a vanilla note. A dehydrated lemon wheel is placed into the glass before dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters are added on top of it to finish off the drink, so “you get that aromatic of the nose,” Conroy says.
On to Pecan Jag, which Wiegand concocted after choosing its name, something he typically does.
“Pecan Jag’s actually a quote from a Jadakiss song, which is hilarious because nobody is going to actually get that,” he says.
His basis for the drink: a booze-for-ward tiki cocktail. Unlike the Rhubarb & Custard, the Pecan Jag’s rum-based. It calls for a pecan-infused rum, which he makes using Denizen Merchant’s Reserve Rum and pecans. He then infuses the bottle for about two days.
The drink also consists of Orgeat, an almond-based syrup; fernet branca, a staple of Tullulah’s (it’s the house shot); pimento dram, a simple liqueur flavored with allspice berries; demerara simple, to sweeten the drink; and Angostura bitters.
“It’s really a pretty simple cocktail, all in all, with a lot of flavor in a little glass,” he says.
Tullulah’s is located at 12 4th Ave. in Bay Shore. They can be reached at tullulahs.com or 631-969-9800.
