A Tacoma bar gives you everything you need to assemble a classic cocktail at home

“Hey friends, Sam down here at The Mule Tavern General Store!”

That’s how Sam Halhuli, the owner of The Mule Tavern in South Tacoma, is greeting his customers during the coronavirus ban on dining in at bars and restaurants. He says the words “general store” like he’s unsure of how he ended up running a supply store and not a bar.

He doesn’t sound despondent or worried, though. His tone evokes a sensibility that’s near impossible to find right now: optimism.

Unable to serve cocktails in person, Halhuli took the hashtag #covidcreative to heart. On March 17, he posted a reminder on Instagram that the bar was closed but he would continue to sell growlers of The Mule’s housemade ginger beer and tonic, both of which he has offered for most of the bar’s four years on South Tacoma Way. Four days later, he announced that the bar was now the proud maker of soda and syrups.

As of this week, The Mule also offers “old-fashioned syrup,” essentially an all-in-one sweetener to make an Old Fashioned at home. All you need is the bourbon, and as of this week, restaurants with full liquor licenses can sell sealed beer, wine and liquor to-go.

“I think drinking at home is essential,” Halhuli told The News Tribune in a phone call Thursday. “It’s an essential cultural part of what we’re doing.”

Even if now we’re all drinking alone in our homes.

Halhuli opened The Mule in 2016 after years bartending in Seattle, Bellingham and New Orleans — where he started and sold a successful soda company called HuHu’s Ginger Brew. He moved to Tacoma on a whim when he saw the building at 5227 South Tacoma Way on Craigslist. As a dive bar that serves excellent but pretension-free cocktails, losing that in-person experience hurt.

Yet regulars and friends and strangers keep stopping by to pick up a growler of ginger beer, but what they really want is a cocktail.

“Hey — we can give that to you in some way, shape or form,” he said, adding that this moment forced him to rethink how he, a hospitality professional, could take care of people. “As tragic as it is, it has forced me personally to get super creative, and it’s reinvigorated the bar.”

Now that the bar “looks like a soda factory,” he has a new business selling housemade syrups that thus far has been successful enough that he plans to rehire some of his small staff of five bartenders.

COCKTAILS FROM A PRO, BUT IN YOUR HOUSE

Halhuli started with the Old Fashioned, a classic cocktail that typically requires three ingredients: sugar, bitters and bourbon (ideally garnished with an orange peel). The stay-at-home regulations demand even simpler measures, so his syrup combines orange peels, bitters and sugar into one. Just stir with whiskey and pour over ice.

Then he added a cucumber cordial — essentially a fresh cucumber simple syrup — to mix with Pimm’s, gin and ginger beer. But not everyone keeps Pimm’s in their home bars, and not every store sells the English herbal liqueur. So he made his own Pimm’s Cup blend with citrus, tea, cinnamon and other herbs and spices.

“The last thing I want to do is you have to go searching for things,” said Halhuli. With a more likely bottle of gin in the liquor cabinet, “My goal was to send you home to be able to make a Pimm’s Cup.”

Another standard cocktail at The Mule is a Cardinal, a gin punch with some sort of red bitter. Halhuni likes to use Cherry Heering, so he made a spiced cherry treacle with molasses to give it an earthy “grittiness.”

The longer we stay inside, the less access we have to fresh citrus. The Mule has you covered there, too, with Sam’s Lime Brine, a riff on Rose’s lime juice called for in many gimlet recipes.

“I’ve always wanted to add salt to this lime sour,” he explained, and “that somehow nailed the proportions.”

It would mix well with gin, vodka, tequila or really any white spirit, he said.

Next up: a straight citrus sour to make proper whiskey sours; house pickle juice so you can have your pickleback and a shot at home; potentially a tepache (a Mexican fermented pineapple juice) with ginger and habaneros; and maybe an orange cream soda.

“This is a work in progress,” said Halhuli. “That’s the whole point: We’re all making do.”

Selling syrup and soda doesn’t match the profit margin of selling booze, but “if this keeps going, then I can bring in my employees. I don’t need to make money; I just need to break even and pay my staff.”

He plans to develop a video component to this newfangled project to walk people through how to make cocktails at home with these ingredients and with limited tools. No bar spoon? Use the handle part of a fork. No shaker? Grab a mason jar.

In fact, Halhuli sees a second business emerging from this project. He is already developing a root beer for Rockaburger, the forthcoming Brewery Blocks collaboration from Ice Cream Social and Philly This. Canning The Mule’s sodas, a longtime dream, seems like a very real possibility.

And he has a new vision for his bar: “The Pimm’s Cup had Pimm’s in it. I’m not sure if it will any more.”

THE MULE TAVERN (GENERAL STORE)

▪ 5227 South Tacoma Way, Tacoma, 253-212-3112, themuletavern.com

▪ Details: Call the bar or message on Instagram to place an order (or ask questions), or drop-in

▪ Hours: pickup or drop-in to purchase, Monday to Saturday, 12 p.m. to 7 p.m.

▪ $10 for a 32-ounce pours of ginger beer and tonic, or $20 for a 64-ounce growler

▪ $12 for a 12.5-ounce bottle of syrup, or $6 for a 5-ounce jar; $10 for a 12-ounce bottle of lemon or lime sour

▪ $4 for 8-ounce jar of spiced cherries

This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 4:00 PM.