Spooky season is finally here, and bars across the country are planning for their Halloween bashes. Any Halloween party needs a specialty cocktail list for the big night, but figuring out what to fill it with can be tricky. But there’s no reason to be spooked by menu planning – drop a few of these drinks onto your menu, and you’re guaranteed to chill and thrill your guests.
1. Graveyard Dirt Bushwhacker
If you grew up eating “dirt and worms” as a kid, this boozy milkshake-style treat will hit an excellent nostalgia button. Most bushwhackers are a mix of ice cream, Kahlua, creme de cacao, and a base spirit, all blended. For this seasonal variation, you should start by using a dark rum.
Make sure to use cookies and cream ice cream, add some crushed Oreos, and for an extra chocolatey punch, you can drizzle chocolate syrup into the glass before you pour in the mixture. Top it with half an Oreo to look like a tombstone, and sprinkle more cookie crumbs over the top. You can even add a gummy worm to enhance the spook factor! This drink has a lot of visual appeal and would look great featured on a Halloween specials menu—and on your social media!
2. Pumpkin Pie Punch
If you’re making a Halloween-themed specials menu, a drink focusing on fall flavors is a must-have. Pumpkin pie punch is a perfect option for this! Making a punch will require a little bit of preparation ahead of time, but thankfully when it comes to service, it should be as easy as pouring and garnishing. For this recipe, you’ll want to use the following:
- Pumpkin puree
- Apple cider
- Bourbon
- A little bit of orange juice for acidity
- A whiskey cream liqueur (such as Whisper Creek)
- A pumpkin pie spice simple syrup
Combine the ingredients in a large food-safe container and mix well to break up the pumpkin puree. An immersion blender is best for this, but using a large whisk and some elbow grease will work too. Once your ingredients are mixed, pour the mixture into your serving vessel and serve over ice with a dollop of whipped cream. This cocktail also makes for a great dessert drink, which you could serve as part of the final course in a Halloween tasting menu!
3. Literally Just A Bloody Mary
Ordinarily, Bloody Marys are a beloved brunch staple, but for the Halloween season, they become uniquely appropriate to include on a drink menu! There’s no real need to deviate from the classic recipe on this one; as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you want to add a little visual flair, you can consider adding some red luster dust for a glittery effect in the glass. But you can ramp up the spook factor by capitalizing on the trend that made the drink famous at brunch time—garnishes are your friend.
If you can make olive eyeballs or a dripping Tajin rim, go crazy with it! You should prepare this stuff before service, as making garnishes like this on the fly will be difficult for your bartenders. When putting the drink on your menu, consider giving it a fun seasonal name (Bloody Scary is right there). Bloody Marys also bring a great element to the possibility of a Halloween cocktail flight. If you batch cocktails ahead of time, serving smaller portions becomes an easy task, and a Bloody Mary contrasts with most other cocktails beautifully.
4. Ghostly Gin and Tonic
A gin and tonic might not seem like much to bring to a holiday drink menu, but this one is all in the presentation. Butterfly pea blossom gins like Empress 1908 have made a significant splash on social media in the past few years due to their deep purple color. They also bring the added perk of changing colors when acids like citrus are added to them. The color component is very on-theme for Halloween, but the choice of tonic water is essential here too. Use tonic water with quinine, which glows under black lights.
So in a sense, the garnish for this drink might be adding a few black light bulbs around your bar to amp up the Halloween energy. If you want to bump up the glow factor, you can also garnish with a small glow stick! As long as they’re not broken, glow sticks can be totally food-safe. Having a quick and easy staple like gin and tonics on your specials menu can give your guests a comfortable starting point, and if you price them affordably, you can also make your bartenders’ lives easier with such a simple drink to make.
5. Spooky Shirley Temples
Not everyone who wants to enjoy a Halloween bash can or wants to drink alcohol, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get to join in the fun! The classic Shirley Temple is a simple mix of ginger ale and grenadine syrup, which brings a nice dramatic visual flair with its bright red color. You can spookify this alcohol-free classic with a bit of prop work; simply buy a pack of food-safe syringes and fill them with grenadine in advance.
To give the drink a little more sophistication, maybe add a hint of herbal syrup to the ginger ale, but otherwise, you can simply add the grenadine-filled syringe to the glass and serve it. The guests get the fun of injecting the grenadine themselves and watching it swirl up into the soda. As a fair warning, this is a very sweet drink by nature, so if you have any ideas on substitutions for grenadine that might not be so sugar-heavy, it could be worth checking out!
Enjoy Your Monster Mash
There’s no reason to stop here—if you have a silly and strange idea to bring some Halloween spirit to your cocktail menu, mock something up and give it a try! After all, there’s no better time of year for a little mad science than the Halloween season. If a cocktail proves to be a huge hit, you can even consider redesigning your regular cocktail menu to feature one of these in a more relaxed and on-theme format. Have fun with your experiments, and Happy Halloween!
Megan Prevost is a marketing content writer for MustHaveMenus. Her work has appeared in App Institute, FanSided, FSR, Modern Restaurant Management, PMQ, RestoBiz, Small Business Currents, and The Daily Fandom.
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