How to Make Blue Curacao, Part One

When you’re basing cocktails recipes on famous environmental disasters, it often seems appropriate to make a Blue Drink. The blue itself is so unnatural, and there’s a whole string of associations there, too. The most famous Blue Drink is the Blue Hawaiian, which makes me think of Elvis, then Vegas, then the Nevada Test Site. Also, Hawaii, the U. S. military in the South Pacific, then Bikini Atoll, where we’re still doing damage control (although I read that the Spam and Coke are now causing a lot more health problems than the radioactivity.)

Anyway, the DeKuyper brand blue curacao that I have tastes really gross. I thought I could do better.

My first idea was that curacao was just an orange-flavored liqueur, so I’d buy some Grand Marnier or Cointreau and die it blue. But that stuff is expensive, about $40 for a fifth, so I went with plan B: A bottle of grain alcohol (about $15) and some oranges.

I peeled two oranges and a lemon and put the peels in a pint-sized mason jar. I filled it with grain alcohol (it’s called Clear Spring) and added a really old vanilla bean. For good measure I also added a splash of the bourbon that the bean had been resting in, and three or four teaspoons of sugar.

Two days later, I had a very powerful brew. It was a lovely orange color (see photo) and drunk straight, was almost painful. The booze burned, but not nearly so much as the long, bitter orange aftertaste.

So I added some water, and found that I had created a liqueur with louche: it turned from clear to opaque when water was added to it, just like absinthe does. But it still didn’t taste very good, even when I added more water and more sugar. Adding blue food coloring made it look pretty cool, but didn’t help the taste.

As a last resort, I decided to actually look up a recipe for curacao. It turns out that it’s flavored with the peels of the bitter laraha fruit, which grows only on the island of Curacao, off the north coast of Venezuela. Maybe it’s supposed to be that bitter? I don’t know, but I’ve got half a bottle of Clear Spring left, so I’m going to try again.