The Flavor Of Blue Curaçao Doesn't Match Its Color

There's something very alluring about brightly colored drinks. It's hard not to be attracted to something so bright and cheerful, especially when you're about to sip on one, kick back, and have a good time. Blue is a particularly eye-catching color, but most of the time that color is relegated to kiddie products like blue Gatorade.

However, there is one cocktail ingredient that boasts a beautiful blue color, and that's blue Curaçao. If you've ever had a drink like a Blue Lagoon, which is made of vodka, lemonade, and blue Curaçao, you know that the latter is what imparts that pretty shade of azure. But in this modern age, we've become conditioned to associate the color blue with the flavor of raspberry, thanks to drinks like Slurpees.

Because of that, it's second nature to assume that blue Curaçao tastes like blue raspberry, but it doesn't. Its main flavor is an entirely different category of fruit altogether: citrus.

Blue Curaçao is a type of liqueur that was traditionally flavored with the peel of the Laraha, which is a type of bitter orange. The fruit itself is so bitter that it's not worth eating, but the peel's essential oil was used to lend its flavor to the original version of the drink. As to where the blue part began, the story's a little cloudy, but it's thought that Lucas Bols (who founded the distillery of the same name), was the one who added the blue coloring to the drink.

Bols had Laraha oil sent to Amsterdam and used it to create a bottled blue drink in 1912 called Crème de Ciel, or "cream of the sky." It's hard not to wish that name stuck, because it's so dramatic, but that beverage is thought to have eventually morphed into the blue Curaçao we enjoy today. Now the drink is made with orange products such as concentrated orange flavoring, and the blue color simply comes from food coloring.

These days, blue Curaçao is mostly relegated to cocktails like the Blue Hawaii (and the Blue Lagoon mentioned earlier), which you probably won't see at high-end drinking establishments.

But for those who are looking for the original flavor of Curaçao that includes the Laraha peel, one company still sells it: Senior and Co. If you can't bear to part with that blue color, Senior and Co. not only sells that version, but also sells a bright orange, red, and green one as well. They all taste the same, however; the color's just a cosmetic aspect to make your drinks pretty.

And if you've got an old bottle gathering dust on your bar at home, we've already got some ideas for what you can make with blue Curaçao right here on our site (Spring Fling, anybody?). The drinks you can make with blue Curaçao are so good that the thought of blue raspberry won't even cross your mind.