Blue Lagoon

The colour is the entire idea

The Blue Lagoon is usually credited to Andy MacElhone at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in the 1960s, and its only real innovation is visual: blue curaçao, an orange liqueur coloured with dye, turns a plain vodka lemonade into something people photograph before they drink it.

What is in the glass

One and a half ounces of vodka, one ounce of blue curaçao, four ounces of lemonade. That is the whole list. The vodka is a delivery system and nothing more, so an expensive bottle is wasted here. The curaçao brings both the orange flavour and the colour. The lemonade supplies the acidity and the fizz that keep the drink from tasting like a liqueur diluted with water, so use a real lemonade — fresh lemon juice and soda, or a good cloudy brand — rather than a lemon-flavoured soft drink, which is mostly sugar.

The dilution trap

With no shaking and no strong spirit, the Blue Lagoon lives or dies on temperature. Fill a highball to the top with ice, pour in the vodka and curaçao first, then the lemonade, and stir once with a barspoon from the bottom. Stirring twice is one stir too many: every turn costs carbonation, and a flat Blue Lagoon is a sweet blue glass of nothing.

Strength and colour

Around 9% ABV and roughly 220 calories, most of them from the lemonade and the liqueur. The colour fades as the ice melts, which is a fair guide to how long the drink has been standing.

Where people go wrong

• Using lemon squash instead of lemonade, which makes the drink cloying.
• Skipping the ice and pouring warm lemonade over the spirits.
• Adding blue food colouring to a colourless curaçao, which stains the glass and adds no flavour.

Variations

A Swimming Pool adds coconut cream and pineapple juice for a softer, opaque version. A Blue Hawaii uses rum instead of vodka with pineapple and sour mix.

Is blue curaçao different from triple sec?

It comes from the same family of orange liqueur, colouring aside, but blue curaçao is usually sweeter and lower in alcohol, so the two cannot be swapped one for one in a Margarita.

Can you make it without blue curaçao?

You can make the same drink with triple sec, and it will taste identical while looking like cloudy lemonade. The colour is the point.