Blue Hawaii

What to expect

Taste

The first surprise is that it does not taste of anything blue. Pineapple leads and leads clearly: sweet, tangy, with the faintly tinned, sunny note that pineapple juice always has. Then lemon cuts across the middle and stops the whole thing collapsing into squash. What arrives underneath is orange — but not orange juice, orange PEEL: the dry, oily, slightly bitter rind flavour of curacao, made from the peel of the laraha, a bitter Caribbean orange whose flesh is inedible and whose skin is the entire point. The white rum sits behind it as a warm, faintly sugary background, and the vodka contributes nothing at all except strength, which is exactly its job and also the drink's chief hazard. Then the finish, which is the part nobody expects: as the sweetness drops away, a clean pithy bitterness spreads across the back of the tongue and stays there, with a slow spirit warmth behind it. Sweet in the middle, bitter at the end.

Aroma

Pineapple first, and it is a big, foamy, almost fermented-sweet smell coming off the freshly shaken cap. Orange oil sits just behind it, brighter and drier. The alcohol shows more on the nose than in the mouth, because vodka carries other aromatics up out of the glass without adding any of its own — so it smells stronger than it tastes, which is the opposite of most tropical drinks and worth noticing. Cold flattens the nose deliberately; five minutes in and the orange peel comes forward as the drink warms, along with a faint sweetness of rum.

Texture

Light and juicy with a soft opening — the foam hits the lip before the liquid does and gives the first sip a texture like the top of a milkshake without any of the weight. Under it the drink is thin, clean and cold, with a slight pulpy body from the pineapple and no creaminess whatsoever. That is the entire difference from the Blue Hawaiian, which is a piña colada in blue: rich, opaque and thick. The Blue Hawaii is a sour with a fruit juice in it and it drinks like one.

Sound

The shake is the drink's soundtrack and it is a long one — twelve seconds of ice hammering a metal tin is loud, rhythmic and unmistakably a cocktail being made rather than poured. Then the crack of the tins coming apart, the strain, and the wet slap of foam landing on ice. After that it goes quiet: a fine crackle as the foam collapses, and the knock of a cube settling.

How the flavour moves

Foam, then pineapple sweetness, then lemon acid cutting through it, then orange peel, then a dry bitter finish and a slow warmth. The important thing about the sequence is that the sweetness fades faster than the bitterness does, so the second sip tastes noticeably less sweet than the first and the fourth tastes almost dry. It gets more serious as you drink it, which is not what a bright blue drink in a hurricane glass has any right to do.

Serve it

Shaken to just above freezing and it needs to stay there. Warm, the sugar takes over and the orange-peel bitterness turns from a clean finish into something harsh and medicinal, which is precisely how a bad Blue Hawaii tastes and why the drink has the reputation it does. Cold, the sweetness is held in check and the bitterness reads as structure. This is a drink that is genuinely good for about ten minutes.

Goes with

Salt and fat, to push against the sugar. Kalua pork, teriyaki, salt-and-pepper squid, fried chicken, crisp pork belly, salted macadamias. Char-grilled pineapple works because it doubles down on what is already there. Anything creamy or coconut-based fights it, and anything delicate loses.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Easy, with one thing to get right: shake it hard enough and long enough for the pineapple juice to foam.

Cost

Moderate. Three spirits go into a single glass, and a bottle of blue curacao is a purchase most people make once and then have to find uses for. The pineapple juice is where quality actually shows and it is the cheapest thing in the drink.

Equipment

A cocktail shaker, a strainer, a jigger, a hurricane or tall glass, and a cocktail stick for the cherry. A blender if you want the frozen version. No heat, no special kit.

When to make it

Daytime, heat, and holidays. It is a poolside and beach-bar drink and it does not translate well to a dark room in winter.

Best season

Pineapple is available year-round and at its best in spring and early summer, but the drink's real season is whenever it is hot. Nothing about it is seasonal in the northern hemisphere sense.

You know it is done when

Blue-green rather than pure blue, translucent enough to see the ice through it, with a pale foam cap a centimetre or so deep and a fine bead of bubbles caught in it. If it is opaque, something creamy has got in and you have made a Blue Hawaiian.

And it feels like

The foam should hold a cherry stalk upright for a moment rather than swallowing it. Underneath, the liquid should feel juicy and light on the tongue, not thick.

Food safety

Nothing perishable. The number worth knowing is the alcohol: 90ml of spirits and liqueur go into one glass, which puts it around three UK units, and it tastes like pineapple juice the whole way down. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which is why the juice can sting a sensitive mouth slightly — harmless, but real.

Where it goes wrong

• Making a Blue Hawaiian by mistake. The moment cream of coconut goes in it is a different drink — opaque, creamy and much sweeter — and both names get used for both drinks all over the internet.
• A short, gentle shake. No foam, no dilution, no chill, and a drink that tastes of raw spirit over warm juice.
• Too much blue curacao, chasing the colour. Past a certain point it goes sticky and medicinal, and the fix is a better bottle rather than a bigger measure.
• Bottled sweet-and-sour mix, which is the single biggest reason this drink got its reputation.
• Dark or aged rum, which turns the colour a murky green-grey and buries the orange peel under molasses.
• Long-life pineapple juice from a carton that has been open for days. It will not foam, and the foam is half the pleasure.
• Serving it in a small glass. It needs the ice, and the ice needs the room.

If it does go wrong

Too sweet: more lemon, not less curacao, because the curacao is carrying the finish. Too pale or too green: the pineapple juice is winning; a slightly bigger curacao measure or, better, a less yellow juice. Muddy or grey: check the rum is white. No foam: the juice is over-pasteurised or the shake was short — shake again, harder, and stir the juice before pouring next time. Tastes harsh and medicinal: it has warmed up, and there is no recovery. Tastes of alcohol on the nose but not the palate: that is the vodka doing what vodka does, and it is a reason to consider dropping it in favour of more rum.

Making it ahead

Pre-batch the rum, vodka and curacao in a bottle and keep it in the fridge — 90ml of that mix per drink. Juice, syrup, ice and the shake all have to happen at the moment of serving, because the foam cannot be made in advance.

Keeping it

Does not keep. The foam is gone in minutes and the colour separates as the pulp settles.

Reheating

Not applicable.

Freezing

The frozen version — everything blended with a cup of crushed ice instead of shaken — is a legitimate and common way to serve it, and it turns the drink pale, thick and much sweeter-tasting because cold suppresses the bitterness the finish depends on.

Leftovers

None. The spirit and liqueur portion can be batched, but the juice and the shake have to happen to order.

Scaling it

Batches well for a party up to the point of the shake. For a crowd, batch the spirits and juices together, keep it very cold, and shake individual servings to order; if that is impractical, blend the frozen version instead, which scales properly and is what most resorts do.

Substitutions

Sweet-and-sour mix, which the original called for, is exactly what our 20ml lemon plus 10ml syrup replaces, and the fresh version is better. Dropping the vodka and going to 60ml of white rum makes a rounder, more rum-forward drink and loses nothing but strength-without-flavour. Do not substitute a dark or aged rum: it muddies the blue to a murky green-grey and its molasses fights the orange peel. Any triple sec or dry curacao will make the same drink in orange rather than blue, at which point it is a decent tiki sour with no reason to be on the menu.

Dietary swaps

A non-alcoholic version is awkward because the colour lives in the liqueur; blue curacao syrups made for coffee and soda work as a substitute and give the look, with pineapple juice, lemon and a little syrup behind them. The drink is naturally dairy-free and nut-free, and vegan apart from the cherry, which is worth checking since some cocktail cherries are still coloured with carmine. The colour itself is FD&C Blue 1 (E133), synthetic in every commercial bottle, which some people avoid.

Shopping for it

Look for a curacao that lists dried orange peel rather than just flavouring, and for pineapple juice that is not from concentrate. A light Puerto Rican-style rum is the historically correct choice and the right flavour: clean, dry and slightly grassy.

Keeping the cost down

Spend on the curacao and save on everything else. A better blue curacao changes the drink completely, whereas an expensive white rum disappears entirely behind pineapple. Buying whole pineapples and juicing them is cheaper per glass than good bottled juice if you are making more than a few.

Sustainability

Everything in the glass has travelled: pineapple juice, Caribbean rum, a Dutch liqueur. The one honest choice available is fresh juice from a whole fruit rather than a carton, which cuts the packaging and makes the drink better at the same time. The colour is synthetic and there is no natural alternative that survives contact with yellow pineapple juice.

Nutrition

Roughly 270-300 kcal and about 25g of sugar per drink, a good half of that from the curacao and syrup rather than the fruit. This is an estimate and varies considerably with the curacao brand. The alcohol is the figure that matters: about 3 UK units, or a little under two US standard drinks, in a glass that tastes like juice.

Worth it?

Far better than its reputation, and the reputation was earned by bad versions rather than by the recipe. Made with fresh lemon, real pineapple juice and a curacao that tastes of orange peel, it is a properly balanced sour that happens to be bright blue — which is the most useful thing anyone can say about it.

Where it comes from

Origin

The Hilton Hawaiian Village, Waikiki, Honolulu, 1957 — a specific bar in a specific hotel, which is rare enough in cocktail history to be worth saying.

Also called

Blue Hawaii. Not the Blue Hawaiian, and not the Blue Lagoon, both of which it is routinely confused with.

Said out loud

Plain English, hah-WY-ee. In Hawaiian the place name is Hawaii with a glottal stop before the last vowel, closer to hah-VAI-ee, though nobody orders it that way.

What the name means

The name comes from the song 'Blue Hawaii', written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger for the 1937 Bing Crosby film Waikiki Wedding, twenty years before the drink. It is regularly assumed to come from the Elvis Presley film of the same name, but that was released in 1961, four years after the drink existed — the film took the title from the same song.

History

It was made two years before Hawaii became a state and before jet services turned Honolulu into a mass destination, which means it was invented just ahead of the wave rather than in response to it. Yee spent more than thirty years as head bartender at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and built the visual grammar of tiki drinks as much as their recipes: he is credited as the first bartender to garnish a cocktail with a vanda orchid, in 1955, and the first to put a paper parasol in one. He created around a dozen other drinks including the Tropical Itch and the Hawaiian Eye.

Why it matters

It is the drink that made blue curacao a fixture behind every bar in the world, and one of the very few cocktails whose entire brief was a colour. For a generation it was shorthand for a Hawaiian holiday, and for the generation after that it was shorthand for a bad one — the Blue Hawaii spent decades as the punchline for everything cocktail revivalists disliked, before the tiki revival went back and found that the original was a properly built sour.

When it is eaten

Holidays, pool bars, beach bars, birthdays, and any room where a drink has to be visible from across it. It is a first-drink-of-the-holiday cocktail rather than a nightcap.

The traditional way

Shaken with ice and strained over crushed ice, garnished with pineapple and a cherry, plus the parasol. Yee's proportions, as generally published, were about 22ml light rum, 22ml vodka, 15ml blue curacao, 90ml pineapple juice and 30ml sweet-and-sour mix.

How it changed

The curacao has crept up, roughly doubling, because bars want it bluer and drinkers expect it bluer. Sweet-and-sour mix went from a house-made lemon-and-syrup preparation to a bottled product and the drink got much sweeter and much duller in the process. Many bars now blend it, which turns a light sour into a slush. And it has been steadily conflated with two other drinks it is not.

Regional variations

The frozen Blue Hawaii, blended rather than shaken, is effectively a separate drink and is what most resorts serve. The Blue Hawaiian, which adds cream of coconut and is essentially a piña colada dyed blue, is opaque, thick, much sweeter and coconut-led — the single most useful distinction to record, because bars and recipe sites swap the two names constantly. The Blue Lagoon, a third drink again, is vodka, blue curacao and lemonade with no pineapple at all.

How this version differs

Ours pours 30ml each of rum, vodka and blue curacao, which is roughly double Yee's curacao measure and a slightly heavier pour of spirit, so the drink is bluer and stronger than the 1957 original. We also split the sweet-and-sour into 20ml of fresh lemon juice and 10ml of sugar syrup, which is what a good sweet-and-sour mix was in the first place and gives a sharper, fresher result than any bottle.

Sources and credit

Harry K. Yee (26 September 1918 - 7 December 2022), head bartender, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Waikiki. Created 1957 at the request of a sales representative for Bols. This attribution is solid and should be stated plainly; it is one of the few tiki-era drinks where the inventor was around to confirm it for another sixty-five years.

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