When craft cocktails started to come back in the early ‘00s, their advocates were working to reset the standards and were fastidious in their gatekeeping: Quality liquors and fresh ingredients were a must. Thou shalt strive for complexity and balance and amplify all things old-timey. Begone, froufrou Blue Hawaiian; hit the bricks, cloying White Russian! Hail the serious drinks — the rye Manhattan; the complex, bitter Negroni; the gin martini, with a side order to refrigerate your vermouth.
A hint of blue crept in via the Aviation cocktail in 2007. Thanks to the arrival on American shores of importer Haus Alpenz’s Rothman & Winter bottling of crème de violette, cocktailers were again able to make the classic cocktail with the floral liqueur called for in its earliest known recipe (Hugo Ensslin’s 1916 “Recipes for Mixed Drinks”). But the scant amount of the naturally violet cordial gives the Aviation just a faint tint of lavender-blue.
The real blue blast came via New Zealand bartender Jacob Briars, who around the same time threw blue curaçao — an orange-flavored liqueur dyed blue, largely scorned by serious cocktailers of the time — into the classic Corpse Reviver No. 2 cocktail, replacing the colorless curaçao. His cheeky Corpse Reviver No. Blue (gin, Lillet Blanc, lemon and blue curaçao, with an absinthe rinse) demonstrated that a drink could both be azure eye-candy and meet the standards for freshness and complexity. The rise of visual social media held the door for other sophisticated blue booze, like Dante’s Negroni Azzuro and Porchlight’s Gun Metal Blue, an awfully Tarantinoesque name for a drink in the shade of Smurf.
The blue door is open again. Have you walked through? Or does the notion of drinking a chilled coupe of FD&C Blue No. 1 undermine the romance for you?
Look, as long as you’re not drinking it by the pint, the FDA has okayed these colorings. We’re all loaded with microplastics at this point, and given that you’re reading a cocktail column, I’m speculating that while health may be on your list of priorities, it’s like, maybe, 6th on that list? Cocktailers generally are not my-body-is-a-temple types. Hopefully you’re not treating your body like a port-a-potty either, but between those two poles, I continue to believe there is a way to balance physical, mental and social health, while feeding that part of the brain nourished by sitting on a beach with a blue-hued umbrella drink. The Buffett Oblongata?
As this summer has heated up to preposterous temperatures, I’ve been daydreaming about tropical turquoise waters. Even in reality, water that blue somehow doesn’t seem real. Every time I go down to the Isla Mujeres or Quintana Roo, I’m shocked all over again that it is. If I can’t walk out into the Caribbean, at least I can create a summer-sweet punch the color of cool tropical seas.
I expected to use blue curaçao but landed somewhere else. I locked up my inner cocktail snob while working on this drink. It’s ocean-blue and so “girly” that if you put your ear to the rim of the bowl, you can hear the Little Mermaid singing Taylor Swift songs.
The liqueur Hpnotiq was launched 20-plus years ago. It spread largely via smart marketing that got it into clubs and music venues in New York and L.A., where it gained enough popularity that it started making appearances in music videos and getting call-outs in hip-hop tracks.
Twenty-some years! That’s how long I’ve been ignoring it at the liquor store, bypassing its glowing blue on my way to some angry amaro, snootily judging the brand by its name — I still want to buy it a vowel — and its marketing, which is clearly aimed at cool young people at the club. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a cool young person. If you’d dropped me in the hottest dance club in New York City when I was 22, I would have managed to find, and possibly reorganize, its bookshelf.
Also, I’ve often encountered Hpnotiq in recipes that include flavored vodka or Red Bull, and when I see a Red Bull cocktail, my brain summons Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon”: “I’m too old for this [four-letter word meaning hangover].”
But having played around with Hpnotiq in drinks now, I can say, even though the marketing tells me I’m not the target audience, even though I feel a little like a cougar with a crush on the cabana boy: Hpnotiq is … delicious? It’s brightly tart, sweet, ambiguously tropical-fruit-juicy (I taste mostly passion fruit). Sure, it’s not the most complex liqueur I’ve ever tasted, but that’s what mixology is for. And that color! Luminous, milky turquoise, so clean I didn’t want to tamp it down with citrus juice. Instead, I saved the fruit for garnish and went in a tiki-adjacent direction, using orgeat for nutty roundness, a bitter liqueur and powdered citric acid — a hack from Dave Arnold’s “Liquid Intelligence” — to balance the sweetness without muting its hue.
I was curious why Hpnotiq hasn’t been bigger in the craft cocktail space. The brand came on the market at an odd moment in 2001, says Lynn House, National Spirits Specialist and Portfolio Mixologist for Heaven Hill, which has owned it since 2003. The early craft cocktail movement was so focused on rediscovery of old ingredients, she says, that newer things weren’t necessarily embraced. “It was like, if it wasn’t in the 1800s, we don’t want to deal with it.”
But the brand has sold steadily, especially in warm-weather markets, and Hpnotiq “flew off the shelves during covid,” says House. “I think people really just wanted to have fun again, after two years of not fun.”
Amen to fun. And if you’re craving something that’s more gulf-green, you can create the cocktail Hpnotiq was most known for in its early years: an equal parts Hpnotiq and cognac concoction, known as an Incredible Hulk. (It seems a missed opportunity not to muddle mint into it, which would make it a Hulk Smash.) In the mid ‘00s, a whole lot of people were drinking Incredible Hulks as they got low on the dance floor. If you try that out, I’ll salute you, from a sensible middle-aged standing position, over by the bookshelf.
