Cocktails, mocktails and sodas that go blue without reaching for Blue Curacao.
Bars and beverages
Blue spirulina gives bartenders something surprisingly rare: a naturally derived blue that can disappear into a drink without bringing the flavour of whole green spirulina with it.
Use it for an electric-blue highball, a turquoise sour, a layered spritz, or just to make the house lemonade look completely unreasonable.
The fun part is that you don't have to treat every drink the same way.
For your first test, skip the amaro, cola, berry puree and twelve-ingredient tiki drink.
Take a clear or pale mixer and add a small amount of blue spirulina. Around 1 g/L is plenty for a first trial, and clear drinks may need less.
Mix the powder with a little cold water first, then add that to the drink.
Once you've seen what the colour looks like on its own, start building around it.
Coconut water, soda, a light spirit and blue spirulina over plenty of ice.
It's an easy place to start because the base gives the blue plenty of room to show. Add lime at the end and watch what it does to the finished colour.
Try with: white rum, gin or vodka.
Take your house sour format and make the blue part of the recipe rather than expecting it to behave like Blue Curacao.
Citrus changes the appearance of phycocyanin, so the result may land closer to turquoise than the blue you started with.
That's not a failed blue drink. That's a very good-looking sour.
Try with: gin, tequila or a zero-proof botanical spirit.
Build a pale, sparkling drink around soda or tonic and use blue spirulina for the colour.
Keep the darker ingredients restrained and let garnish do the rest: mint, cucumber, rosemary or a wheel of citrus all work against the blue.
This one also makes an easy zero-proof menu special.
If you're used to working with Blue Curacao, don't think of blue spirulina as a one-for-one natural replacement.
Blue Curacao brings sweetness, orange flavour, alcohol and a very stable synthetic blue depending on the product. Blue spirulina brings primarily colour and behaves more like the natural pigment it is.
That gives you considerably more freedom over the flavour of the drink, but the recipe has more influence over the final colour.
For a bar specifically looking to move away from synthetic blue colouring, that's the interesting trade.
Blue spirulina won't make bourbon blue.
Nor will it overpower cola, coffee, dark bitters, berry puree or a heavily coloured liqueur simply because you add more of it.
If you want the blue to be the visual focus, put it in the lightest part of the drink.
That's particularly useful for layered cocktails. A blue soda, coconut or clarified component can sit alongside darker ingredients without asking the pigment to do something impossible.
Blue spirulina is fantastic for layered drinks because you can put the colour exactly where you want it.
The layering itself, however, has nothing to do with spirulina. Sugar concentration and density are what keep one liquid above another.
So if you're designing a layered serve, formulate the blue component for the density you need and pour carefully over ice or the back of a spoon.
That opens up much more interesting possibilities than simply making the entire drink blue.
Don't have a bartender weighing 0.2 g of powder every time someone orders a drink.
If the same blue component appears throughout service, make it ahead.
For a simple 1 L blue mixer, start around 0.5-1 g of blue spirulina depending on how clear the base is and how strong you want the colour. Disperse it thoroughly, refrigerate it, and use that as your house component.
For anything containing fresh juice or other perishable ingredients, follow the same refrigerated holding and food-safety practices you already use for the rest of your batched drinks.
That last one could be genuinely fun for a bar: the behaviour of the pigment becomes theatre rather than a formulation problem.
Start with a pale drink you already know well. Make three small versions with different amounts of blue spirulina and see which one actually looks good behind your bar.
Then start messing with it.
Blue spirulina powder
Choose a pack