Spooky Colored Ingredients
Adding creepy colors to your cocktails isn’t always easy. If you’re not careful, it can end in a muddy, unsophisticated mess – or worse, an artificial color bomb that stains your guests’ teeth. Here are some cocktail ingredients and techniques you can use to add ghoulish colors to your drinks.
Blue Curacao vs. Butterfly Pea Flower
If you want to go blue, the obvious choice for most is Blue Curacao. However, this is a fairly artificial ingredient, and it’s farily syrupy compared to the normal dry curacao that’s called for in many classic cocktails,
Instead, try playing around with Butterfly Pea Flowers as a coloring agent. The yield a nice blue color when heated in water as a tea or a syrup, and the color changes to bright magenta when acid is added to the cocktail.
Activated Charcoal
This is one to be careful with. Activated charcoal can create a stunning, black cocktail, but its main use is to strip polyphenols and other chemicals out of cocktails (and out of your body). One incidental side-effect is that it tends to strip flavor. Perhaps leave this one to the professionals unless you have extensive experience using it.
Midori Melon liqueur vs. Green Chartreuse
If you want a green cocktail, there are a couple attractive options. On the low-priced end of the spectrum, you’ve got Midori Melon, which tastes very sweet and artificial. Then, on the pricier side, you’ve got Green Chartreuse. Both are going to yield a really nice green character when paired with clear spirits & mixers.
Layered Colors
If you want to delight your guests with cocktails that have different color layers, play around with liquids that have different weights. Generally speaking, the higher the alcohol, the more likely it will be to float (so add it to the glass last). The more sugar is present, the heavier the liquid will be, which means it will sit well at the bottom of the glass.
Be careful, though! Your guests might not know to stir a layered drink before taking a sip, so make sure you consider the use case before passing out drinks with different liquid layers.
