Time for another Mixology Monday! And it’s a good thing too, as the monthly online cocktail party always gives us an excuse to play with booze (not that we need an excuse). This month’s theme is “blue” from Andrea of the excellent Ginhound blog. Here is the breakdown:

January needs a bit of color – or perhaps the month after all the holiday mania makes you feel…blue? Either way this month’s Mixology Monday is a chance to live those emotions out. You can dazzle us with a brilliant blue drink or you can share that blue feeling with a melancholic drink.

Blue has been predicted as a new cocktail trend several times in recent years… But any mixer of blue drinks is faced with a bit of a dilemma as there is nothing “natural” about E133 – the most common of blue food colors: Do I really want to mix chemicals into my prefect mixture of fresh juices and good booze? Feel free to interpret blue as freely as you wish – if natural is the way you want to go blueberries, violets, cornflower or red cabbage could be good ingredients to work with.

Well, we played around with developing a more blue-feeling drink, but then that bottle of blue Curaçao gathering dust on the top shelf just kept calling. And since we only make Blue Hawaiis in summer, it was time to break the stuff out. But one thing we did decide to do is make a truly blue drink, as so often drinks with blue Curacao end up more green than blue.

We looked for pale drinks to work from and found the Corpse Reviver #2, one of our favorite classics. Not only is it very tasty, but all the ingredients (gin, lemon, Cointreau, Lillet, Absinthe) run from clear to pale straw in color- and would keep us “true blue”. So we subbed the blue Curaçao for the Cointreau and then triple-strained the lemon juice to remove all pulp (for a clearer drink). And we got a very clear, blue drink (and yes, we may have played with photo effects a little..;-). We also added a lemon wheel for extra color and contrast, we like the look.

So how did it taste? Great, as always. Oh, and the name? As they say, “live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse……”

The Beautiful Corpse:

Ingredients:

• 3/4 oz. gin
• 3/4 oz. blue Curaçao
• 3/4 oz. Lillet Blanc
• 3/4 oz. lemon juice
• 1 dash Absinthe
• Lemon wheel, for garnish

Assemble:

1. Add all the liquid ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well chilled and triple-strain into a chilled coupé or flute. Garnish with the lemon wheel. Serve.