What Makes The Blue Hawaii Different From Other Drinks With A Similar Name?

Tiki cocktails inspire images of sunny tropical locales, warm island breezes, and sipping fruity rum drinks with paper umbrellas while listening to waves roll in on a sparkling white sand beach. The Blue Hawaii is a classic of these vacation-in-a-glass cocktails, famous for its vibrant blue color that evokes the Pacific Ocean waters surrounding the Hawaiian islands.

A Blue Hawaii is made with light rum, vodka, the orange liqueur blue curaçao, pineapple juice, and lime-based sweet and sour mix – which is different from usual mixes made with lemon: combining sweet, citrus, and sour flavors. The ingredients are shaken with ice and strained into a tall glass, but they can also be blended with ice for a frozen version, and the drink gets a pineapple wedge garnish. A cocktail likely inspired by the Blue Hawaii has a near identical name, Blue Hawaiian, and ingredients in common, so they often get confused for each other. 

The Blue Hawaiian also has blue curaçao, light rum, and pineapple juice, but swaps vodka for cream of coconut, and replaces sweet and sour mix with lemon juice. It tastes more like a gussied-up piña colada because of the thick and syrupy cream of coconut, which also makes the cocktail creamy and a lighter aquamarine. Among other cocktails with names similar to the Blue Hawaii, the closest may be the Hawaii Five-O. It's a near match, with all the same ingredients except for vodka, and since it's a neutral spirit, the drink isn't going to taste very different than a Blue Hawaii.

The Blue Hawaii was invented by bartender Harry Yee at Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel in Honolulu in 1957. A Bols liquor company sales representative wanted to publicize the brand's blue curaçao liqueur and asked him to create a drink with it. Yee came up with the Blue Hawaii, and reportedly named it after a song from a 1937 movie called "Waikiki Wedding." Its popularity took off, and it became one of Hawaii's best-known cocktails, perhaps aided in part by the 1961 Elvis Presley hit movie of the same name. When making it at home, keep in mind that Yee has said he prefers Bols' blue curaçao and Puerto Rican rum for the drink.

The blue curaçao that lights up these cocktails with a vivid hue that can make its orange flavor a surprise comes from and is named for the southern Caribbean island of Curaçao. It's made from the fragrant dried peels of the bitter laraha oranges that grow there and has both sweet and bitter flavors. It's not clear when it was first made — Bols claims it was in the 17th century — but it wasn't until around the early 1900s that it started being produced in blue, orange, and green colors.