Post #235196 by Humuhumu on Thu, Jun 1, 2006 1:38 AM

As it turns out -- blue curacao & orange curacao may be the same after all! We did a blind taste test between the two tonight at Forbidden Island. The general consensus was that both of the liqueurs were pretty nasty. We weren't clearing our palettes between the two, so if there were any subtle differences, they were lost on us, but basically it's the same stuff, and we couldn't tell them apart.

So, this leads me to the question -- why is it then that I have found blue curacao drinks to be so nearly universally gross? I love the color, and I've always been so disappointed that the drinks are never any good. Plus, some there tonight reported having attempted unsuccessfully to use blue curacao instead of orange in a pinch. The general consensus was that it was a two-pronged thing: 1) in order to get a drink to have a nice blue color, a lot of the blue curacao has to be used, and as was just mentioned, the stuff is vile on its own. Plus, the other ingredients chosen to go with it are selected with consideration for how they might skew the color, not just for taste consideration. 2) when used for substitution, it just looks ugly, just not right at all, and so the taste difference might be psychological.

Because the taste was so very strong, it might be that they are actually different, but we couldn't tell because it left such a vile taste in our mouths. A better test would be to make two actual drinks side-by-side using blue curacao & orange curacao, as that would let the stuff mellow out a bit. But generally speaking, it looks as if the two might be interchangeable, after all.

But boy howdy, would that make a visually unappealling Mai Tai.