They Call it the Blues
Blue-hued booze may conjure memories of cheesy cocktails, scandalously named shots and that bottle of blue stuff that has sat in the liquor cabinet since the beginning of time. However, these three local beer- and spirit-makers are redefining what blue booze can mean to you. From a well-balanced blueberry beer to gin steeped in Butterfly Pea shoots, to an April Fools’ Day that may make blue curaçao cool again. Fingers crossed.
Sons of Vancouver, Blue Curaçoa
Sons of Vancouver is a small-batch distillery based in North Vancouver that has developed a reputation for making high-quality spirits such as chilli vodka, amaretto, and most recently, Cigarettes on a Leather Jacket whisky.
Every April Fools’ day, the Sons of Vancouver puts out a new liqueur that, well, maybe isn’t taken as seriously as it once was — peach schnapps, coconut rum, coffee liqueur. Drinks of yesteryear that spend a lifetime on bar shelves neglected. This year, they released a craft version of blue curaçao and the joke is on them because this blue booze is beautiful.
Curaçao originates from the Caribbean island of the same name. It was created by the Spanish who attempted to grow Valencia oranges on the island, but the hot and dry weather made them bitter and practically inedible. They dubbed it the Lahara orange, and they began to make a bitter orange liqueur much like triple sec or Cointreau.
The island came under the control of the Dutch and Bols took the recipe and made it blue. There are recipes and reports as early as 1913 of blue-coloured curaçao. In the ’60s it had its heyday, thanks to tiki culture and to this day, a bottle of Bols Blue seems to live on as a collector’s item on bar shelves.
What the Sons of Vancouver has attempted to do is bring back blue curaçao, but make it better than the blue stuff we remember. It’s made from macerated cinnamon bitters, orange, mace and brandy, then finished with a healthy helping of food colouring, because nothing in nature is that colour blue.
“Actually, I think it’s the best thing that we make,” says James Lester, co-owner of Sons of Vancouver. “It’s easy to get snobby about cocktail culture, myself included, but we’re a craft distillery and we still want to have fun.”
Sons of Vancouver Distillery
1431 Crown St., North Vancouver, B.C.
sonsofvancouver.ca | 778.340.5388 | @sonsofvancouver
Mariner Brewing Company, Venture Blueberry Sour
A few years ago, a relatively unknown brewery hit the Vancouver Craft Beer Week festival with one of the most eye-catching beers at the entire event — a blueberry sour that looked more like Welch’s grape juice than the straw colour ubiquitous with beer. The lineup was long as revellers (remember when we could revel) lined up for another hit of the blue stuff.
The beer was Mariner Brewing Company’s Venture Blueberry Sour, which is, to this day, the Coquitlam-based brewery’s top- selling beer.
“When we released the blueberry sour three years ago, nobody had really seen a purple-looking beer before, so at festivals, people just kept coming back for it,” says Tori Browning, taproom operations and programming manager at Mariner. “Plus, it’s absolutely delicious.”
What gives the blueberry sour its purple hue is over 1000 pounds of local B.C. blueberries brewed with lactose and the aromatic extract of mosaic hops.
If you are expecting a mouth-puckering sour bomb, then you will be disappointed. What makes this beer so crushable is that they’ve done a beautiful job of balancing the blueberry juice with the lactose, so that the sour just enhances the blueberry juice, while the hops give it a dry finish. No flavour overpowers the other.
It’s definitely worth lining up for whenever lining up for beer is once again a possibility.
Mariner Brewing Company
1100 Lansdowne Dr. H, Coquitlam, B.C.
marinerbrewing.ca | 604.467.4160 | @marinerbeer
Arbutus Distillery, Blue Gin
Arbutus Distillery based in Nanaimo has built a reputation for making unusual gins such as crème de lavande and forest dweller gin made with pine, spruce tips, grand fir and other foraged finds from Vancouver Island. But perhaps their most unusual is their Blue Gin with its rich blue hue.
Made with fairly traditional ingredients — juniper, coriander, rosemary and lemon verbena —the gin is then steeped in Butterfly Pea flower, a flower whose deep-blue colour shifts to a purple hue when combined with an acid such as lemon. It’s nature’s answer to food colouring.
“The blue gin is more of a classic gin that’s all-around well bal- anced, so it’s what you might expect,” says Mike Pizzitelli, owner and distiller of Arbutus Distillery. “We tried to shape it around things that grow on the West Coast, like local hops.”
Pizzitelli opened Arbutus Distillery eight years ago after working in breweries in Ontario.
“I moved out here from Ontario and I always knew I was more interested in distilling than brewing,” Pizzitelli says. “At that time there weren’t many distilleries in B.C., and to be honest, it was kind of a hard sell. B.C. liquor stores and drinkers didn’t really know what to think of local spirits, especially because with craft spirits, you can have more fun with flavours.”
Arbutus is classified as a craft distillery, which means 100 per cent of their ingredients must be sourced from B.C. farms and anything they can’t get their hands on, such as botanicals, they grow themselves.
This approach to infusing local ingredients has garnered the distillery many awards and accolades, including taking home gold for their Blue Gin at the 2021 Canadian Artisan Spirit Competition.
Arbutus Distillery
1890 Boxwood Rd., Nanaimo, B.C.
arbutusdistillery.com | 250.714.0027 | @arbutusdistillery
