Blue Lagoon Punch

Transport guests to tropical waters with this azure party punch. The classic vodka and blue curaçao combination scaled for crowds delivers vacation vibes and photogenic appeal.

The Blue Lagoon was created around 1960 by Andy MacElhone at Harry's New York Bar in Paris — the iconic establishment at 5 Rue Daunou that his father Harry MacElhone had opened in 1923 after purchasing it from its original American founder. Harry's Bar had been a gathering place for American expatriates, writers including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and sporting figures since the 1920s, and the bar's house creation of the Bloody Mary and other cocktails gave it an outsized role in cocktail history relative to its size. Andy MacElhone's Blue Lagoon combined vodka, blue curaçao, and lemonade — a formula whose defining characteristic was entirely visual: the blue curaçao, first sold by the Dutch distillery Bols in 1912 under the name Crème de Ciel ("cream of the sky"), gets its vivid color from synthetic food dye rather than any natural pigment, and it transformed a simple vodka-citrus drink into something that looked like no other cocktail. Blue curaçao's vivid color made it immediately attractive to bartenders seeking visual novelty, and its popularity surged further in the 1960s alongside the broader tiki and tropical-cocktail craze. The punch version of the Blue Lagoon simply scales the same formula — vodka, blue curaçao, and lemonade, topped with lemon-lime soda for extra fizz at party scale — into a communal bowl, preserving the drink's defining electric blue appearance at a scale where the visual impact of a large vibrant blue bowl is even more dramatic than a single glass.