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 in 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 produced by Bols of Amsterdam using the dried peel of the laraha citrus fruit from the island of Curaçao and colored with natural blue dye from the indigo plant, transformed a simple vodka-citrus drink into something that looked like no other cocktail. Bols had introduced blue curaçao to the commercial market in 1948, and its vivid color made it immediately attractive to bartenders seeking visual novelty. The punch version of the Blue Lagoon simply scales the same formula — vodka, blue curaçao, lemonade — into a communal bowl, preserving the drink's defining electric blue appearance at a party scale where the visual impact of a large vibrant blue bowl is even more dramatic than a single glass.