Origin
The Blue Hawaiʻi belongs to the hotel bar of Waikīkī, the drinking room that grew up beside the visitor trade of Oʻahu in the twentieth century. It sits in the line of the mai tai and the tiki bar, where Victor Bergeron and Ernest Gantt (Donn Beach) made the rum drink a Pacific fashion. The hotels and the pineapple companies, among them the Hawaiian Pineapple Company founded by James Dole in 1901, taught visitors to call anything made with pineapple Hawaiian; Alana Kysar writes in Aloha Kitchen that the campaign succeeded and that its effects are still felt. The Blue Hawaiʻi is the product of that hotel table rather than of the home kitchen, a drink for the visitor built from pineapple, rum and a blue liqueur.
Description
The Blue Hawaiʻi is a shaken or blended long drink of light rum, blue curaçao, pineapple juice and a sweet coconut cream, sometimes lifted with a little sour mix. It is served over ice or frozen, in a tall glass, and garnished with a wedge of pineapple (Ananas comosus). The blue comes from the liqueur and nothing in the glass is native to the islands except the association: pineapple, like rum and coconut cream in this form, reached the table after contact. The colour is the point of the drink, a clear aquamarine that reads against the sea and the hotel pool, and the balance is sweet-sour with the rum kept low behind the fruit.
The Thread
Flavour Context
The drink is taken at the hotel bar in the afternoon and at sunset, beside salty and fried small plates such as fried shrimp, coconut shrimp, poke or a plate of chips. The salt and fat of those dishes answer the sweetness of the pineapple and liqueur, and the acid of the juice cuts through the cream. It is not a drink for a meal of rice and rich meats, where its sugar would run ahead of the food.