Hooray, you made it to this day! We’re going to show you how to impress your friends at the next virtual happy hour. And we have a kid-friendly version! 

Butterfly Pea Flowers

The star of today’s post are butterfly pea flowers. The flowers come from a plant grown in Southeast Asia. It’s been used there for centuries to brew tea. The “magic” component of the flowers is that they contain a pigment that changes color depending upon the pH of a liquid. When first brewed in a neutral or slightly basic environment, the liquid will be blue, but if you increase the acidity of the liquid, its color will change to a pink or purplish color!

These flowers are commonly brewed with lemongrass to create a tea (ahem, tisane) in Asia. As with the drinks below, you could add a squeeze of lemon juice to bring on the color-changing magic. The flavor of the brewed flowers is a touch earthy, reminding me of a green tea, but this one is caffeine free, but I didn’t find that much of that flavor transferred to the drinks we made.

Since a lot of drinks blend an acid with neutral spirits, they’re a natural medium for taking advantage of butterfly pea’s color-changing properties. I used a couple of different methods to create these color-changing drinks, the first is with magic ice cubes, the second is with magic alcohol. And don’t forget, thrown in here is a kid-friendly version, but I think you’ll agree even that one is fun for any age!

MAGIC ICE CUBES

Are you ready for this? It’s going to be so easy.

Brew a little pot of tea with the flowers. I think I used about a 8-10 flowers/1.5 cups of water. It doesn’t take long for the water to take on that nice blue color. Once you have that, pour it into ice cube molds and freeze.

• I used this exact brand of butterfly pea flowers.
• For these drinks I used these popsicle molds without putting the sticks in to create cute small round cubes. I also used gem molds for a classier look.
• I haven’t tried it, but I think a large ice cube, commonly use for whisky, would be awesome for a slower melt.

Make a cocktail that contains an acidic ingredient, I made a simple G&T below. Add the ice cubes and watch your drink slowly turn a beautiful lavender color as the ice melts and its pigment changes from blue to purple.

Kid-Friendly Version

The kid-friendly version of a magic ice cube drink is so easy: use lemonade!

I wanted to create an ombre look with these drinks. To achieve the, I crushed up a few plain ice cubes and put them at the bottom of the glass and topped those with some crushed magic ice.

When I poured in the lemonade, it flows over the blue ice picking up some of that pretty purple color at the bottom of the glass, but you can see that the blue ice at the top of the glass creates the color gradient.

If you want to do the same, be sure to use a clear glass so that your little teetotalers can see the magic.

Color-changing Spirits

Another simple, but still magical, way to use the butterfly pea flowers, is to infuse a clear alcohol.

I had great success with both gin and vodka. I’ve heard that you could also use a clear tequila. Once you’re infusing liquids beyond water, the only factor to consider is whether the liquids are acidic. If so, the infused liquid won’t have its color-changing properties.

To infuse an alcohol, I used a ratio of about 8-10 flowers/cup of alcohol. I let the infusion sit overnight before straining. The result was a dark blue liquid, so much so that for some drinks I used half infused alcohol and half clear alcohol. So I think I could have used fewer flowers and still achieved the same color-changing effect. 

Once you have your infused alcohol, use it to make any drink that contains an acid! Gin and tonics are on point. In these photos I made an awesome vodka|lemon|rosemary|fizz.

If serving these up to friends, which you totally should in a few months, then make up the whole drink minus the alcohol and let them pour that in at the table so that they can experience to full color-changing magic.

And if you’re looking for a quarantine project, infusing a few bottles of alcohol with the flowers and giving them as gifts is a good move.

!poof!