Your Favorite Spirits Are Changing Colors

Gins, tequilas and vodkas are showcasing brand-new hues, thanks to one common ingredient.

What's the ingredient?

It's butterfly pea flower tea used in the form of teas or tinctures and comes from petals from a plant long used in Asia as an herbal tea. You might've seen it on Instagram and TikTok before — it can dreamily shift the hue of a drink from a deep blue to pink or light purple with the addition of acid (usually lemon or lime juice). It started taking off in bars around 2016 and became an FDA-approved natural food coloring agent in 2021.

Does it affect the taste of the drink?

Nope, but there are other benefits that come with directly infusing a spirit with the pea flower. We even have a few tips and tricks on how to make the most of these color-changing liquids at your home bar.

Which color-changing spirits should I try?

We've got you covered with recommendations, too.

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We're Men. Of Course We Don't Look Each Other in the Eye.

We're spending the month of April publishing a series of interviews, essays, advice columns and reported features about the male friendship crisis. In just the first week, you've read about recovering lost friendships, the impact of generational gaps between friendships and advice from two men who have been friends for half a century. Today we ask a new question: What can we learn from the male preference for side-by-side interaction?

It's a casual form of interconnectedness that we don't think much about: playing video games next to each other, sitting at a bar, grilling in the backyard, watching the game. The gendered singularity here isn’t that men have a habit of doing things next to each other — It’s that we might prefer it to the intensity of looking each other in the eye. Is this aversion to face-to-face interaction normal?