One of the fun things about cocktails is the color. How do you achieve these colors? What's the best way to make that happen?
I'm a big fan of using natural things and flavors to color your drinks. It's rare that I use colored alcohol or food dye. I much prefer juices, fruits, candies, spices, ect. to color my beverages.
For Green and Blue drinks I have exceptions:
For Green I use - Green Creme de Menth or Midori - one is mint flavored and the other melon flavored so there is a green alcohol to color any variety of drink.
For Blue I use - Blue Curacao - This is an orange flavored, which may sound odd but it's used in many, many drinks so it makes it easy to color something blue.
These colors are hard to duplicate naturally, your options aside from these are leaves or grass muddled for green, and blue berries or black berries for blue. But both of these don't achieve the same kind of color as the colored alcohols mentioned above. Play with all of them to get the hue and flavor profile you're looking for.
For red the options are wider:
Sloe Gin: Colored and flavored by sloe berries and gives a deep purple red to drinks, more or less deepens the richness of the color. Can be used in fruity drinks or more sophistocated bitter drinks to add sweetness.
Grendadine: Most popular red colorant. Non-alcoholic mixer, it's the main ingredient in a shirley temple and the cherry flavor makes it easy to add. However it can be over powering and it is a bit of juvenile mixer in my personal opinion.
Cranberry juice (or pomegranite): My favorite red color. You can make any drink pink or red very easily with amount. The bitterness of cranberry juice makes it ideal to cut sweetness of soda or alcohols like rum. It can also compliment flavors in gins interestingly. A very versitile mixer and my favorite to use as a red or pink color.
Strawberries, cranberries, or raspberries: Muddled they can add refreshing flavor and color, cut they can be a thematic color garnish.
For purple combine a red with a blue. Common combination is cranberry and blue curacao for a purple cosmopolitan.
For yellow or brown, these are pretty easy:
Brown: Any whiskey or dark rum will color something a nice brown. For a sweet brown, use amaretto.
Yellow: Use ginger ale or bitters, such as angostura or peychaud. Use them sparingly with light liquors and they will act like pepper for your drink as well as give it a slight yellow hue. There are also the juice favorites like orange juice, lemonade, and sweet and sour (a very common mixer in many drinks, particularly long island ice teas or lemonade).
All of the alcohols I mentioned can be found at Applejack liquors or Tipsys, and mixers at your favorite grocery store. If you have questions or would like to request options for other color combinations leave me a comment!
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