Liquid Marijuana: The Long Drink and the Shot, Side by Side
We get asked about this one more than almost anything else on the site, and the confusion is always the same: people find a shot recipe and a tall-drink recipe with identical ingredient lists and assume one of them is wrong.
Neither is wrong. It’s one flavor idea served two ways, and the proportions are what separate them.
The tall version
Liquid Marijuana — spiced rum, coconut rum, melon liqueur, blue curaçao, pineapple juice, sweet and sour.
We build ours at ½ oz each of the four bottles, then 2 oz pineapple juice and 1 oz sweet and sour, shaken hard and poured over crushed ice in a hurricane glass. That lands somewhere around 12% ABV in the finished glass, which is roughly a strong glass of wine — sweet enough that you’ll want it very cold.
The name comes from the color, and the color comes from a specific pairing: melon liqueur is a yellow-green, blue curaçao is a blue, and pineapple juice is a cloudy pale gold. Together they make a hazy jade rather than the flat mint green people expect. If yours came out turquoise, you were heavy-handed with the blue.
The shot
Liquid Marijuana Shot — the same six, tightened up.
Equal parts of the four spirits, then a splash of pineapple and a smaller splash of sweet and sour — just enough to soften the edges. Shake and strain into two shot glasses. No ice in the glass.
The tall drink is a sipper you nurse through a warm afternoon. The shot is the same flavors at nearly double the concentration, which is a genuinely different experience, and it is the version that gets ordered at bars.
When you’re missing a bottle
Four spirits is a lot to ask of a home shelf, so here is what actually survives a substitution and what doesn’t.
The melon liqueur is load-bearing. It carries both the color and the honeydew note the drink is named for, and nothing else in a normal home bar does that job. If you don’t have it, make something else — our melon liqueur shooters are a better use of an evening than a Liquid Marijuana without it.
The blue curaçao is mostly color, and a small one at that. Skip it and you get a paler yellow-green drink that tastes about 95% the same. That’s the cheapest corner to cut.
The coconut rum and the spiced rum can collapse into each other in a pinch — use 1 oz of whichever you have rather than ½ oz of each. You lose a little complexity and gain a drink you can actually make tonight.
Sweet and sour is the one people improvise worst. Equal parts fresh lemon juice and simple syrup gets you there in a minute, and it’s a meaningful upgrade over the bottled stuff. We keep a jar of it going most weeks; if you want the reasoning and the ratios, we wrote them up in our sweet and sour mix guide.
Making a pitcher
Multiply everything by six, leave out the ice, and refrigerate for at least two hours before anyone arrives. Add the ice to individual glasses rather than the pitcher — pineapple juice dilutes into something thin and sad if it sits on melting ice for an hour.
Half a bottle of coconut rum and no plan for the rest? Type what you’ve got in and work backward from the shelf you actually own.
Last modified on September 6, 2026
