Springtime Refresher: Bee's Knees
Any cocktail that can be made with only three ingredients is a winner in my home.
For instance:
This simple gin sour is elevated by the simple substitution of honey syrup, a way of thinning out honey to make it mixable. This cocktail is a Prohibition-era classic, and is so easy to make that you’ll be wondering where it’s been your whole life.
As always, you're welcome to click this link to skip straight to the recipe, or you can read on. Don't worry, it's a short one this time.
The History
You may well be familiar with the phrase “the bee’s knees,” a slang phrase that dates back to the early 20th century. Simply put, the “bee’s knees” referred to something that was awesome, the best. I dunno, bee’s knees are small? So they’re rare and therefore valuable? I’ll be honest, I don’t have much, here.
Meanwhile, in Prohibition-era America, gin was apparently made in bathtubs? The point is, this was not exactly a high-quality product, and it often tasted pretty bad. It was the kind of thing that didn’t do well in a classic Martini, where you’re really trying to highlight the gin. Instead, you’d be using as many flavors as you could to mask the gin; enter, honey and lemon.
Now, obviously, since then, distillation processes have improved and the gin we have today can be really spectacular; that doesn’t mean we have to give up on the cocktail, though.
Never gonna give this up.
The Ingredients
This drink uses only three ingredients: gin, honey syrup, and lemon juice. Lemon juice really doesn’t deserve its own section, apart from saying that fresh-squeezed is (obviously) more delicious, but use what you have and what you’re comfortable with.
As for honey syrup, we’ve touched on this concept before in some other posts (like the Penicillin and the Skrewball posts), but the basic idea is that you’re thinning honey out with just enough water to be able to mix with it. In order to make this honey syrup, you’re going to mix hot water in a particular ratio with honey; a lot of bartenders go 1:1, hot water to honey, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Personally, I use quite flavorful honeys, and I want to taste them. You could use a 2:1 ratio, but I go even further with a 3:1 ratio. The thing to remember in this case is that your honey syrup is going to be quite a bit sweeter than a regular simple syrup, maybe even as far as a rich syrup. You’ll want to think about that generally as you mix cocktails, to ensure that they stay balanced.
Now, as for gin selection, you can use basically whatever you have on hand. Every gin has a slightly different flavor profile, but the basic premise of the cocktail would work with pretty much anything. My standard pour is always a London dry, because it tends to be really versatile in cocktails. Plymouth would be great too, and a lot of newer gins play with different botanicals. In particular, if you were to have a gin that was particularly floral, I think that could be quite nice here. I’d skip over gins that are spicy or sweetened at all here, I just don’t think that is going to make for a nice, balanced cocktail.
Okay, enough jibber-jabber. Let us mix!
To the bat-shaker!
The Recipe
2 oz gin
3/4 oz lemon juice
3/4 oz 1:1 honey syrup (reduce to 1/2 oz if using a higher ratio of honey)
Garnish (optional): Lemon peel
Chill cocktail glass.
In a shaker, combine all ingredients with plenty of ice. Shake until well-chilled, about 8-10 seconds.
Double-strain into chilled cocktail glass. Optionally, twist lemon peel over drink to release oils and garnish glass with it. Serve very cold.
Honey and lemon, good for what ails you.
That’s it! This drink is as simple as they come, and deceptively delicious. It’s tart, refreshing, and has that great rounded sweetness from honey. What’s not to love?
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