I love the taste of honey. I use it as sweetener for a lot of things, like smoothies. But it’s rare you see it in cocktails, since cocktails are usually cold, and honey doesn’t mix in with cold liquids so well.
But it turns out that you can get around that just by dissolving honey in hot water to make a syrup. Or just shaking really hard.
First, I tried a bourbon cocktail.
Gold Rush
1.5 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon boiling water
2 oz bourbon
1 oz lemon juice
The honey and lemon juice made a nice combination of sweet and sour, and with the bourbon it actually made a pretty good drink. Somehow the sweetness of the honey and the sourness of the lemon went well with the taste of bourbon.
Then, I happened upon this cocktail, which I wanted to make since it had a cute name.
Honey Bee
2 oz dark rum
0.25 oz honey
0.5 oz lemon juice
This needed more honey, it tasted overwhelmingly of dark rum. The lemon juice was also too much compared to the small amount of honey, it was sour without being sweet enough.
Finally, the “Bee’s Knees,” which apparently isn’t just an idiom.
Bee’s Knees
1 oz gin
1 oz lemon juice
1.5 oz hot water
0.5 oz honey
The gin flavor wasn’t that overpowering in this drink, which I appreciated. I probably would’ve cut the lemon juice a bit, since this also had the 1:2 ratio of honey to lemon juice, which made it a bit too tart without enough sweetness, at least for me.
It seems that having a 3:4 ratio of honey to lemon juice results in a nice level of sweetness, at least for me.