The Bee's Knees Cocktail Recipe with Raw Honey

by Maggie Frank
Your go-to sweetener in your cocktails should be honey.

Imagine it’s late at night and you want to pull out your bartending skills for some guests. You start mixing a drink up and then you remember you used the last of your simple syrup in your morning coffee. What do you do?

Shaking an iced beverage with regular granulated sugar screams amateur.

Then it comes to you, the sweet and smooth cabinet staple, honey. Always liquid and ready to be stirred into your favorite drinks. Plus, you get the opportunity to lean into the beautiful flavors honey can add.

Keep reading to learn how to make a Bee’s Knees cocktail. Something easy to keep in your back pocket for all those special moments.

The Bee’s Knees is a hundred-year-old recipe and an absolute classic. As the name suggests, it features sweet honey, along with lemon and gin. It is chilled and served straight up. This couldn't get easier.

Featured Ingredients

The Honey

What you might not know about honey is the large variety of flavors and benefits it can have. In this recipe, I suggest using Black Locust. The black locust plant offers sweet vanilla notes. As well as some more complex notes that could be reminiscent of fruits and jasmine.

We will be pairing this honey with gin. Made of juniper berries, gin has similar notes and will be a perfect pair with this honey.

The Gin

The bee’s knees is a lighter cocktail. For this kind of gin-based drink, I love to pull out the Botanist Islay Dry Gin. It’s light and crisp. This gin is made of juniper berries, along with seeds and barks from Scotland. It’s delicate in the front of your mouth and warms to the back. The perfect accompaniment to rich honey.

Lemon

Using freshly squeezed lemon juice is so important. The taste will be crisp and while juicing, you’ll also be spraying the essential oils out and into your drink. To further embrace the citrusy aroma. Before you squeeze the lemon make sure to take a paring knife to cut off a bit of the peel to make a garnish.

White Pepper

What to throw this cocktail over the top and surprise your guests? Add a single crack of white pepper over the top of your drink. White pepper is a little milder than black pepper but all you need is a small amount to add a lot of punch and flavor. This will pull out the spice in the gin and add that wow factor. Don't use a pre-cracked pepper. It may be too fine and might travel right up your nose as you drink!

Tools

Cocktail Shaker

A mental shaker is so important to make this drink properly. Shaking the drink will chill and homologize the ingredients but an element of shaken drinks that I love are the tiny ice shaving that breaks off into the drink and creates a little pleasant texture for the final product. It is a little hard to describe but once you’ve had a properly shaken drink, it's so hard to go back.

Jigger

This is the best way to create consistently accurate drinks time after time. This tool comes in different shapes and sizes but anyone will work.

The Bee’s Knees

Servings: one 4oz drink

Ingredients

2 oz gin
1 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
½ oz Black Locust honey
Lemon peel garnish
Fresh cracked white pepper, optional

Directions

Chill your drinking glass by either placing it in the freezer while you mix the drink or by filling it to the brim with ice cold water. Set aside.

To ensure your honey mixes into the drink well and doesn’t freeze to the ice in your shaker we will mix the drink, then shake it. So, In the glass of your shaker measure in the gin, the freshly squeezed lemon juice, and the honey. Put on the lid and give it a good shake.

Remove the lid and add a cup or two of ice. Replace the lid and shake again.

Pour the ice water out of your drinking glass, or remove it from the freezer. Pour in your cocktail and add a nice lemon peel garnish.

Optional: crack a very small amount of white pepper over the top of the drink.

Enjoy!