Bee’s Knees
The Bee’s Knees is a gin sour built on honey syrup instead of sugar, documented in the early 1920s and born of a practical problem. Prohibition gin was frequently terrible, and honey and lemon are both strongly flavoured enough to cover for a spirit that needed covering for. What makes it worth making now is the inversion. The combination chosen to hide a bad gin turns out to be exceptionally good at showing off a good one, because honey and gin occupy overlapping territory. Gin is defined by botanicals; honey is itself a botanical product, its character set by whatever the bees visited. The honey does not simply sweeten the gin, it extends it in a register the gin already occupies. Three ingredients, no egg, nothing complicated. Built with a proper London Dry and a properly made honey syrup it is brighter and more layered than the ingredient list has any right to suggest.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Lemon Peel
Ingredients
52.5ml
A gin with genuine juniper and a botanical profile that complements the honey rather than competing with it. The drink was designed to mask poor gin; use a good one and it does the opposite.
22.5ml
Squeezed immediately before use. It is the only acid in the glass and the only thing stopping the honey syrup making the drink cloying, and pre-squeezed juice reads flat and dull.
22.5ml
The half of the official recipe most modern versions drop. Orange rounds the lemon and gives the honey something softer to sit against, and without it the drink is a plainer gin sour.
2 teaspoons
Two parts honey to one part warm water. A light wildflower honey suits a subtler gin; a heather or otherwise darker one suits a robust juniper-forward bottle where the honey needs more presence.
Instructions
Squeeze the lemon and orange juice immediately before building the drink.
Chill a coupe in the freezer or with ice water.
Add the gin, lemon juice, orange juice and honey syrup to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into the chilled coupe.
Express a wide strip of lemon peel over the surface and rest it on the rim.
Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.
Expert Tip
Two teaspoons of honey syrup is less sugar than the drink's reputation suggests, because the official recipe splits the citrus between lemon and orange and the orange is doing some of the sweetening. Honey registers more slowly than refined sugar at the same volume, so it needs the room the orange gives it. That also tells you how to correct it. If the finished drink is too sweet, take the honey back before you touch the lemon. If it is too sharp, add honey rather than cutting the citrus. The honey is the adjusting screw in both directions. Make the syrup two parts honey to one part warm water. Neat honey seizes on contact with cold gin and ends up as a lump in the bottom of the shaker, which is the most common way this drink fails.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The Bee’s Knees appears in cocktail literature in the early 1920s, at the height of American Prohibition, when gin quality was determined by speed of production and a willingness to sell anything not immediately harmful.
Bathtub gin, the colloquial term for spirit made outside the licensed trade, was typically neutral grain spirit redistilled or simply flavoured with whatever botanicals were to hand. The result was harsh and medicinal and bore very little resemblance to the London Dry being made legally in Britain.
Honey and lemon were the practical answer. Both are strongly flavoured, and honey in particular has the sweetness and aromatic complexity to cover rough edges. Whether one bartender invented it or several arrived at it independently is not established.
Why Honey and Gin Suit Each Other
This is the part that turns a workaround into a good drink.
Gin is defined by its botanicals: juniper first, then usually coriander, angelica, citrus peel and whatever else the distillery favours. Honey is itself a botanical product, and its character is determined entirely by the flowers the bees visited.
The two occupy overlapping aromatic territory, which no other pairing of honey and a base spirit quite manages. Against bourbon in a Gold Rush the honey works as a contrast; against gin it works as an extension. It deepens what the gin is already doing rather than sitting beside it, and the coherence feels inevitable rather than constructed.
Choosing the Honey
The jar changes the drink more than most people expect, and the choice is worth making against the specific gin rather than as a fixed preference.
A light, floral wildflower or acacia honey suits a gin whose botanicals are subtle: it extends without overwhelming. A heather, chestnut or otherwise assertive honey suits a robust, juniper-forward bottle where a delicate honey would simply disappear underneath.
Match them badly and the drink is still pleasant. Match them well and it is noticeably better, which is an unusually large return on a decision most recipes do not mention at all.
The Prohibition Irony
The name is 1920s slang: the bee's knees meant the best of something. Naming a drink built to compensate for bad spirit after an expression meaning the very best is either deliberate irony or a period joke that has outlived its context.
The era produced a number of drinks that survived for the same reason. Strong flavour combinations designed to mask poor ingredients turn out to be equally suited to showcasing good ones, which is why the Last Word, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 and this one all came back with the revival. They were built under constraints that no longer exist, and they benefit from the constraints being gone.
How to Serve It
Shaken hard and double strained into a chilled coupe, with lemon peel expressed over the surface and rested on the rim. No ice in the glass and no other garnish.
It is a clean, precise drink and it should look like one. Worth pouring for people who think they dislike gin sours, because the honey changes it enough to surprise them.
The Spirit
GinA flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Bee’s Knees?
A Prohibition-era gin sour built on honey syrup rather than sugar syrup: London Dry gin, fresh lemon juice and honey syrup, shaken and served up in a chilled coupe. It was documented in the early 1920s.
How does it differ from a Gold Rush?
The same honey-for-sugar swap on a different spirit. A Gold Rush uses bourbon, where the honey works as a contrast. Here it works as an extension, because gin's botanicals and honey's floral character overlap. Same idea, different result.
Which honey should I use?
Match it to the gin. A light, floral wildflower honey suits a subtler London Dry; a heather or otherwise assertive honey suits a robust juniper-forward bottle where a delicate one would disappear underneath it. Choose against the bottle rather than by habit.
Why is there so much honey syrup?
Because honey's sweetness registers more slowly than refined sugar's at the same volume, so the lemon needs more support to balance. If it comes out too sweet, reduce the honey rather than adding lemon. It is the adjusting screw in both directions.
Master the Techniques
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Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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