Honeysuckle
The Honeysuckle is a daiquiri with honey syrup instead of sugar, and that single change does considerably more than sweeten it. Honey has floral weight and a waxy texture that plain syrup does not, so instead of simply balancing the lime it wraps around it. The drink comes out rounder and golden where a daiquiri is sharp and clear. The proportions are the daiquiri's own: sixty of rum, twenty-two of lime, twenty-two of honey syrup, shaken hard and served up. Nothing else changes and nothing else needs to. It is the least celebrated of the honey sours and arguably the most natural of them. The Bee’s Knees does the same thing to gin and the Gold Rush does it to bourbon, and both are better known. But rum and honey have been drunk together in the Caribbean for as long as there has been rum, and of the three this is the pairing that needed the least persuading.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Lime Wheel
Ingredients
60ml
A full daiquiri measure, and a clean one. Honey is floral and easily buried, so a heavy pot-still rum takes the drink over; a light Cuban style leaves room for the jar to be heard.
22.5ml
Squeezed to order. Honey rounds the acid rather than cancelling it, so a lime that has been sitting gives you a drink that is sweet and flat rather than sweet and bright.
22.5ml
Two parts honey to one part warm water. Neat honey seizes on contact with cold rum, and the variety you choose steers the drink more than the rum does.
Instructions
Add the white rum, lime juice and honey syrup to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with a lime wheel.
Expert Tip
Make honey syrup, never use honey neat. Two parts honey to one part warm water, stirred until it runs freely. Neat honey hits cold rum and seizes into a lump that no amount of shaking will recover, and you will find it at the bottom of the glass. The jar decides the drink. A light wildflower or acacia honey keeps it bright and spring-like; a dark chestnut or heather honey turns it heavy and autumnal, almost savoury. Both are good and they are barely the same drink, so pick deliberately rather than using whatever is open. Shake hard and double strain. Honey syrup is viscous and needs proper aeration to integrate, and an under-shaken one tastes sweet and separate rather than rounded.
Behind the Honeysuckle
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Rum and honey is one of the oldest pairings in Caribbean drinking, older than the cocktail as a category and older than any of the books. The Canchánchara, which is cane spirit, honey and lime built in the glass, is generally described as a nineteenth-century Cuban drink and may well be considerably older.
The Honeysuckle is the polished version of the same idea: the same three things, shaken, strained and served up in a coupe. It appears in mid-century bar books under this name without much ceremony, which is usually the sign of a drink that was already common enough not to need introducing.
What Honey Does That Sugar Does Not
Sugar syrup is a balancing agent and nothing else. It takes the edge off the citrus and disappears.
Honey does not disappear. It has floral aromatics of its own, a faint waxiness that gives the drink body, and enough acidity to interact with the lime rather than simply offsetting it. In a daiquiri the lime is the loudest thing in the glass; in a Honeysuckle it is wrapped, and what you notice first is the honey.
It is also a texture change. Honey syrup is more viscous than sugar syrup and carries that through the shake, so the drink sits heavier on the tongue. That is part of why the recipe wants a light rum: the weight is already coming from somewhere else.
Choosing the Honey
This is the decision that changes the drink, and most recipes do not mention it.
A light acacia or wildflower honey gives a bright, floral, almost spring-like glass where the lime stays forward. A dark honey, chestnut or heather or buckwheat, gives something heavier, more resinous and faintly savoury, where the lime becomes a supporting note. Both are correct. What is not correct is using whichever jar is open and then being surprised.
The Honey Sours
Three drinks do the same swap on three spirits. The Bee’s Knees puts honey against gin and lemon and is the Prohibition-era famous one. The Gold Rush puts it against bourbon and lemon and is the modern classic, built at Milk & Honey. The Honeysuckle puts it against rum and lime.
None of them is trying to do anything clever. Honey simply suits sour drinks, and the interesting thing is how differently the same jar behaves against three different spirits.
How to Serve It
Shaken hard for twelve seconds, double strained into a chilled coupe, lime wheel if you want one.
Cold is essential. Honey drinks turn cloying as they warm, and this one is at its best in the first five minutes. If you are making more than one, put the coupes in the freezer before you start rather than trying to work faster.
Make it at home
The Spirit
White RumWhite describes a filter rather than an age. A good deal of light rum spends time in oak and then has the colour taken back out with charcoal, which leaves the roundness that ageing gave it and none of the shade.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Honeysuckle cocktail?
Why does the honey have to be made into syrup?
Which honey should I use?
How does it relate to the Gold Rush and the Bee’s Knees?
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Gold Rush
The Gold Rush was invented at Milk and Honey, the Lower East Side bar that rewrote modern cocktail culture, when T.J. Siegal asked Sasha Petraske for a whiskey sour and got talked into honey instead of sugar. That was 2001, the drink went around the world with the bar’s alumni, and it is now as close to a canonical modern classic as the twenty-first century has produced: bourbon, lemon, honey, done. The honey is the entire intervention and it changes everything: floral weight where sugar is neutral, a waxy richness that rounds bourbon’s corners, and a golden colour that named the drink. Cut into syrup at two parts honey to one part water it integrates like sugar never quite does, and the drink lands somewhere between a whiskey sour and a warm afternoon. Its family tree runs in both directions: back to the Bee’s Knees, the Prohibition gin sour that proved honey and citrus belonged together, and sideways to the Penicillin, Milk and Honey’s other golden child, which is a Gold Rush that emigrated to Islay. Three ingredients, no technique beyond a hard shake, and no excuse for a bad one ever.
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.
Daiquiri
The Daiquiri is a sour in its most elemental form: white rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup, shaken and served up. Three ingredients, no bitters, no liqueur, nothing to hide behind. It takes its name from a mining district on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer, is credited with combining local white rum with lime and sugar around 1898. Whether Cox invented it or documented what Cuban workers had been drinking for years is not something the record can resolve. What is not disputed is that it was refined and popularised in Havana at El Floridita by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. The simplicity is the point and the problem at once. There is nothing in the construction to compensate for a poor rum, juice that was not squeezed fresh, or a syrup made carelessly. Every variable is fully exposed, which is why a properly balanced Daiquiri demonstrates more skill than a ten-ingredient tiki drink.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits