Cocktail recipe
Bee's Knees
A sunlit gin sour where honey softens lemon without dimming its sparkle.
Ingredients
- 60 ml (2 oz) London dry gin
- 25 ml (⅚ oz) fresh lemon juice
- 20 ml (⅔ oz) honey syrup (1:1 honey and warm water, cooled)
- Garnish: 1 thin lemon twist
Preparation
Combine gin, lemon and cooled honey syrup in a shaker. Shake hard with plenty of ice until the honey is fully integrated, then fine-strain into a chilled coupe. Express a thin lemon peel over the glass and discard or rest it lightly at the rim.
Glassware
Chilled coupe
History
For decades, the Bee's Knees was casually attributed to American Prohibition and the need to mask rough gin. Stronger period evidence points to Paris in 1929. A Brooklyn *Standard Union* report of 22 April 1929 credited American socialite Margaret 'Molly' Brown with a honey-and-lemon cocktail of this name; the 1929 French book *Cocktails de Paris* instead credited Frank Meier of the Ritz Bar. Meier subsequently included it among his own creations in *The Artistry of Mixing Drinks* (1936). The rival 1929 attributions leave the precise inventor unresolved, but make Paris a better-supported setting than the generic bootleg-gin legend.
Mixology View
Honey should add floral depth, not gluey sweetness. The disputed Brown–Meier attribution is exactly the kind of fascinating tension Mixology should preserve rather than simplify into a tidy myth.