Why Spirits Brands Are Embracing Honey

Honey is everywhere — and not just in food. Increasingly, you’ll find it in gins, rums, bourbons, brandies, beers and even — the horror — blended with whisk(e)y.

This idea is not exactly new. When Wild Turkey’s founder Jimmy Russell decided to add honey to his 101 Bourbon in 1976, that was considered a novelty. Dewar’s launched its Highland Honey back in 2012, around the same time as Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam released their own honey whiskey expressions. Today, several craft whiskey brands are utilizing honey infusions and ex-honey barrels in the maturation process (see: Amber & Opal, Five Springs, Garrison Brothers, Up North, Blue Note, Broken Barrel and many more).

Honey may become even bigger outside of whiskey. Earlier this year Absolut launched its infused Absolut Hunni vodka, and Indiana’s Cardinal Spirits announced its Honey Schnapps. Indeed, if you’re looking for a drink, honey can be hard to avoid.

“Honey is a ubiquitous flavor that everyone understands, even if it’s actually quite a polarizing ingredient. You tend to either really like it or not,” says Tom Warner, founder of the U.K.-based Warner’s Distillery, makers of a Honeybee Gin launching in the U.S. later this year. “But it’s certainly versatile — it goes especially well with dark spirits, but then works as a botanical in gin. And if you see ‘honey’ on a bottle label you can’t always assume that will mean the drink will be sweet. Honey can bring floral notes, too.”

Honey is also perceived as natural — it contains vitamins, amino acids and proteins, and has antioxidant properties which, ironically, can reduce the damage caused by alcohol — giving it appeal to more health-conscious drinkers. And certainly the use of raw honey in booze — as opposed to honey-flavored sugar syrup, or low-grade honey cut with syrup or the kind of “honey” in your cereal — is an improvement on the use of artificial sweeteners or even industrially produced cane sugar. “If you see ‘honey-flavor’ on the bottle, that’s a big indicator there’s probably fuck-all actual honey in it,” warns Warner.

“It is a point of difference. Whenever we have tastings, a lot of people go for the honey gin because it’s something they haven’t heard of,” says Mike Scargill, the co-founder of Prestwich Gin, maker of a honey gin akin to Old Tom, a style of sweet gin dating back to the 18th century. Scargill, a gin classicist, says honey is about the only extra ingredient he’s prepared to add.

There’s an environmental argument for honey’s growing popularity too, he suggests. With bee populations in decline, some distillers are keen to play some small part in finding other uses for honey and encouraging bee-keeping on a bigger scale. Or at least that’s what they’re claiming.

But there’s more afoot to this wide embrace of the sticky stuff. And that’s because honey isn’t just honey: because honey is a product of the plants pollinated, and those plants are shaped by the land in which they grow, honey might be said to have a terroir, like wine, with each honey offering its own distinct flavor and aroma profile. “There’s a seasonality with raw honey,” says Warner. “Honey from early in the year will take on the snowdrops, later in the year the rapeseed and sunflowers, and by this time of year possibly heather and ivy.”

That terroir is another reason consumers are starting to see honey as its own thing and not just as an upscale sugar alternative. It’s why more distillers have their own hives — the U.K.-based Hive Mind, for example, operates 180 hives to make its Smoked Honey Porter — or consistently go the same source. The Vermont-based Caledonia Spirits buys some 70,000 pounds of raw honey from beekeepers in a 250-mile radius for its Barr Hill gin and vodka.

Broadly, darker and stronger honey may work best with dark spirits and lighter, more delicate honey with clear spirits, but there’s also scope for distillers to deliberately mess with this formula. A wildflower honey might work well with a herbaceous gin, while a grassier, clover-based honey could do well in a rye whisky. But the more premium honey-tinged drinks might be expected to use a single variety of honey, sourced from a single crop and patch of land.

Doing so also chimes well with the whole farm-to-table craft movement. “We speak about the soil-to-glass movement: everyone is that much more interested in the origin of the ingredients in their spirits,” says Joyce Nethery, co-founder of the Kentucky-based Jeptha Creed distillery, which makes a honey vodka. “Sure, some people don’t like the funky sediment at the bottom of the bottle, but others actually look for that.”

The craft image and terroir angle have helped honey drinks escape some of the accusations of tackiness that followed other spirits with added flavors. And industry folks see it as more than a flash in the pan.

“Honey has been tried in almost every kind of drink now and it looks like it’s here to stay,” says Nethery. Interestingly, she sees a potential counter-shift towards spirits with more savory flavors. After all, you eventually need something to cut through all that sweetness.