The bottle
Barr Hill gin, $39.99
The backstory
Some of you may be familiar with the expression, “You are the bee’s knees.” But what about the Bee’s Knees cocktail?
The classic Prohibition-era drink – a mix of gin, honey and lemon – is finding fans lately. Trendy bars have it on their menus. A popular booze-focused site ranks it 30the most popular cocktail, ahead of other trendsetters such as the Cosmopolitan and the Dark ‘n’ Stormy.
And now there’s even an entire week dedicated to celebrating the sip.
Credit Caledonia Spirits, a Vermont distillery whose roots date back to 2011, with the idea for Bee’s Knees Week, which started on September 22 and runs through October 1. That makes sense when you consider that Caledonia was started in part by Todd Hardie, a beekeeper and farmer who used raw honey in his small winery. He worked with Ryan Christiansen, who was in the homebrew business.
Their idea? To create a distillery that would celebrate the bees so important to our food systems. As Christiansen, who now owns the distillery, told MarketWatch: “They are essential for biodiversity and they produce one of the most unique and complex natural ingredients: raw honey.”
And sure enough, honey finds its way into one of Caledonia’s signature products, Barr Hill Gin. Specifically, the spirit is finished with locally sourced raw wildflower honey, which Christiansen says provides the perfect balance for juniper, the key botanical in gin. Christiansen added that 2,600 pounds of raw honey is used in each batch of Barr Hill.
This hive of gin making led to the creation of Bee’s Knees Week a few years ago. Christiansen said nearly 2,000 bars, restaurants and liquor stores participated in the effort to celebrate the cocktail last year.
What we think
I love a good classic London Dry gin, but Barr Hill is in the style of what is called a New American gin – a style that tends to be more eclectic. In the case of Barr Hill, it is the addition of honey that is so fascinating and critical, resulting in a gin that is slightly sweet in a very attractive way. In short: it’s worth a try.
How to enjoy it
If there’s a cocktail tailor-made for Barr Hill Gin, it’s the honey-flavored Bee’s Knees. But you can experiment with the gin in other cocktails – and it works well on its own, a bit like a martini with a hint of honey.