honey liqueurs have roots that stretch back at least to Cleopatra’s time, when the Hellenistic Greeks would infuse wine with spices and sweeten it with honey; while this isn’t quite what we call a liqueur today, it shows the use of honey in a liqueur-style drink. Honey itself was the staple sweetener for drinks in most of the world until the 1500s brought an explosion in sugar-cane cultivation and processing.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in Europe we see the amalgamation of distilled spirit, spices from ever-expanding trade routes, and honey to form medicinal drams, touted as remedies for everything from gout to the common cold. At first, the honey was added before distillation, which meant that it would contribute little more than its aroma to the final distillate. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, as recreational, or at least prophylactic, uses of distilled spirits outstripped purely therapeutic ones, one finds honey being used to sweeten the end product, as in the recipe recorded by Caterina Sforza in around 1500, where aqua vitae is infused with gentian and tormentil (both quite bitter) and two other botanicals and then sweetened with clarified honey. The result can be considered the ancestor of the modern Italian amaro. See aqua vitae and aperitif and digestive.
Even though the 1600s saw it largely displaced by the cheaper and more neutral-flavored cane sugar, honey would continue to be used to flavor some herbal liqueurs. In fact, a number of perennial favorites rely on honey for their sweetness, including yellow Chartreuse, Bénédictine, Drambuie, and Irish Mist. See Bénédictine and Chartreuse.
In those formulae, the honey takes a backseat to the herbs. There is, however, another approach to using honey in liqueurs, one that treats it as a flavoring ingredient in its own right. We see this in Hieronymus Brunschwig’s pioneering 1500 book on distillation, where he details a “honey water” made from fermented and distilled honey. Honey-flavored liqueurs would go on to become a specialty of the southern Baltic region, with the East Prussian Bärenfäng (“bear trap,” so called after the practice of trapping bears with honey mixed with grain spirit; today this is marketed internationally as Bärenjäger) and the Polish and Lithuanian krupnik, a mix of vodka with locally sourced herbs and spices and clover honey. (Lithuanian legend holds that the drink dates to the early fourteenth century, when one of the Grand Duke Gediminas’s knights used it to cure him of a deathly bout with the flu.) Served hot, krupnik is a wintertime favorite that was traditionally made by grandparents at Christmastime to be enjoyed at end of year celebrations. Commercially available examples are mostly aimed at the domestic markets in Poland and Lithuania, but they are also sometimes exported.
Another stronghold of honey-flavored liqueurs is the United States, beginning with “peach and honey,” a mixture—either made to order or pre-bottled—of aged peach brandy and honey that was popular until the end of the nineteenth century. See peach brandy. In 1975, Jimmy Russell of the Wild Turkey distillery revived the practice, after a fashion, with Wild Turkey Liqueur, bourbon-based and honey flavored. While the product was not a runaway success, it paved the way for a plethora of honey-bourbon liqueurs in the 2000s, most of them quite successful.
Andreae, Illa. Alle schnäpse dieser welt. Zurich: Transitbooks AG, 1973.Brunschwig, Hieronymus. The vertuose boke of distyllacyon. Translated by Laurence Andrew. London: 1527.
Leinböck, Johann Georg. Der aechte Waidmann: Neustes handbuch für jäger und jagdfreunde, vol. 2. Vienna: 1831.
Pasolini, Pier Desiderio. Caterina Sforza, vol. 3. Rome: Loescher, 1893.
By: Shawn Soole and David Wondrich