Mention honey within the context of beverage alcohol, and mead will likely be the first drink to come to mind—yet honey has much more to offer beyond the fermentation stage.
Whether you infuse your spirits with it or distill with it, honey has a lot to offer. Among other potential strengths:
- It can contribute a more rounded and complex sweetness.
- Or it can provide a surprisingly not-that-sweet yet floral and earthy foundation.
- It can boost mouthfeel.
- It includes a storytelling-friendly connection to nature.
Across categories, distillers use honey in a variety of ways to craft unique, compelling spirits. Honey is familiar to virtually everyone—by including it, these liquors can engage consumers who often are already sweet on the stuff.
Yet there’s more to be discovered in each sip, depending on how you choose to use and express honey’s profile. Here are some specific tips from craft distillers who know it well.
Straight from the Source
One of the main reasons that distillers use honey is to showcase the flavors of their surroundings.
Honey’s profile changes based on the climate, soil, and flowers from which the bees are collecting nectar. Those plant sources are what distinguish the product—lavender honey, eucalyptus honey, wildflower honey, clover honey, and so on. Distillers tend to prefer raw honey over the processed stuff on store shelves. Pasteurized, pre-filtered honey includes fewer nutrients—possibly important if you’re fermenting it first—and, more importantly, less flavor.
In Deadwood, South Dakota, West River Whiskey is a grain-to-glass distillery that uses what’s grown on a sixth-generation farm. Owner Joel Ellis says that farm also has beehives, so “it was only natural to add a honey whiskey to our collection of . . . bourbons and whiskeys.” He uses raw honey for that whiskey to show off South Dakota agriculture; the beekeepers who take care of the farm’s hives also collect the honey.
In upstate New York, Denning’s Point Distillery opened in Beacon in 2014. Owner Susan Johnson was working on other spirits while waiting for their first bourbon to mature. She released a gin but wanted something more to highlight Hudson Valley’s “herbaceous botanicals and agricultural abundance.” After experimenting with different ingredients, she landed on honey as a foundation on which to build with more bitter roots and leaves. The team connected with local beekeeper Tom Steed of Steed’s Bees, and Denning’s Point still uses his wildflower honey to create Maid of the Meadow, a vodka perfectly balanced between the honey’s sweetness and the herbs’ bitterness.
Two Texas companies that showcase honey are Iron Goat Distillery in Fredericksburg and Queen Bee, a Houston-based brand.
Iron Goat owners Kerry and Preston Williams say they wanted to add another spirit to a lineup that already features agave spirits and rum—but they weren’t set up to mash from grain, so they turned to honey. The Williamses use a combination of wildflower and buckwheat honey from Fain’s Honey in Llano, Texas, to create Honey Spirit, which contains only honey, water, and yeast.
Catharine Faulconer and Kim Martin founded Queen Bee driven by an interest in spirits without grains, gluten, or nightshades because of their respective autoimmune condition and allergies. Not finding any existing options, they set out to make their own vodka from honey because it was something they could both consume—plus, it was a local product with environmental ties. They partner with the beekeepers/meadmakers at Thirsty Bee Meadery in Tomball, Texas, to source their honey.
“It’s very difficult to label honey as organic, since bees can travel up to five miles and it’s hard to police the flowers they pollinate,” Faulconer says. “However, [the honey we use] is raw and chemical-free.” She’s also acquired her own bees but says it will be a year or two before they’ve produced enough honey for Queen Bee’s needs.
Courtesy 12th Hawaii Distiller
In Kailua, Hawaii, the entire lineup at 12th Hawaii Distiller is distilled from honey. That includes their Hawaiian Vodka, Hawaiian Honeyshine, Hawaiian Kona Coffee Spirit, and Distiller’s Reserve. The coffee spirit is Honeyshine that’s had freshly roasted Kona coffee beans macerated in it for eight to 10 days. The Distiller’s Reserve, meanwhile, is a honey-based spirit meant to echo bourbon; it ages solera-style on deep-charred American oak barrel and pieces of Texas mesquite. Founder Dave Puckett says he sources Hawaiian honey exclusively from one supplier, so that he can be sure it’s pesticide-free.
Infusing with Honey
Honey is versatile as an infusion option. You can dial in your desired level of sweetness to any spirit by controlling what type, how much, and at what stage you add the honey.
West River’s Honey Whiskey is 12 percent raw honey.
“With our traditional 750-milliliter bottles, you have right at 90 milliliters of raw honey infused for each bottle,” Ellis says. They heat the honey to make it easier to work with, adding it with water to proof down a younger corn whiskey—from 120 proof out of the barrel to 48 proof for the final product.
Fermenting and distilling honey will consume most of its sweetness, which can be a plus for distillers who want honey’s flavor but not its sugar. When introduced via infusion, however, honey holds onto its sweetness, so it can serve to balance out bitterness or smooth the spirit’s finish. Ellis says their raw honey brings just the right amount of sweetness to the whiskey.
“Many larger distilleries use a honey liqueur for their flavoring, but there just isn’t anything that compares to real wildflower honey from the farm,” he says. “While you certainly get a whiskey taste, you definitely get a sweet finish, too.”
“We specifically went with honey for that rounder, fuller sweetness,” says Johnson of their Denning’s Point Maid of the Meadow, which she says drinks like an amaro. “It would have been easier and cheaper to go with sugar, but we wanted that round, full profile to balance the roots we’re using.”
The amount of honey they use at Denning’s Point is “not inconsequential,” Johnson says. “It’s one of the primary ingredients, so we’re using it at a fairly high ratio, which does have an impact on the retail price.” After proofing down the vodka, they blend the honey and herbal extractions into it simultaneously.
Both Ellis and Johnson say that the honey settles out a bit in their spirits—but also that consumers have proven tolerant of this, perhaps even viewing it positively because it signals that these are craft products with natural ingredients.
“We’ve never had a complaint in 11 years,” Johnson says. “We could filter it out, but then we’d lose some flavor. So, we just tell people to give the bottle a shake. I think the consumer is savvy enough to understand [that] totally clear translates to synthetic and manipulated in some way.”
Distilling with Honey
Rather than balancing and flavoring an existing spirit, honey can become that spirit and define it via distillation—as a sugar, it can be the base for spirits such as rum or vodka. In certain cases, distillers must label these products as “honey spirit” to abide by TTB guidelines and category definitions.
Honey also is gluten-free, which makes it an important base for Queen Bee. More generally, using honey as a base can provide rounded floral flavor and mouthfeel without much sweetness.
At 12th Hawaii, Puckett uses plenty of honey for his lineup. “For me to produce a 750-milliliter bottle of Honeyshine, I’ll use 750 milliliters of honey, one-to-one,” he says. “I have a 45-gallon still with a bubble-plate column, and I use two buckets, or 120 pounds, of honey per batch.”
The fermentation stage is something that Puckett says he’s had to master.
“When I first started, I used a packet of whiskey yeast, and it would take a long time to ferment,” he says. “So, I reached out to a yeast manufacturer who’d once had a distillery. They had advice on how to snip long sugar chains in honey to make them available for the yeast to eat. So, I use an enzyme.”
Honey creates the most ethanol and acid during fermentation, Puckett says, so he adds a pH buffer to “keep the yeast happy.” It normally takes six to seven days for a batch to ferment and be ready to distill.
Queen Bee’s Faulconer says honey takes longer to ferment than other sources because it’s antimicrobial and antibacterial. “A genetically modified corn may take about 24 to 48 hours to ferment and be ready for distillation,” she explains. “Honey may take a month.”
Fermentation can demand patience, but Iron Goat also takes a slower approach to the distillation stage. The Willamses do one 10-hour distillation to achieve a pure, smooth finish on their Honey Spirit.
Puckett, Faulconer, and the Williamses all emphasize the benefits of distilling from honey in flavor and mouthfeel. Iron Goat’s Honey Spirit, for example, has honey, floral, and creamy notes; a palate of earthiness and malt, florals, and hints of citrus; and a finish of honeycomb, citrus, and earthiness.
Puckett says customer feedback on 12th Hawaii’s honey spirits often compare them to something like agricole, with floral, grassy qualities.
Taking Honey One Step Further
There are more ways to use honey in spirits, from its flavor profile to its agricultural ties.
At Tamworth Distilling in New Hampshire, head distiller Matt Power makes Apiary Gin as a complex homage to local bees.
“It’s based on the stuff bees produce in their hive, a resinous building material called propolis,” he says. “It’s not usually used in food, so it’s not on the FDA’s list of recognized ingredients, but it has amazing aromas—bubblegum, sweetness, waxiness, resin, and florals.”
Because he couldn’t actually use propolis, Power set about building a recipe to translate those aromas into Apiary. He researched what kinds of plants bees use to make this resin, and he gathered those to reconstruct a propolis profile with more familiar, workable ingredients.
Apiary Gin gets much of its character from balsam poplar buds and pine rosin (aged pine sap). “Balsam brings this deep, royal spice matched with a rosy, floral note,” Power says. “The more resinous part is very bitter, and we needed something to make that less obvious, which is where honey comes in.”
Power grounds the gin in the spicy, floral depth and bitterness of the buds and rosin, balances it with the sweetness of red clover honey, and finishes with the top notes of botanicals.
The seven different ingredients Power uses need to be macerated, distilled, and filtered at different levels to achieve the intended intensity and balance. So, he infuses and distills each ingredient separately until he gets the flavors he wants from each one.
“Resins are heavy molecules and generally not easily distilled,” Power says. “They’re things we can detect in small amounts, so we don’t need large concentrations for big impacts.” He manipulates the bitterness of the balsam poplar with a rotary evaporator, distilling it in a vacuum to get all of the aroma off that he can. The leftover material is a “very bitter, resinous blob” that he blends back in at a certain proportion to have more control over the level of bitterness.
He then blends all of these individual ingredient distillates together. Once that blend is perfected, honey that’s been diluted into gin is added as a filtrate.
The result is spicy, bitter, floral, herbaceous, and rounded with a hint of sweetness; it makes for a striking exploration of bees’ role in agriculture.