Bees Knees

Gin, fresh lemon, and honey — 1920s slang for the best available, honey once masking bathtub gin's harshness and now recognized as genuinely elevating the cocktail.

The Bee's Knees is a Prohibition-era cocktail that combined gin with fresh lemon juice and honey syrup in a formula that was simultaneously practical and delicious. Its name derives from 1920s American slang in which bee's knees meant the best or most excellent thing available — a phrase constructed in the same spirit as the cat's meow, the cat's pajamas, and the elephant's eyebrows, all of which followed the same pattern of attributing superlative quality to an anatomically improbable animal part. The honey's practical role during Prohibition was to mask the harsh, fusel-oil-laden character of bathtub gin — illicitly produced spirits that bypassed the redistillation and botanical infusion steps of proper commercial gin, producing a harsh raw spirit that needed significant sweetening and acid to be palatable. But the combination also worked with quality gin once Prohibition ended: honey's floral aromatic complexity and its specific combination of fructose and sucrose produce a sweetness more interesting than simple syrup, and the Bee's Knees emerged from Prohibition's end as a genuinely excellent cocktail rather than a survival strategy. The drink's rehabilitation during the craft cocktail revival of the 2000s was helped by the simultaneous growth of artisan honey production in the United States, with varietal honeys including wildflower, buckwheat, lavender, and orange blossom each producing meaningfully different Bee's Knees expressions depending on the botanical source of the bees' forage.