Bee Sting Cocktail: A Tequila Variation on the Classic Bee’s Knees

Bee Sting Cocktail

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Tequila and Honey Sour with Jalapeño Sting

A Bee Sting cocktail is a variation on the classic Bee’s Knees cocktails, and it’s made with tequila instead of gin. It’s sweet and easy to drink, perfect for those summer days when you want something light but still refreshing!

Bee Sting Drink

1. Introduction
2. Tequila cocktail based on the Bee’s Knees
3. Sour Cocktail – made with lemon and honey syrup
4. Substitute Tequila for gin

Are You Looking for a Spicy Take on a Tequila Sour?

Do you want to find out what happens when you replace gin with tequila in a Bee’s Knees? And make it a little spicy?

You get this drink that is complex – sour – like a margarita, but richer with a fun little hit of spice.

Jump to the recipe below and try it for yourself.

Cocktail Story – 

The Bee’s Knees is a prohibition era cocktail created by Frank Meier, the first head bartender at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. It is a gin based sour sweetened with honey.

This simple combination of spirit, honey and lemon has a fairly standard variation for pretty much every base spirit. Eventually, we’ll get them all posted here. For now, this is the tequila version of the Bee’s Knees.

We should also note; There are several contenders vying for the title of the Bee Sting. It’s hard to say if any one of them has any more credibility that any other recipe. I like this one, because it is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Bee’s Knees.

This recipe also makes more sense to me than pairing Ancho Reyes and Gin. After all, if you’re going to make a split base drink tequila is just a more natural fit with Ancho Reyes. In fact, I had a bartender serve me almost exactly that one time. Shaken, up with an egg white foam. It was delicious.

How to Make this Drink – The Breakdown

This is a sour cocktail. That means you are going back to the old faithful the 2:1:1 ratio. That is two parts strong. In this case tequila. One part sweet. Here we are using honey syrup. And, finally, one part sour. That would be lemon juice.

Because this is a sour that means it contains citrus juice. So, we are going to get out the cocktail shaker and shake it up. When you strain it into a cocktail glass it is nice to use a fine strainer to get the pulp out, and any stray lemon seeds.

Lemon juice is the acid in this drink. As always, there is no substitute for fresh lemon juice. You should be able to get about 1 ounce of juice from a medium lemon.

Honey Syrup is the sweet component in this drink. Making this syrup is no more difficult than making a batch of rich simple syrup. Simply dissolve the honey in hot water. Let it cool and put it in a bottle to store away and you’re good to go.

The recipe calls for two parts honey and one part hot water which is why it reminds me of rich syrup. What you’re actually trying to do here is to thin honey down to make it easier to work with. You are also reducing the sweetness so it is more in line with a typical 50/50 simple syrup.

The brix, or sugar content, of honey is somewhere between 70-88. Simple syrup is a little less than fifty. So the objective here it to decrease the density of the syrup and bring the sweetness more in line with simple syrup. Once you have done this you can use this anywhere you use simple syrup and want a little more of the complex flavor that honey can provide.

Yucatan Honey – If you can find Yucatan or Melipona honey it’s fun to try in this cocktail. As they like to say in the wine world, ‘what grows together, goes together’.

Jalapeno – This recipe calls for a jalapeño wheel muddled in to give the drink a little heat. Jalapeño is a fantastic pairing with tequila. A jalapeño slice is also a great garnish for the Bee Sting cocktail.

Best Tequila for this Drink

1. Reposado – The light oak, cinnamon and baking spice notes that are often found in reposado tequilas work particularly well in this cocktail.
2. Mezcal – If you like the complexity that a little smoke flavor adds to a drink mezcal could be an interesting choice.

Recipe

1. 2 ounces Reposado Tequila
2. 1 ounce honey syrup
3. 1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
4. Jalapeno

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