Honey in cold and alcoholic drinks
Every failure with honey in a cold drink has the same cause. Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution at roughly eighty per cent sugar, and it will not disperse into anything cold. Make a syrup first and the entire category opens up.
The principle
Honey does not dissolve cold. Cut it with an equal weight of warm water into a syrup, and it behaves like any other sweetener — including in the shaker.
Why this works the way it does
A three-to-one or one-to-one honey syrup, made by stirring honey into warm water and cooling it, is the single technique that makes honey usable in cold drinks. It keeps for a couple of weeks refrigerated, pours accurately, and dissolves instantly. Without it, honey in an iced drink is a lump at the bottom of the glass and a lesson learned.
Spirits are the interesting half of this. Whisky and honey is a real pairing rather than a hot-toddy cliché: a peated whisky against a heather or a honeydew honey is smoke against smoke and malt against malt, and the two hold each other up. Rum takes molasses-heavy honeys for the same reason. Gin, being botanical, takes the herbal Mediterranean honeys.
Acid is what stops a honey drink being cloying. Lemon, lime and vinegar-based shrubs all give the sugar something to push against, and the hot-water-honey-lemon standby is a genuinely well-constructed drink rather than folklore — although its reputation as a remedy rests on the honey soothing a throat rather than on anything the lemon contributes.
One caution worth stating plainly. Honey and alcohol together are the base of mead, which is fermentation rather than mixing, and a honey syrup left at room temperature will eventually ferment on its own — honey carries osmotolerant yeasts that wake up as soon as it is diluted. Refrigerate it.
Pairings in this group
Guides behind these pairings
- How honey pairing actually worksFour mechanisms decide nearly every honey pairing, and none of them is a matter of taste. Learn them and you can pair a honey with a food this site has never heard of.
- Honey and teaTea is where most of the world's honey gets eaten and where most of it is wasted. Two mechanisms — heat and tannin — explain almost every disappointment.
- Honey in coffeeHarder than tea, and for a reason worth understanding: coffee already occupies the caramel register a mid-amber honey would bring.
- Honey and chocolateCocoa percentage decides everything. Above seventy per cent the honey has bitterness to answer; below forty it has sugar and dairy to cut through, which is the opposite job.
- Honey and cheeseThe pairing with the deepest tradition and the widest gap between doing it well and doing it at all. Salt, fat and acid are what the honey is answering, and each wants a different answer.
- Honey on bread and at breakfastThe one place where a honey's physical behaviour outranks its flavour. A honey that runs off the toast has failed regardless of how good it is.
Other pairing groups
Tools for choosing
- Pairing finder
I am eating this — which honey goes with it?
- Flavour selector
I like this taste — which honeys have it?
- Honey finder
Which honey should I buy for what I actually want to do with it?
- Honey substitute calculator
How much honey do I use instead of sugar, and what else has to change?