What Do Prohibition, Paris, and the Titanic Have in Common? This Timeless, Honey-Lemon Cocktail

The Bee’s Knees is one of the most well-known riffs on the classic Gin Sour, consisting of gin, honey, and lemon juice. The cocktail dates to the 1920s, and is often viewed as a product of the United States’ Prohibition era, though the drink’s origins are actually rooted in Western Europe.

Though stories sometimes seek to credit the Bee’s Knees to American bartenders covering up the taste of poor quality “bathtub” gin, most evidence points to its invention coming from Frank Meier, an Austrian-born bartender who began working at the Ritz in Paris in 1921. However, like many drinks of the era, hard evidence can be difficult to find as to its specific origins.

An April 1929 article published in the Brooklyn Times-Union, more recently unearthed by cocktail historian Jared Brown, mentions the cocktail by name while discussing the emerging trend of women-only bars in Paris, and sheds light on the cocktail’s provenance. This story credits the cocktail as an invention of Margaret Brown, an American philanthropist and socialite known as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown” after surviving the disaster on the RMS Titanic and urging her lifeboat crew to turn around to look for survivors (as famously portrayed by Kathy Bates in the 1997 film).

However, the 1929 book Cocktails de Paris, released around the same time, credits Meier with the recipe itself. Though hard to say how the drink came about, it’s believed by some that Meier may have created the drink for Brown, or that the drink simply became a favorite of the socialite around that time.

Why the Bee’s Knees works

At its heart, the Bee’s Knees is simply a Gin Sour where honey takes the place of sugar or simple syrup. 

Many historical recipes garble the proportions of the Bee’s Knees, some going so far to imply that it’s an equal parts drink. This is at odds with Meier’s published 1929 recipe, which hews to the classic sour template of two parts spirit mixed with half as much sweet and sour ingredients in equal balance, that mirrors more modern iterations.

Honey is a natural pairing with gin, as both can offer highly botanical and unique profiles. Honey also has a way of mellowing out some of the harsher aspects of gin cocktails, creating a rounder cocktail that tempers the sometimes too-tart acidity of other sours. The Bee’s Knees  is a simple three-part drink that’s easy to make, and due to the wide range of available gins and honeys, it offers a world of possibilities depending on the product you use. A juniper-forward gin can make the drink more earthy, herbal, or spiced, while a citrus-forward gin can lead to a brighter cocktail that emphasizes the lemon.