Cocktails with Honey syrup
Honey syrup is honey thinned with hot water so it will mix into a cold drink, as raw honey will not.
Substitutes for Honey syrup
Honey syrup is denser than a plain one — about 60% sugar by weight against 50% — so plain syrup in its place goes in at about a fifth more volume, and gets tasted. The floral side is the part a neutral sweetener cannot bring back, and in a Bee’s Knees or a Penicillin that is what the recipe was after.
Often confused with
Raw honey
The undiluted original. A recipe asking for honey syrup means the thinned version: raw honey at the same volume oversweetens and still sinks to the bottom of a cold drink.
Agave nectar
Let down the same way it pours and mixes just as well, and it is neutral where honey is floral; the drink keeps its weight and loses the thing the recipe came for.
Storage
Dilution is what puts honey at risk: the water that makes it pour also makes it perishable. Chilled, the syrup keeps a few weeks, far short of the honey it came from, and it goes cloudy before it turns.
