The National Honey Board’s team of beverage industry experts, with the help of alcohol industry insiders, named the 20 most influential alcoholic beverages with honey, including two products from Caledonia Spirits. The Honey20 list recognizes the made with honey distilled spirits, beers and meads that have changed consumer perceptions, influenced industries and challenged notions of honey’s true expression in an alcoholic beverage.
Caledonia Spirits’s Barr Hill Gin and Barr Hill Vodka ranked fifth and 10th, respectively.
Dogfish Head Brewery’s Midas Touch took home top honors for its ability to pay tribute to the origins of honey’s use in alcoholic beverages while at the same time pioneering “extreme” beers and beer/wine hybrids that are popular today.
“ Despite its ‘ancient ale’ positioning, Midas Touch helped usher in the concept of extreme beer recipes that renounced traditional German purity laws making any ingredients outside of water, barley and hops forbidden,” the Honey20 list stated. “Midas Touch showed that you can move the beer industry forward by looking back in time, when honey was the main fermentable sugar of all alcoholic beverages.”
Rounding out the top five, in addition to Caledonia Spirits’s Barr Hill Gin, were Shramm’s Mead’s Heart of Darkness, Genesee Brewing Company’s Honey Brown and Jack Daniel’s Distillery’s Tennessee Honey.
“This was such an exciting project to tackle because of the diversity of beverages represented,” Catherine Barry, The National Honey Board’s director of marketing says. “We had a beer that was released in the last year on the list, as well as a spirit that was first crafted more than 200 years ago!”
For a full list of the Honey20 click here.