What do the Ritz Hotel Paris, a survivor of the Titanic sinking and a citrus and honey-based gin cocktail have in common? It’s an interesting story…

Between January 1920 and December 1933 America was dry. Bone dry - theoretically… The only booze to be had was either prescribed by a doctor for purely medicinal purposes or illegal, bootlegged from Canada or Mexico, smuggled in from Ireland or Scotland or made in either a backwoods still or a bathtub!

Historically, the era was personified by the relaxing of fashions and social traditions. Going out and having a good time meant dancing the Charleston or Fox Trot rather than the more formal waltz. It was the confluence of the Jazz Age and the Art Deco movement – and enjoying all this fun were the flappers with their bare shoulders, head bands, shimmering beaded knee-length dresses and long cigarette holders. If anything was fantastic it was “swell”, “quite the cat’s pajamas” or “simply the bee’s knees, darling!”

So a variation on the classic Gin Sour (gin, lemon and sugar) developed by the head barman of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Frank Meier, was called the Bee’s Knees – and all that set it apart was the use of honey rather than sugar.

Popular myth has it that one of the reasons the Bee’s Knees and its honeyed element became so popular during Prohibition in America was because the flavour of the honey masked the less-than-ideal flavours of the illegal gin being used in the cocktail! And that popularity meant that America was credited as its origin.

Difford’s cocktail website notes that while some historians attribute the first ever publication of the drink’s recipe to a book by David Embury, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, published in 1948, the Bee’s Knees had already been credited to Meier in 1929.

Cocktail historian Jared Brown traced an article published in Brooklyn, New York, in April 1929 which reported on the trend of women’s-only bars being popular in Paris at the time. The report stated: “The Bee’s Knees is an invention of Mrs JJ Brown of Denver and Paris, widow of the famous miner, and is a rather sweet combination, including honey and lemon.”

Well, Mrs Margaret Brown was an American socialite and philanthropist who went by the nickname of “the unsinkable Molly Brown” because she’d survived the Titanic iceberg disaster in December 1912. Mrs Brown lived a colourful life which was ultimately detailed in the 1960 Broadway musical of the same name – that was then made into a movie in 1964.

The American origin of the Bee’s Knees was thus disputed and discredited since it appeared in the French 1929 publication Cocktails de Paris where its creation was attributed to Frank Meier, of the Hotel Ritz Paris. So both the newspaper article and the book have Paris as its point of origin. Difford’s speculated that perhaps Meier made the cocktail for Molly Brown as she was “bound to have been a patron of the The Ritz Paris” during that period.