Get Buzzed

Inside a converted walk-in cooler on Vancouver Island, Dave Brimacombe, founder of Wayward Distillery, spent his early distilling days doing something few would associate with spirit production: warming 640-pound drums of crystallized honey. Wayward Distillery is a honey-based operation that specializes in crafting premium spirits made entirely from fermented B.C. honey.

“We converted a walk-in fridge into a walk-in heater,” said Brimacombe. “We kept barrels of honey there for two weeks so that the heat would get into them slowly. If you cook a barrel of honey, you destroy a lot of its protein.” The goal was to preserve the integrity of the material because honey, as it turns out, is a deeply challenging and incredibly rewarding ingredient in craft distilling.

While grains, molasses and fruit have long been the standard for fermentation, some Canadian distillers are turning to honey for its natural complexity, regional character and consumer appeal. Working with honey isn’t easy. It’s expensive, temperamental and doesn’t always fit into existing spirit categories or regulatory frameworks. For the producers who are wildly passionate about this liquid gold, however, that’s exactly what makes it worth the effort.

A buzzworthy ingredient

With increasing consumer demand for sustainable, local products, honey spirits sweeten the deal. Honey is a naturally renewable resource and, when produced responsibly, the harvest supports healthy bee populations, which are critical pollinators for a wide variety of flowering crops and vegetables.

Unlike traditional agricultural crops, honey doesn’t require planting, irrigation or soil disturbance, making its environmental footprint remarkably low. This means that honey-based spirits not only deliver flavour but also align with values of ecological stewardship and biodiversity.

In B.C., where distillers must use 100 per cent local agricultural inputs, honey provides both a practical and ethical advantage for producers. “We work with honey because it’s a sustainable food source,” said Brimacombe. “Using all B.C. wheat, corn or fruit takes a lot of food out of our food web. Honey is a byproduct of food production.” The alignment with sustainability and provincial pride is echoed across the country.

At Alberta’s Burwood Distillery, honey became a core ingredient thanks to a founding partnership between Ivan Cilic, Jordan Ramey and Marko Cilic, a local beekeeper. What began as a practical decision – using excess honey to create spirits – grew into a commitment to celebrate Alberta’s agricultural heritage. “… we wanted to see what we could make with it,” said co-founder Ramey. “Other producers make mead, so why can’t [we], as a distillery, make a novel product featuring our local apiaries and craft something that’s unique in this part of the world?”

Chemically, honey is unlike other fermentable ingredients. Honey contains a mix of simple and complex sugars, acids, enzymes and trace phenolics, some of which break down during fermentation to create alcohol and aroma compounds, while others survive even the high heat of distillation, leading to notes of fruit, spice or floral sweetness in the final spirit. Honey-based spirits are often lighter, softer and more floral than their grain or molasses-based counterparts.

“Honey spirit gives you a light, delicate mouthfeel,” said Ramey. “It’s easy drinking, floral, fruity and it doesn’t have that big, oily mouthfeel you get from some cereal grains.” Wayward’s honey vodka, gin and rum alternative all retain that character, despite being triple-distilled and unflavoured.

“Honey tastes good all the way through, which means we start with a base that already has a really positive flavour profile in distillation,” said Brimacombe. “It’s got a nice viscosity, natural oils from fermentation and a softness that carries through.”

Sticky situations

If honey offers beautiful flavour and ethical sourcing, it demands repayment in logistics. For starters, it doesn’t pour. Wayward receives honey in 200-litre drums, each weighing more than 600 pounds. Its early days involved scooping 50-pound batches by hand using four-cup measuring scoops. Eventually, they developed a custom process using hot water injection and a specialized pump to liquefy and move the honey safely and efficiently.

That amount of honey isn’t exactly cheap. While grains cost mere cents per litre, honey is a premium ingredient – anywhere between four to eight times the price of malted grain, according to Ramey. This makes honey-based spirits significantly more expensive to produce, and almost impossible to scale cheaply.

Faced with this reality, Wayward had to pivot. When the pandemic shifted consumer spending, Brimacombe reimagined his 100 per cent honey approach, focusing honey’s use where it truly impacted flavour and quality, in products like Unruly Vodka, Unruly Gin and Drunken Hive Rum. For more accessible offerings, he introduced ethically sourced, pollinator-friendly grain that’s glyphosate-free, spray-free and fully traceable, keeping Wayward’s values intact.

Unlike traditional agricultural crops, honey doesn’t require planting, irrigation or soil disturbance, making its environmental footprint remarkably low. This means that honey-based spirits not only deliver flavour but also align with values of ecological stewardship and biodiversity.

A new challenge that appeared? Educating consumers. “We are a honey-centric distillery that has three products made 100 per cent from B.C. honey, and then everything else we do is pollinator-friendly,” said Brimacombe. “We use honey whenever we use sweetener. We had to communicate the difference between ‘made with honey’ and ‘made from honey.’”

Ramey faced this issue with Burwood’s first product, too. “Our first product was called Single Hive, like single malt,” he said. “But people were confused. Was it rum? Was it whisky? We wanted to tell people that it was a barrel-aged honey spirit, and it kind of tastes like rum and kind of tastes like a Scottish single malt, but there’s no grain in it. It’s hard to tell that branding story quickly.”

This challenge pushed Burwood to experiment and refine its approach, leading to the creation of The Bee Whisperer, a blend of its single-malt whisky and barrel-aged honey spirit. To make the honey spirit component, Burwood first dilutes the honey so it can ferment properly. Then, it ferments for about a week using Chardonnay yeast along with some wild microbes, which adds unique floral and botanical flavours. After fermentation, the spirit is distilled twice, just like traditional whisky, and aged in used American bourbon barrels for up to seven years.

“This honey spirit makes up about 10 per cent of the final blend, with the other 90 per cent being single malt whisky,” said Ramey. “The result is a Canadian whisky that tastes smooth and familiar, but with a subtle, wildflower-like twist.”

Honey spirits exist in a regulatory grey zone. In Canada, spirits like vodka, whisky and rum are defined by their base ingredients – typically grain, potatoes or sugarcane byproducts – which leaves little room for experimentation with ingredients like honey. This has created significant hurdles for producers trying to innovate. Wayward, for example, wasn’t allowed to label its honey-based spirit as vodka until 2018, because it didn’t meet the grain or potato requirement.

In Alberta, Burwood has taken a proactive approach, working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) to create an entirely new category: Canadian rum, made from honey. The effort began with an unusual byproduct from beekeeping. When cleaning hive frames, leftover caramelized sugars form a dark, sticky substance. There was no good use for it, it couldn’t be dumped without causing environmental issues and storing it was a logistical burden.

Burwood began experimenting. Partnering with government researchers, it explored whether the substance could be treated like molasses: fermented, distilled and aged to create a rum-like spirit. The result is a bold, spiced honey spirit that’s low-cost and helps reduce farm waste.

According to federal regulations, however, it still doesn’t qualify as rum. Even though the base material is chemically and functionally similar to molasses, it doesn’t come from sugarcane, so it falls outside the current definition. As a workaround, Burwood markets the product as “rhum,” a tongue-in-cheek nod to the regulatory ambiguity. So far, the CFIA is open to the idea of a new category, but it needs more producers to participate before a formal designation can be made.

Blossom to bottle

Just as grapes and grains express their growing conditions, honey reflects the plants, flowers and climate from which bees forage. This is why distillers are highly selective about floral origin.

Honey has a naturally wide range of flavour profiles depending on the flowers the bees forage from. These are known as varietals. While all honey shares a familiar sweetness, each varietal carries unique floral notes layered on top. Distillation concentrates those flavours, allowing the identity of each honey varietal to shine through. At Wayward, the focus is on wild clover honey.

“The bees pollinate crops all over B.C., then rest on the wild clover fields in B.C.’s north,” said Brimacombe. “It’s an efficient food source for the bees, when you consider the density of one cubic metre of clover versus one cubic metre of, say, raspberries.”

It’s ideal both for the bees and distillers aiming for reliable yields and a balanced, floral spirit. Burwood, on the other hand, works with blended “prairie mix” honey, made up of canola, clover, wildflowers and myriad other varieties that Alberta bees encounter. “It’s bloom time in Alberta in a bottle,” said Ramey. “I get wildflower, honeysuckle [and] rose aroma. Some people say lavender; some get raw vegetal notes.”

Working with honey isn’t easy. It’s expensive, temperamental and doesn’t always fit into existing spirit categories or regulatory frameworks.

Honey characteristics vary year to year based on climate, rainfall and blooming cycles. To maintain consistent spirit quality, the distilleries rely on detailed blending, sensory profiling and, in Wayward’s case, automated fermentation analysis using equipment they co-developed with a local college.

For Wayward, its mono-floral approach not only helps standardize flavour but also ensures a consistently higher sugar content than found in generic grocery store honey, which often contains more water. Higher sugar concentration leads to more efficient fermentation, better alcohol yields and fewer unwanted off-flavours, allowing for greater control over the final spirit.

While finding the right honey is an art, Wayward’s methods are also backed by a healthy dose of science. “Honey changes from barrel to barrel, so we built an automated system with a PhD chemist,” said Brimacombe. “It samples the ferment every 20 minutes, tracking 23 points like pH and Brix. After 100-plus ferments, we know exactly how to adjust – like adding water if the honey is sweeter – to maintain consistency.”

For Burwood, honey can vary a lot depending on the season and what the bees are foraging on, but it has a few ways to keep things consistent. First, the honey it uses is already blended by its producers at the end of the season, so it’s not working with wildly different batches from different months. When it’s time to blend the final product, samples are pulled from a large pool of barrels and only the ones that meet the flavour profile are selected. Every blend goes through tasting panels and small-scale trials before it gets scaled up. It also accounts for differences in barrel aging: where the barrel sits in the warehouse, how it’s made and even Alberta’s dry climate, which affects how the spirit matures.

A sweet shift

As Canadian drinkers grow more conscious about what they consume, and where it comes from, honey offers craft distillers a mix of story, substance and sensory intrigue. While it may not yet have the mainstream recognition of wine or whisky, that’s starting to change. Honey spirits are carving out their place in the industry and challenging drinkers to think differently about what’s in their glass.

“One of the biggest challenges with honey-based spirits is this strange disconnect in how people think about them,” said Brimacombe. “Consumers understand that beer is brewed locally, or that wine comes from a nearby vineyard. It’s visible, it’s agricultural and it supports the local economy. But something weird happens when you turn that beer or wine into vodka or gin: people stop caring about where it comes from.” That disconnect, he notes, is starting to shift.

“People are beginning to ask where their spirits come from, just like they do with food, wine and beer. I’m excited to be here when they do to say, ‘Hey, here’s something ethically sourced, sustainable, low-water and made from honey. It’s lovely. Give it a try.’”