The Business Cocktail Recipe

The Business is a simple and elegant three-ingredient cocktail that combines gin, lime juice, and honey syrup. The drink was invented in the early 2000s by Sasha Petraske at his pioneering bar, Milk & Honey. Petraske and Milk & Honey are widely credited with being some of the most influential figures in the early cocktail renaissance, and The Business is a perfect example of their brilliance.

Petraske’s signature style of cocktail creation is on full display with The Business. The goal of Milk & Honey was to create a sophisticated environment for enjoying carefully crafted cocktails. To do that, Petraske drew inspiration from the canon of classic cocktails. Many of Milk & Honey’s cocktails were based on Prohibition-era classics, but with a small twist. In this case, Petraske took the Bee’s Knees and swapped the lemon juice for lime.

Precision was also extremely important to Milk & Honey’s bar program. In Sasha Petraske’s posthumous book, Regarding Cocktails, bartender Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin shares a glimpse into Petraske’s mindset regarding The Business. “If the drink were just a tiny bit off, he wouldn’t serve it to a dog,” he says of Petraske. “When there are only three ingredients, you have little behind which to hide imperfection.”

The combination of meticulous craftsmanship and simplicity is what made The Business and Petraske’s other creations so revolutionary during the early years of the cocktail revival. 

Why The Business works

The simplicity of The Business works because it is based on the classic sour cocktail formula of spirit, citrus juice, and a sweetener, usually a type of syrup. Inspired by the Prohibition-era Bee’s Knees cocktail, The Business uses a rich honey syrup as the sweetening agent. A rich honey syrup (3 parts honey to 1 part water) offers more of a rounded depth of flavor than a plain simple syrup and also gives The Business a richer texture.

Gin and lime juice are no strangers, as evidenced by the classic Gimlet. In fact, with the introduction of lime juice, The Business shares just as much in common with the Gimlet as it does its namesake cocktail. Lime gives the drink a brighter, citric zip than lemon juice and creates a bridge between the botanical-forward gin and rich honey syrup.