Mike’s Hot Honey Beverage Syrup
Mike’s Hot Honey enters the beverage space with a ready-to-use syrup designed for cocktails, coffee, tea, lemonade, and smoothies, leveraging the brand’s viral equity in a convenient, bar-friendly format. Made with hot honey, sugar, water, natural flavor and preservatives, the product delivers the familiar sweet heat profile in a pourable 750ml plastic bottle, positioning itself as an easy substitute for simple syrup or honey in mixed drinks. From our sampling, the concept feels intuitive and largely successful, translating a well-known condiment into a versatile beverage ingredient.
Things that stand out:
- The flavor is true to Mike’s Hot Honey, offering a balanced sweetness with a gentle but noticeable chili heat that enhances cocktails without overwhelming them. It works particularly well in spirit-forward classics like an Old Fashioned or in lighter citrus-forward drinks such as a Bee’s Knees riff.
- The syrup format adds clear convenience, eliminating the need to dissolve honey or sugar in cold beverages. This makes it an easy drop-in for bartenders and home users looking to add heat where they might otherwise use simple syrup.
- Versatility is a major strength, as the product performs consistently across cocktails, coffee, and tea, adding complexity rather than novelty-level heat.
Things to consider:
- At 100 calories and 11 grams of added sugar per ounce, the nutritional profile may limit more frequent or heavy-handed use, especially outside of cocktails.
- Compared with their Hot Honey products, which feel like tightly designed products, the packaging feels a bit underwhelming to us. The flat white cap and the shape of the bottle feels a bit too stock for a higher end product.
- Labeling could more clearly communicate that this is a beverage syrup, as consumers may initially assume it is simply a larger-format version of the original hot honey.
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After sunsetting its Spiked line earlier this year, Spindrift is expanding its line of mocktail-inspired sparkling waters with the launch of Ginger Lime Mule, which joins Nojito, Cosnopolitan and Berry BelliNo. As its name suggests, the new flavor draws inspiration from the classic Moscow mule cocktail, sans vodka. Staying true to Spindrift’s ethos, Ginger Lime Mule is sweetened exclusively with fruit juice – in this case, lime juice – and has just 1 gram of sugar per 12 oz. can.
Things that stand out:
- Spindrift describes the new flavor as “all kick, no buzz,” and it certainly delivers, with just the right amount of bite from the ginger extract (made from ginger sourced from Peru) balanced by the lime.
- At $26 per case of 24 cans, Ginger Lime Mule is a wallet-friendly non-alcoholic option with full-bodied flavor.
- With its strong flavor profile, the new sparkling water flavor could also make an excellent cocktail mixer.
Things to consider:
- While the Moscow mule illustration on the front of the can clearly indicate the flavor profile, it may lead to consumer confusion about whether the product contains alcohol, as the “non-alcoholic” callout toward the bottom of the can is extremely small.
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