Wild Honey Cocktails with Niks Anuman

Niks Anuman seems to be ever-present in Bangkok’s cocktail scene. He runs two successful bars in an up-and-coming part of Chinatown. Though his voice is soft but his enthusiasm is contagious. He first opened Teens of Thailand in a seedy neighborhood of the city called Soi Nana, serving Spanish-style gin and tonics to just a handful of diehards. Within a few years he expanded and opened another bar just around the corner called Asia Today – the bar that he proudly calls the “non-supermarket bar”. His bartenders are instructed to only use ingredients that have been grown themselves, foraged, or purchased from local farmers. And Asia Today is the perfect home for his honey collection. He’s obsessed with the terroir of wild honey and the bees that produce it. So much has his obsession taken over that he now regularly travels across Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia hunting for new varieties of honey and teaching rural beekeepers how to produce honey in an eco-conscious way. There are many variables that affect the taste of honey – the available plant nectar in the area, how each species of bee produces that honey, and the surrounding microclimate. It seems that the possibilities for honey variations are endless. And Niks is just scratching the surface. On top of all that work, Niks is also the founder and organizer of the annual Bangkok Gin Festival. The fest just wrapped up last week, and saw record attendance. Still in it’s infancy, the Bangkok Gin Fest is destined become much, much larger and the prevailing wisdom is that it will eventually morph into a Bangkok Cocktail Week. There is a lot of work between now and then. And Niks is up for it.