Absolute vs relative link trouble

I’m working on a WordPress theme and have an instance where in the top-left of the page, the site name is displayed and links back to the home page. I have that code as:

<a href="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>"><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>

Yet that’s outputting as a relative link, not an absolute one. I’ve even tried specifying the $scheme as http and that doesn’t seem to work.