Glucose-to-fructose ratio

Definition

Glucose is much less soluble than fructose, so a honey with proportionally more glucose reaches saturation sooner and granulates faster. Acacia sits near 0.6 and can stay liquid for over a year; rapeseed sits near 1.0 and can set inside the comb. The ratio also affects perceived sweetness, since fructose tastes distinctly sweeter than glucose.

Honey records that discuss this

• Acacia honeyClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
• Clover honeyWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Rapeseed honeyVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.
• Sage honeyMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
• Wildflower honeyVaries with the season and the landscape. Pale spring crops are floral and light; late-summer crops darker, fruitier and stronger.
• Chestnut honeyAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Manuka honeyEarthy, mineral and damp — heather-like without the smoke, with a faintly medicinal edge. Distinctive rather than delicious, and not what most people expect for the price.
• Jarrah honeyDark, malty and caramelised, with a coffee-and-treacle depth and much less of the medicinal edge a comparably dark honey usually carries.
• Willow honeyMild, faintly green and quick to set. A spring honey in the literal sense, and one most beekeepers taste and few buyers ever see.
• Motherwort honeyClean and lightly herbal with a faint bitterness at the end — a summer honey that tastes of the plant rather than of sugar.
• Ailanthus honeyIntensely aromatic — muscat grape and elderflower with a medicinal edge. It divides opinion more sharply than any other European honey.
• Tulsi honeyDistinctly clove-scented over a light caramel body — one of the few herb honeys that genuinely smells of the herb.