Honey aroma explained

Almost all of it is smell

The tongue detects sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami, plus physical sensations such as astringency and warmth. Everything else in a tasting note arrives through the nose. When honey is in the mouth, warmed and diluted, volatile compounds travel up the back of the throat to the olfactory epithelium — retronasal olfaction — and the brain files the result as taste.

Where the compounds come from

1. 1From the flowerNectar carries the plant's own volatiles. Linalool and its oxides in citrus and lavender honeys, methyl anthranilate in orange blossom, and phenylacetaldehyde in a range of floral honeys are all inherited more or less directly.
2. 2From the bee and the hiveEnzymatic activity and the hive environment generate compounds that were not in the nectar. Gluconic acid is the clearest case — it is made in the honey, not collected — and it sets much of the perceived acidity.
3. 3From timeMaillard reactions between sugars and the small amount of amino acid present run slowly at room temperature, producing darker colour and heavier, malty, caramelised notes. An old honey is not spoiled, but it is a different honey from the one that was jarred.

Some compounds are distinctive enough to serve as markers of floral origin. Benzaldehyde is associated with almond-scented honeys, abscisic acid with heather, and methyl syringate with manuka. Chromatographic profiling of these is one of the working techniques for confirming what a honey is.

How trained panels taste honey

Everything above is about what is in the honey. Describing it reliably is a separate discipline, and the European honey laboratories harmonised theirs in 2004 so that a description made in Rome means the same thing in Brussels. The method borrows from wine and olive-oil panels and is strict about the things that make a single taster unreliable: expectation, fatigue, the colour of the honey and the order of the samples.

1. 1A panel, not a personAt least seven assessors, selected and trained to the ISO standard for sensory panels, working in separate booths in a room built to the ISO specification for test rooms. A panel leader prepares and codes the samples and does not taste them.
2. 2Hide the colour, hold the aromaAbout 30 to 40 g of honey goes into an odourless, covered beaker — often red or opaque so the colour cannot bias the verdict — at 18 to 25 °C. For judging aroma or conformity to a type, the honey is diluted one part water to five of honey, taking it to about 30 per cent water so crystals and viscosity stop interfering.
3. 3Smell first, then tasteThe honey is spread up the side of the beaker to release its volatiles, sniffed at once and again after 10 to 20 seconds. Then 1 or 2 g are held in the mouth to dissolve before swallowing, so that taste, retronasal aroma, persistence and any after-taste can each be registered.
4. 4Rest between samplesNo more than seven samples in a session, sessions at least two hours after a meal, a minute or two between tastings — longer for persistent honeys — and a piece of slightly acidic apple, low-salt bread or water between samples.
5. 5Mark a line, not a numberEach intensity is marked on an unstructured 10 cm line rather than chosen from a numbered scale. The panel's result is the median, and it counts only if the robust standard deviation of the marks is 1 or less — if the assessors disagree more than that, there is no result.

The seven families

The panels describe odour and aroma with a wheel of families and sub-families, each tied to reference samples the assessors have memorised. Seven families appear in the descriptions of the principal European honeys, and several of the names mean something narrower than the everyday word.

• Woody — wood, resin, dry leaves and spice. The family of chestnut, heather, lime and honeydew.
• Chemical — medicinal, phenolic or pharmaceutical notes. Chestnut, lime and thyme all carry it, and it is a description of character, not a contaminant.
• Fresh — cool, minty or anise-like. The anise note panels find in citrus honey belongs here.
• Floral – fresh fruit — flowers and fresh fruit, sub-divided into floral and fruity. The largest family, present in most blossom honeys.
• Warm — caramel, toffee, malt, cooked sugar. Present in robinia, heather and both honeydews.
• Spoiled — a family name for sulphurous, cabbage-like or ammoniacal notes. It is part of the recognised profile of rape and dandelion honeys, not a sign that they have gone off.
• Vegetal — green, grassy, hay and cut-stem notes, as in rape, sunflower and rosemary honeys.

Read across a row and a honey's character appears in outline: chestnut is woody, chemical, warm and spoiled with nothing floral; citrus is floral with a fresh anise note and nothing else. Read down a column and the families sort the honeys into groups that cut across colour — lime honey is light to medium in colour yet shares the woody-chemical register of the dark chestnut, and so, from the middle of the colour range, does thyme. That is the reason pairing on this site is argued from flavour families rather than from colour.

Taste is more than sweetness

The same descriptions record the tastes the tongue does report, and they show how much variation hides behind the word sweet. Chestnut is the only honey in the set whose bitterness panels call strong, and with lime one of the two blossom honeys described as astringent. Sunflower is the only one with strong acidity. Heather and chestnut are the only two whose sweetness is called weak, and both are long in the mouth. Robinia — acacia — is the only honey called more than medium-sweet, with a weak aroma and a short finish: a honey defined by what it lacks.

What a panel treats as a defect

Alongside conformity to a type, panels score defects against reference samples of each fault. The harmonised method names the off-odour and off-flavour of fermentation, and foreign tastes and odours — smoke and thymol taints among them — as the defects it considers.

• Fermentation — sour, yeasty, alcoholic or vinegary notes, from a honey that was too wet or badly stored.
• Smoke — from heavy use of the smoker at harvest, which the honey absorbs.
• Thymol — a taint from thymol-based varroa treatments used at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and a direct line from colony health management to what ends up in the jar.
• Other foreign odours — honey absorbs smells, so storage near fuel, paint or strong foods can be tasted.

Why aroma is so easily lost

Volatility is the whole point and the whole problem. A compound light enough to reach the nose is light enough to leave an open jar, and heating accelerates its departure. The lightest and most floral compounds go first, which is why gently warmed honey loses its top notes before anything else changes and why a delicate honey in a hot drink becomes generic sweetness.

• Add honey to tea once it has cooled below about 60 °C to keep most of the aroma.
• Keep jars closed and cool. A jar left open on a warm shelf loses character measurably over weeks.
• Use robust honeys for cooking and delicate ones raw — the aroma of a good acacia will not survive a bake, and it costs more than the honeys that will.
• Warm a honey slightly in the hand or mouth before tasting. Volatility works for you as well as against you.