How to taste honey

Setting up

• Room temperature, or slightly above. Cold honey is mute — the aromatics do not volatilise. Around 20-25 °C is right.
• A small quantity. Half a teaspoon is plenty; more coats the palate and ends the session.
• Water and a plain cracker between samples. Sugar accumulates fast, and by the fourth honey everything tastes the same without a reset.
• Three or four honeys at most, in order from palest to darkest. Going the other way means the dark honey has already ruined the pale one.

The sequence

1. 1LookColour against the light, and clarity. Note whether it is liquid, set, or somewhere between, and how it moves — a thixotropic honey resists the spoon and then suddenly gives.
2. 2Smell it in the jarBefore tasting. Some honeys announce themselves entirely from the jar — orange blossom, lavender, buckwheat. Stir first to release the volatiles.
3. 3TasteTake a small amount and let it warm and spread across the tongue rather than swallowing at once. Sweetness arrives first everywhere; what comes after it is the interesting part.
4. 4Breathe out through your noseThe single most useful technique here. Most of what you think of as flavour is retronasal aroma, and exhaling through the nose with the honey still in your mouth is what makes it available. Try it once with your nose pinched and once without — the difference is startling.
5. 5WaitThe finish is where honeys separate most. Sweetness fades quickly; bitterness, herbal notes and mineral character build. Chestnut becomes more bitter as you wait, which is why a first impression underrates it.

What to look for

• Intensity. Does it dominate, or sit quietly? This is the most practically useful thing to establish, because it decides what the honey is for.
• Sweetness against everything else. Chestnut and honeydew have roughly the same sugar content as acacia and taste far less sweet, because bitterness and mineral weight are competing.
• Bitterness. Present in chestnut, strawberry tree, buckwheat and heather, and a feature rather than a fault.
• Aromatic family. Floral, fruity, herbal, resinous, malty, mineral, smoky — a rough category is more useful than a precise word.
• Texture. Runny, thick, set, gelled, gritty. Crystal size matters as much as crystal presence.
• Finish length. The clearest separator between an interesting honey and an ordinary one.

A first flight worth trying

Four honeys that between them cover most of what honey can do, tasted palest to darkest: acacia, orange blossom, thyme, chestnut. Acacia establishes the baseline of sweetness with nothing else. Orange blossom adds unmistakable floral aroma. Thyme adds savoury herbal warmth and a long finish. Chestnut removes much of the sweetness and replaces it with bitterness and tannin. By the fourth, the first will seem like a different substance.