Alfalfa honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

beeswax, cut grass, warm hay

Flavour

clean sweetness, a faint green note, light butter

Finish

Short and clean.

Intensity

Mild

Sweetness

Very sweet

Bitterness

None

Acidity

Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Extra white (8-17 mm Pfund)toWhite (17-34 mm Pfund)toExtra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)

Pale straw to light gold, sometimes with a faint green cast.

On setting: Sets pale and opaque, close to white.

Texture

Runny; Soft set; Creamed

Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Close to clover in sugar balance and behaves the same way — a few months to a fine even set. It is widely used as a creaming base for the same reason.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–18.5% (typically 16.8%)

Fructose

37–42% (typically 39%)

Glucose

32–37% (typically 34.5%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.83–1 (typically 0.9)

pH

3.7–4.4 (typically 4)

Electrical conductivity

0.1–0.3 mS/cm (typically 0.18 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey.

What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured

Where it comes from

Floral source

Medicago sativa, grown at vast scale as a forage legume for livestock. The honey comes from fields left to flower rather than cut for hay, which in practice means seed-production acreage and late cuts.

Origins

The northern Great Plains above all — the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming — plus California, the Canadian prairies and Argentina.

Origin pages

• North America
• United States
• Canada
• Argentina

Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.

Harvest

June to September (northern hemisphere)

A long window, but interrupted: alfalfa cut for hay is cut in bloom, so a flow can end overnight when the mower arrives.

The bees

The most instructive bee-plant relationship in the catalogue. An alfalfa floret is held under tension and trips when a bee pushes into it, striking the insect on the head — honey bees dislike this and quickly learn to rob nectar from the side of the flower, which collects nectar but pollinates nothing. Alfalfa grown for seed is therefore pollinated commercially by alfalfa leafcutter bees and alkali bees, which tolerate being tripped. The honey bee is the honey producer here and the leafcutter is the pollinator, and they are not the same animal doing the same job.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Filtered, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set), Pasteurised

Much of the crop is sold as generic or blended honey rather than under the alfalfa name, which is why a honey produced by the thousands of tonnes is barely known to the people eating it.

What to do with it

An all-purpose cooking and table honey. Its mildness is a genuine advantage in baking and dressings, where a strong honey would take over, and there is nothing lost to heat because there was little there to begin with.

At the tableSpreadingBakingIn hot drinksDressingsSauces

Pairings

• Cornbread and pancakes

  Sweetness without character, which is what a strongly flavoured batter wants.

• Salad leaves in a mustard vinaigrette

  Balances the mustard's heat without adding a floral note that would fight the vinegar.

• Mild fresh cheeses

  Neither party dominates; a mild pairing for people who dislike assertive honeys.

History and traditional use

Alfalfa honey is a nineteenth and twentieth-century product of irrigated western agriculture. As alfalfa acreage spread across the American west, a large and dependable honey flow appeared with it — and the industry that grew up around that flow is the same one now trucked to California each February for almond pollination.