Angico honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

resin, wood smoke, caramel, dry earth

Flavour

caramel, resin, faint smoke, dried fruit

Finish

Long, warm and slightly resinous.

Intensity

Pronounced

Sweetness

Sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Moderate

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Amber (85-114 mm Pfund)toDark amber (over 114 mm Pfund)

Mid to dark amber, occasionally almost brown.

On setting: Sets slowly to a coarse dark grain.

Texture

Runny; Thick but pourable

Crystallisation

Slow — months before it starts to granulate

Slow to granulate, and warm storage generally keeps it liquid.

Typical composition

Moisture

16–20% (typically 18%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.8–1 (typically 0.9)

pH

3.6–4.4 (typically 4)

Electrical conductivity

0.4–0.9 mS/cm (typically 0.6 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Higher conductivity consistent with its colour. Brazilian organic certification has produced more compositional data on caatinga honeys than on most tropical crops.

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

Where it comes from

Floral source

Anadenanthera colubrina, of the seasonally dry forests of Brazil, Bolivia and northern Argentina.

Origins

Piauí, Ceará, Bahia and the wider Brazilian northeast, with production in Bolivia and Paraguay.

Origin pages

• Brazil
• South America
• Argentina
• Caatinga

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

Harvest

September to November (southern hemisphere)

Flowering ahead of the rains, which is when the caatinga honey year begins.

The bees

Worked by Africanized honey bees and by the native stingless bees kept across the region — the same tree supplying two parallel systems, one introduced and one indigenous.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Raw

Northeastern Brazil has built a substantial organic honey export industry on the caatinga, helped by a landscape with very little agricultural chemical use and by long-standing certification programmes.

What to do with it

Robust enough to survive cooking and assertive enough for cheese — a genuinely useful honey rather than a delicate one.

At the tableWith cheeseGlazing and roastingMarinadesIn hot drinksBaking

Pairings

• Aged hard cheese

  Resin and smoke against salt and aged fat, which is what strong honeys are for.

• Grilled meat

  Its smoky note agrees with the char, and it holds together through the heat that does the browning.

• Strong coffee

  Resin against roast — a register coffee does not already occupy, which is what makes it work.

History and traditional use

The caatinga is the only major biome entirely within Brazil, and its honey industry has become one of the more successful examples of a semi-arid landscape supporting a certified export crop without irrigation.

• Angico bark and gum have a long traditional use in Brazil for coughs and wounds, entirely separately from the honey.

Traditional use records that people have done something, and for how long. It is not evidence that it works.