Beech honeydew honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

malt, forest floor, resin, molasses

Flavour

malt, mineral, caramel, light resin

Finish

Long, savoury and mineral.

Intensity

Pronounced

Sweetness

Moderately sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

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

Dark amber to reddish-brown, with a distinctive depth.

Texture

Thick but pourable; Runny

Stays fluid and thick for a very long time, as honeydew honeys generally do.

Crystallisation

Very slow — often still liquid after a year or more

Very slow to crystallise. Low glucose and a high oligosaccharide content both suppress crystal formation.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–19% (typically 17%)

Fructose

30–37% (typically 33%)

Glucose

24–31% (typically 27%)

pH

4.2–5.4 (typically 4.7)

Electrical conductivity

0.9–1.8 mS/cm (typically 1.3 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

Honeydew from Ultracoelostoma scale insects embedded in the bark of black and mountain beech, Fuscospora solandri and Fuscospora cliffortioides.

Origins

The South Island of New Zealand — principally Nelson, Marlborough, Canterbury and the West Coast beech forests.

Origin pages

• South Island, New Zealand
• Germany

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

Harvest

January to April (southern hemisphere)

The honeydew season, which is more continuous than a flowering and depends on scale insect populations.

The bees

Honey bees collect the droplets from the waxy anal filaments of the scale insects. Native birds — bellbirds, tui and kaka — depend heavily on the same resource, and introduced German and common wasps consume an enormous share of it, which is one of New Zealand's most serious invertebrate conservation problems.

Usual processing

Raw, Coarsely strained, Spun (centrifugally extracted)

The resource is under severe pressure from introduced Vespula wasps, which consume a very large share of the honeydew in some seasons and outcompete both bees and native birds. Wasp control programmes in beech forest are among New Zealand's larger invertebrate conservation efforts.

What to do with it

Its low sweetness makes it useful where honey usually cloys — with cheese, in a sauce, or stirred into something rich.

At the tableWith cheeseGlazing and roastingIn hot drinksMarinades

Pairings

• Aged cheddar and blue cheeseClassic

  Mineral depth against salt.

• Dark bread

  Malt on malt.

• Strong coffee

  Both low in sweetness and both resinous.

History and traditional use

The beech honeydew system is one of the most productive in any temperate forest, and its ecological importance — to birds as much as to bees — was only properly documented in the later twentieth century.

Claims about this honey