Borage honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

fresh cucumber, clean wax, faint melon

Flavour

clean sugar, a cool vegetal freshness, light vanilla

Finish

Short and cool.

Intensity

Delicate

Sweetness

Very sweet

Bitterness

None

Acidity

Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Water white (0-8 mm Pfund)toExtra white (8-17 mm Pfund)toWhite (17-34 mm Pfund)

Almost colourless, with a faint grey-green cast; among the palest honeys sold.

On setting: Sets brilliant white and fine.

Texture

Runny; Soft set; Creamed

Crystallisation

Fast — granulates within weeks

Relatively glucose-rich, so it granulates within weeks to a smooth white set. Most of the commercial crop is creamed for that reason — an uncontrolled set in the jar looks like a fault, and a seeded one looks like a product.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–18.5% (typically 17%)

Fructose

36–41% (typically 38.5%)

Glucose

33–38% (typically 35.5%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.88–1.05 (typically 0.94)

pH

3.6–4.3 (typically 3.9)

Electrical conductivity

0.1–0.3 mS/cm (typically 0.17 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

Borago officinalis, grown for gamma-linolenic acid in the seed. The honey exists because the crop exists; nobody plants borage for honey.

Origins

England, New Zealand and Canada, following the starflower-oil acreage. Small quantities from Spain and eastern Europe.

Origin pages

• United Kingdom
• Canada

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

Harvest

June to August (northern hemisphere)

A long flowering period for a field crop, and unusually tolerant of dull weather — borage secretes nectar on days when clover and lime do not.

The bees

Exceptional nectar productivity is the whole story. A borage floret replenishes nectar within a few minutes of a bee emptying it, so a colony can work the same acre continuously rather than moving on. Beekeepers value borage fields for building colony strength as much as for the crop.

Usual processing

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

Much of the English crop disappears into blended supermarket honey rather than being sold under its own name, on the same commercial logic as rapeseed.

What to do with it

A general-purpose pale honey. It sweetens without interfering, which is its virtue and the limit of it — nobody has ever built a dish around borage honey.

At the tableSpreadingBakingIn hot drinksDressings

Pairings

• Plain yoghurt

  The honey's cool vegetal note reads as freshness against the lactic tang.

• Toast

  Creamed borage spreads cleanly and does not run. A texture argument rather than a flavour one.

• Elderflower cordial

  Both sit in the same pale floral-vegetal register, so neither has to give ground.

History and traditional use

Borage honey barely existed before the 1980s. Field-scale borage cultivation for gamma-linolenic acid began in Britain and New Zealand in that decade, and a new pale honey arrived alongside a new oilseed — the same pattern rapeseed honey followed a decade earlier.

• Borage itself has a long European record as a culinary and medicinal herb — the leaves in drinks, the flowers candied — but the honey is a modern agricultural by-product with no tradition behind it.

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