Pasteurised honey
Heated to delay crystallisation and kill fermenting yeasts. It costs aroma and raises HMF, and it is done for shelf appearance rather than for safety.
2 honeys · processing
Honeys in this group
- Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
- Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
Plants behind these honeys
- White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
- AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
Guides covering these honeys
- Raw, filtered and processed honeyWhat actually happens between the hive and the jar, which of it changes the honey, and why the word 'raw' carries less information than it appears to.
- Creamed, set and whipped honeyCreamed honey has nothing added and nothing whipped into it. It is ordinary honey whose crystallisation has been controlled instead of left to chance, and the technique is a hundred years old.
- What is honey?Honey is nectar that bees have concentrated and chemically altered, then sealed in wax. Every property people notice about it — the sweetness, the keeping quality, the setting — follows from that process.
- What makes a honey mildMild honeys are pale, low in minerals and dominated by sweetness. They are the right answer far more often than the honey world tends to admit.
- Which flowers make honeyBeing good for bees and producing a honey crop are different things. A honey crop needs a plant that flowers in enormous quantity, in one place, at one time — which most good bee plants do not.
- Nectar plants explainedNectar is a payment. Understanding what the plant is buying, and how it controls the price, explains most of what flowers do and why some are useless to some bees.
Other processing groups
Narrow it down further
- Honey finder
Which honey should I buy for what I actually want to do with it?
- Flavour selector
I like this taste — which honeys have it?
- Honey comparison
How do these honeys actually differ, beyond colour?
- Honey substitute calculator
How much honey do I use instead of sugar, and what else has to change?
- Storage guide
How should I store honey, and what do I do when it sets?