HoneyHQ

Goji honey

Light and clean with a soft red-fruit note and a faint herbal edge — mildly fruity rather than obviously berry-like.

MonofloralMildFruityFloral

枸杞蜜

A honey from the goji berry plantations of Ningxia in arid northwestern China, produced alongside one of the country's best-known agricultural specialities. The plant flowers in flushes right through the summer, which gives an unusually long flow for a desert-margin crop, and the honey is light, mildly fruity and slow to set.

Flavour and aroma

Aroma
light red fruit, fresh hay, soft florals
Flavour
soft berry, light caramel, faint herbs
Finish
Short and clean.
Intensity
Mild
Sweetness
Sweet
Bitterness
None
Acidity
Moderate

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour
Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)

Pale gold, clear and bright.

On setting: Sets to a smooth pale cream.

Texture
Runny; Thick but pourable; Soft set
Crystallisation

Slow — months before it starts to granulate

Slow and fine, which suits a honey generally sold liquid in the Chinese market.

Typical composition

Moisture
15–19% (typically 17%)
Fructose
37–42% (typically 39%)
Glucose
29–35% (typically 32%)
pH
3.6–4.4 (typically 4)
Electrical conductivity
0.2–0.5 mS/cm (typically 0.3 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
Lycium barbarum, goji or wolfberry, grown in irrigated plantations on the arid plains of Ningxia and Gansu.
Origins
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and neighbouring Gansu and Inner Mongolia, northwestern China.
Origin pages

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

Harvest
June to September (northern hemisphere)

Flowering runs in flushes through the summer, giving several successive harvests.

The bees
Chinese commercial beekeeping is the largest in the world by colony number, and migratory operations follow crops across the country. Goji is a mid-season stop between the spring rape and the autumn jujube.
Usual processing
Raw, Coarsely strained, Spun (centrifugally extracted), Filtered

Migratory beekeeping supplies the goji plantations, and pesticide programmes on a high-value fruit crop are the principal risk to colonies working it.

What to do with it

An everyday honey in China, taken in warm water and tea. It has no character that requires accommodation.

At the tableIn hot drinksSpreadingDesserts

Pairings

  • Chrysanthemum and green teaClassic

    The traditional Chinese use, and the honey is mild enough not to bury the infusion.

  • Plain congee and rice porridge

    A mild honey on a plain base.

  • Fresh soft cheeses

    Both mild.

Pairing pages this honey appears on

Selected by this honey’s own recorded intensity, flavour families and uses rather than by anything written above — each page prints the rule that put it there.

Where this honey sits in the catalogue

History and traditional use

Goji cultivation in Ningxia is centuries old and was industrialised in the twentieth century. The honey followed the plantations rather than the other way round.

  • Goji berries themselves have long-standing use in Chinese medicine; the honey is a modern by-product of the plantations rather than part of that tradition.

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

Sources

  • HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
  • Analytical approaches to honey authentication — Peer-reviewed food-analysis literature · Peer-reviewed article

How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.

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