Lingonberry honey
Delicate and clean with a distinct tart berry note and a fresh acidity — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes of the fruit its plant produces.
Puolukkahunaja / Lingonhonung
A Nordic forest honey from lingonberry, the low evergreen shrub that carpets the boreal understorey, and one of the few genuinely northern monoflorals. It is pale, tart and delicately fruity, and it comes from a plant whose flowering is brief and whose honey is correspondingly scarce.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- tart berries, fresh florals, pine
- Flavour
- lingonberry, light citrus, faint resin
- Finish
- Short, fresh and slightly tart.
- Intensity
- Mild
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Bright
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Extra white (8-17 mm Pfund)White (17-34 mm Pfund)Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)
Very pale straw, clear and bright.
On setting: Sets to a fine pale cream.
- Texture
- Runny; Soft set; Creamed
- Crystallisation
Moderate — granulates over a few months
A moderate fine set. Nordic honey is very often sold creamed, which is a market preference rather than a property of the crop.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 16–19% (typically 17.5%)
- Fructose
- 36–41% (typically 38%)
- Glucose
- 30–36% (typically 33%)
- pH
- 3.5–4.2 (typically 3.8)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.1–0.4 mS/cm (typically 0.25 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
- Vaccinium vitis-idaea, lingonberry or cowberry, in boreal pine and spruce forest understorey, frequently alongside bilberry.
- Origins
- Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Baltic states and northwestern Russia.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- June to July (northern hemisphere)
A short boreal window, and the whole northern season is compressed into a few weeks.
- The bees
- Bumblebees are the more important wild pollinators of lingonberry in the far north, where they fly in cooler conditions than honey bees will. Nordic beekeeping operates within a very short season and long winter confinement.
- Usual processing
- Raw, Coarsely strained, Spun (centrifugally extracted), Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)
Nordic production is small, seasonal and expensive, and most of it is consumed domestically. Genuine single-source lingonberry honey is scarce even in Finland.
What to do with it
Its acidity makes it useful in dressings and with rich food, and it is good on plain yoghurt where a sweeter honey would flatten the sourness.
At the tableSpreadingDessertsDressingsIn hot drinks
Pairings
- Rye crispbread and butterClassic
The Nordic staple, and the honey's tartness lifts it.
- Reindeer, game and pork
Lingonberry with meat is a Nordic pairing that predates the honey.
- Plain skyr and yoghurt
Acid meets acid without either flattening.
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
Lingonberry is a foundational food plant across the Nordic countries, and its honey is a minor by-product of a plant valued overwhelmingly for its fruit.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides that cover this honey
Tools for choosing and using honey
- Honey finder
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- Honey comparison
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- Honey substitute calculator
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- Storage guide
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