Paperbark honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

eucalypt, camphor, wet bark, menthol

Flavour

camphor, eucalypt, caramel, cooling finish

Finish

Long and cooling, with a medicinal echo.

Intensity

Pronounced

Sweetness

Sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Moderate

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)toAmber (85-114 mm Pfund)

Mid amber, sometimes slightly cloudy.

On setting: Sets to a fine to medium grain.

Texture

Runny; Thick but pourable; Soft set

Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Sets over a few months in the manner of the myrtle-family honeys generally.

Typical composition

Moisture

16–20% (typically 18%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.9–1.1 (typically 1)

pH

3.7–4.5 (typically 4.1)

Electrical conductivity

0.3–0.9 mS/cm (typically 0.55 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Wetland-grown myrtles produce honey slightly wetter than the dry-forest eucalypts.

What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured

Where it comes from

Floral source

Melaleuca species on swampy and estuarine ground. The tea tree name attaches to this genus, to Melaleuca alternifolia oil, and to the Leptospermum that makes manuka honey — three different things.

Origins

Coastal Queensland and New South Wales, on wetland and estuarine margins.

Origin pages

• Australia
• New South Wales
• Queensland

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

Harvest

October to February (southern hemisphere)

Spring and summer, and several species flower more than once in a good year.

The bees

Exposed nectar in a stamen brush, accessible to everything, and worked by honey bees, native stingless bees and honeyeaters at once.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Filtered

Coastal wetland forest has been heavily reduced by development, which has made the remaining paperbark stands both scarcer and more valuable.

What to do with it

A hot-drinks honey above all. Its camphor note stands up to strong tea, ginger and lemon without difficulty.

At the tableIn hot drinksWith cheeseSpreadingGlazing and roasting

Pairings

• Hot water, lemon and gingerClassic

  The honey's own cooling camphor reinforces the ginger, and there is no tannin to bury it.

• Strong black tea

  Robust enough to be tasted through tannin and milk.

• Aged hard cheese

  A resinous honey against salt and aged fat, in the manner of the herb honeys.

History and traditional use

Melaleuca and Leptospermum were both called tea tree by early European colonists who used their leaves as a tea substitute, which is where a naming problem that now spans two continents and three products began.

• Paperbark bark was used extensively by Aboriginal peoples across northern and eastern Australia for wrapping food, roofing and containers, which is a use of the tree rather than of the honey.

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