When my company, Two Hives Honey, was in its infancy, I was at the biggest bee school in Texas. I had a card table, a black tablecloth, and a few dozen jars of honey that I counted among my most prized possessions. I’d spent weeks searching for the perfect vessels that were worthy of my honey bees’ work, and worked with a local designer to come up with a label that I loved. I couldn’t have been more proud.
A man walked by the table, picked up one of my jars in disgust, and proceeded to chastise me, exclaiming, “You shouldn’t be selling honey like this.”
“Like this” referred to the fact that the honey was crystallized, and not liquid. At that time, there weren’t nearly as many women beekeepers running businesses and working the speaking circuit in Texas. As one of those few, I already was battling the feelings of unworthiness without some stranger berating my perfectly fine products.
What I didn’t have the courage to say that day, but I’ll gladly shout from the rooftops now, is this: Why, oh why do beekeepers spend so much time and work keeping their honey in a liquid state for point of sale?! An uneducated consumer will gladly buy your product, get it home and have it crystallize four weeks later, and then dump it in the trash. They will never return to you again, assuming you sold them a defective product.
Like it or not, the onus is on us, the beekeepers, to educate our consumers. It can be a bit trying, repeating the same refrain again and again. However, the fact that your honey is real, raw honey is a differentiating factor from large brands found in many grocery stores, and can and should net you a higher price. So it’s important to understand the whys and hows of crystallized honey to ensure an educated consumer.
The crystallization of honey is completely natural and does not change the quality or taste of the honey (though a new texture likely will communicate a different flavor profile to your brain, because flavor is much more than just taste.) This change of states is what happens to raw, unfiltered and unheated honey.
Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugars. It contains more than 80% sugars and less than 20% water. In other words, the water found in your honey contains more sugar than it can naturally hold. This overabundance of sugar makes honey unstable, but nature doesn’t like instability and will always try to reach equilibrium. Your honey’s efforts to reach an equalized state result in crystals beginning to form in the honey, causing it to thicken and eventually become solid. The process of crystallization does not typically happen uniformly in most honeys, and you may notice your honey starting to become cloudy, or “marbling.” It often begins at the bottom and or sides of the jar first, and works its way upward and inward …
