Why do honeys crystalise differently?

Short answer:

Because the ratio of glucose to fructose is slightly different in every honey - and that's what determines how and when honey crystallises.

What is crystallisation?

Crystallisation is a normal process and a sign of the honey’s purity as the glucose in honey starts to knit together around the pollen grains in it. The glucose content in a honey will depend on the flowers the bees have visited to make it - if they’ve been visiting the bright yellow oil seed rape fields for example it will crystalise very quickly, almost within days as its nectar is very glucose-heavy.

Glucose needs pollen grains to knit around and crystalise so supermarket honeys have been pressure filtered to take as much pollen out as possible, and then pasteurised to kill the yeasts and enzyme activity to keep the honey runny and stable for as long as possible. 

Why do raw honeys have different textures?

It comes down to the balance of all the different sugars, from the main ones of glucose and fructose - but also including many other complex sugars which are found in smaller quantities but are also the ones that make honey a prebiotic and good at feeding your good gut bacteria!

The bees don't collect uniform nectar from one type of flower. They visit literally millions of flower to make a jar of honey. Each plant produces nectar with a slightly different sugar composition.

So even honey from the same hives, taken on the same day can have subtle differences in that glucose-fructose balance. Just enough to make one bucket crystallise fast and the other stay liquid.

What to do when honey has crystalised?

If we have crystallised buckets of honey from the beekeepers we gently warm it until it's runny enough to pour into jars. Then, once in the jar the glucose will start knitting around the pollen grains again and it'll crystallise back.

If you like your honey runny then try first to simply stir in the crystalised honey to your porridge, yoghurt or drink - it will dissolve and all its active ingredients remain intact.

How do you know if a honey will crystalise?

So the most important thing to remember is that EVERY honey will eventually crystalise and in different ways depending on the combination of flowers that made it. It most certainly hasn’t gone off and will still be good to eat. It's totally natural and a good sign that all the pollens are in there.

You can't predict exactly how or when a honey will crystallise. It depends on what the bees visited, what was blooming that week and what the bees gathered.

This is one reason mass-market honey is so heavily blended. They mix honey from multiple countries, multiple years, multiple sources to create a consistent crystalised texture they can control.

We don't blend. Which means every harvest behaves differently. Sometimes predictably, sometimes surprisingly.  So much so that I am the current proud owner of two buckets from the same hive, doing completely different things.

That's raw honey. Natural, unpredictable, extraordinary.