HOW TO TASTE HONEY
Our aim is to curate a collection of honeys that showcases how different every one is as I love bringing to others the same happy sense of discovery I had when I realised that honey didn’t actually taste like supermarket honey: that was the day inspiration for Hive & Keeper came to me!
Every jar you buy will be different to any other as we keep the honeys we collect from our beekeepers totally seperate, even if the honeys come from the same hives (but taken off on different days), or from hives the beekeeper has in different places.
It's important to us that you get to taste and experience the uniqueness of each honey as they're like snapshots that capture the flowers, weather, landscape and bees that made them at that particular moment in time.
Just as there’s a language to describe different wines, there’s one for honey too that gives us the words to describe its flavours and aromas. Here are examples of the words and associations we use when tasting our honeys and deciding its main flavour note:
Fruity: citrus, tropical fruits, dried fruits, red berries, tree fruits
Floral: rose, violet, blossom, elderflower
Fresh: less flower and more herbaceous like hay, grass, trees
Caramel: maple, toffee, marshmallow, butterscotch
You can also get a sort of baldness on your tongue, or a mouthwatering feeling each due to having a different sugar composition reflecting the different nectars that make up each honey.
To decide what your honey is first stir it and take a deep breath in, then hold your nose, taste a little and swirl it around your mouth for the first flavour notes to hit. Then let go of your nose and let the aromas come through and the flavours develop.
You can eat apple and smell yourself to recalibrate your mouth and nose back to neutral in between tastings!
