Raw Honey has not been definitively defined by any government or world agency, the National Honey Board, or any Beekeeping Organization. Therefore there is some confusion and a bit of hoodwinking of the public on raw honey sales.

First let us define raw honey as we sell it: Raw Honey is honey that has not been heated above the ambient temperature outside the beehive. Arizona 117°, Florida 102°, Washington 95°, Utah 105°, are some ambient temperatures on record. The highest known ambient temperature was 120° F in Pad Idan, Pakistan, in the shade. Honey began to seep out of the combs onto the ground as the comb started to melt. As the temperature cooled the honey was extracted and found to be perfect, with natural enzymes intact. Therefore we have adopted a practice of process that does not exceed 120° throughout collection, extraction, straining and bottling. This is TRUE RAW HONEY.

Straining: Raw honey is strained through cheesecloth very slowly as the viscosity of honey lower than 120°F does not allow rapid movement of the honey. As a result of this process YOU WILL see grains of pollen mixed in the honey. (NOTE: MOST honey processors use honey heated to 160°F so that they can FILTER the honey down to 10 microns under high pressure and accomplish pasteurization.)

Because of the low heat process of our RAW HONEY, it is not pasteurized. There are yeast spores present in every environment, even the Arctic. Under ideal conditions these yeast spores could cause unpasteurized honey to ferment.

Over 120° F, all foods begin to cook. For every degree increased in heat there is a greater loss of benificial enzymes and nutrients. Most honey processors that sell “raw honey” heat their honey to 140°, some 145° for one great reason; faster processing and finer filtration. ALL RAW HONEY IS NOT EQUAL! If fact these high heat treatments produce cooked honey that is devoid of live enzymes and should no longer be qualified as “raw honey”.

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Raw Honey is desired by many and rarely found in the marketplace. Raw honey is a perishable product and is sold soon after harvest. There are exceptions to raw honey being sold just in the fall. Honey has live enzymes that are valued as healers, promote good health and aid in the digestion process. So why is raw honey perishable? Yeast! Airborne yeast spores are everywhere on the planet including the Arctic. Some airborne yeast spores enter the honey when it is processed. The honey that is in the honeycomb and sealed COULD also have yeast spores. Yeast can cause the honey to ferment. Fermentation will ruin the honey. The solution to reliable sources of raw honey is in choosing a beekeeper that has CLEAN processing facility and one who stores capped honey still in the honeycomb to just before sale.

If you buy comb honey there is a 100% assurance that your honey is “raw”! If the comb honey is surrounded by liquid honey there is a 90% chance that the liquid honey is pasteurized. If the beekeeper has stored raw honey in the comb until just before selling the raw honey, there is a less chance of airborne spores contaminating the raw honey. This is one way that raw honey is sold after the fall harvest. If your beekeeper elects to offer comb honey, please realize what happened in his beehive. It takes over 8 pounds of honey to produce a pound of wax. All comb honey is sold in “new wax”, wax made the same year as the honey. Wax comb is normally reused every year, and will result in more honey to the beekeeper as no honey was used in wax production. These methods of caring for raw honey are deliberate extra work details for the beekeeper. If it is extra work then of course the price per pound of honey will go up. Is the extra money paid for raw honey worth it? Absolutely! The benefit to the body and your good health is the same as eating raw vegetables compared to eating over cooked vegetables. Raw honey has more nutrients, vitamins and enzymes than pasteurized honey.

Processing raw honey is the most expensive feats of processing honey. The honey does not exceed 125°. The viscosity of honey at this temperature does not allow the honey to flow as freely as 150° pasteurized honey. The honey will not flow freely through a commercial filter so the raw honey slowly runs through a strainer allowing pollen and some wax particles to be included in the raw honey. This is not an unhealthy issue but the clarity issue of raw honey will be less than the commercially processed honey. The taste of raw honey is fabulous! The floral nuances are preserved with a smell of freshness. If you get a chance to hug your beekeeper, do so and tell them how much you appreciate the EXTRA they do to bring you RAW HONEY. Your beekeeper can be stung an average of 3 times a day all summer long while plying the beekeeping trade.

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Raw honey is a honey that has not been pasteurized. Gourmet honey is a honey gathered from one source of flowers, processed separately from all other honey and bottled so that the honey can be enjoyed as a gourmet monofloral honey. The first question is usually how do you get the bees to not mix the honey? Honey is gathered from the flowers that are flowing with nectar. All flowers do not produce nectar at the same time of day or the same time of year. The bees naturally store only one kind of honey in each honey cell. It becomes the beekeeper’s chore to know when the flower that is producing gourmet nectar is blooming, and then remove that box of honey when the floral source is finished. This is EXTRA WORK for the beekeeper! This is why each gourmet honey has its own taste, like wine, all honey DOES NOT taste the same.

Raw honey is preferred over pasteurized honey because the raw honey has all its natural enzymes that aid digestion and good health. The reason a beekeeper would not store all his honey as raw honey is the raw honey has airborne spores in it that could in time cause the honey to ferment. The honey would then have to be dumped. Most honey worldwide is cooked to 140° and is no longer a raw honey. This pasteurization of honey allows the sealed honey to be stored at 60° for at least 3 years without spoilage. Honey that crystallizes (turns solid) has not spoiled. All honey will crystallize, but can be returned to the liquid state by warming the glass bottle of honey in warm water not to exceed 125°.

Raw Gourmet Honey is one huge step further than just unpasteurized honey. Keeping the single flower source honey separate from all the other honey that the bees bring into the hive is a vigilant task performed by the beekeeper. Much more time and trips to the apiary are required in addition to labeling stored honey supers at the honey-house before extracting. If the beekeeper was to sell raw gourmet honey for $15 a pound it would still be a wonderful price compared to the costly efforts that went into presenting Gourmet Raw Honey to the consumer!

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Blackberry honey will be scarce this coming fall!

Extreme drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest last year left a parched look to the hillsides and some trees and grass. That giant sucking sound that was heard in the fall was discounted by the natives as just another rainy season beginning. Most of the flora rebounded quickly and rehydrated. However the blackberry vines and brambles suffered the most. Some of the established canes died completely. It is true that there will still be lots of blackberries along the lanes, pathways and most freeways in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California.

This year the blackberries may not recover to their pre-drought production. This may not be of concern to landowners that fight the spreading blackberry vines, but to the beekeeper this drought will have a serious effect on his honey crop. Blackberry honey is the most abundant gourmet honey worldwide. Blackberry honey is sought after and purchased by honey connoisseurs and great chefs in almost every nation on the planet. Ninety three percent of wild blackberry honey comes from the Pacific Northwest.

The strange bee anomaly of absconding has beekeepers asking for federal aid to ward off a catastrophe of poor honey harvest this year. For some strange reason half of the beehives did not survive the winter. Unless immediate measures are implemented to replace the hives that died, there will be a poor wild blackberry crop not to mention a devastating year for every crop that needs bees as a pollinator.Next time you see a field with beehives, thank your local beekeeper for a bountiful crop of all melons, fruits, most vegetables and nuts.

The good news is that we have our beehives ready and plan to harvest one of the most concentrated wild blackberry counties in Washington State. Our sources of fireweed honey and raspberry honey are in these same counties.

If you have never tasted wild blackberry honey… well this paper is not designed to portray taste very well… the flavor is unlike any honey you have tasted before, it has body, a full robust flavor that lingers in the mouth, a wonderful aroma…it is so good I recommend you try it! Wild blackberry Honey.

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Star Thistle Honey. America is defining its choice for their favorite honey. Editors give star thistle honey five star reviews.

The price: “If you need to ask, don’t buy.”

Taste: “Star thistle honey is golden ambrosia.”

San Francisco Magazine awarded Star Thistle Honey as “One of the 125 Best Things to Eat in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

“Star thistle honey has notes of cinnamon and a long, sweet finish.”

“The only thing needed with star thistle honey is baroque music.”

“Just eat it out of the jar!”

“Star thistle honey should be hidden from the unsophisticated…”

“Do not camouflage the marvelous star thistle honey with any other ingredient…”

“Star thistle honey should be sipped from a silver spoon.”

“For the sake of star thistle honey it should not mixed, combined or eaten with anything other than sultry background music.”

The reports continue to come in from chefs and honey tasters from all across the nation. Star thistle honey is our favorite. You be the judge try this fabulous gourmet honey.

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Cooking with honey is as simple as addition. Pastries cookies in our cakes made with gourmet honey have improved keeping qualities as the honey tends to keep the pastry from drying out. This is very important if you’re going to be baking in advance of a holiday.

Use 1 teaspoon baking soda for every cup of honey used when baking. This helps to neutralize honey’s natural acidity.

To measure honey, moisten the cup or spoon with olive oil before measuring the honey.

It is best to lower the bakery temperature of the oven about 25° to prevent honey baked goods from over browning.

Honey is made of simple sugars that are easy to digest. Because they are in this form they can be absorbed directly into the body. Four fifths of honey, by weight, is in the form of simple sugar. The remaining 1/5 is water, small amounts of protein, vitamins and minerals.

We would love to have you share your favorite honey recipes, remedies and honey stories. Click the Comments button below and submit your recipe. Share this website with a friend!

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Blackberry honey can be harvested in many states. However the mother load of blackberry honey comes from the Pacific Northwest where blackberries grow wild to a point of nuisance. Old farmsteads have been known to “just disappear” under the growth of blackberries.

Rubus laciniatus, the evergreen blackberry, is considered an invasive species but for the beeman of the Pacific Northwest this vine produces one of the finest gourmet honeys of the world. Blackberry honey has a robust flavor with a hint of fruit taste but like most honeys it does not taste like the fruit that it was gathered from.

Blackberry honey is very flavor specific and has a specific unique flavor that cannot be confused with any other honey. This flavor will depend on the geographic location the honey is made in and can vary in color and taste due to the climatic and weather conditions from year to year. Once you have tasted blackberry honey, nothing will take its place. You will ask specifically for the premier nectar of blackberry honey!

Most supermarket honey is bottled from a cooperative and is a combination of many different honeys, with half of the blend imported from China and South America. The floral essences are cooked away with high heat and the natural enzymes are killed. Although by law “100% honey” one gets the idea that all honey tastes the same. That thought could not be further from the truth, just as all wine does not taste the same, all vegetables do not taste the same, neither do all honeys taste the same!

Experience the wonders of gourmet honeys, sample three different honeys and you will agree, the finest are bottled separately.

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Saw palmetto honey, the gourmet honey from the dwarf American palm tree, called a palmetto, ruled the land of Florida when Ponce de Leon landed on its shores looking for the “fountain of youth”. Ponce de Leon undoubtedly waded through the palmettos while exploring the land of flowers.

Elderly Native Indian men had long discovered that eating the fruit of the saw palmetto reduced the frequency of urinating through the night, increased libido and gave the small palm the Indian name that meant ‘’spring of life.”

Real estate developers have destroyed thousands of acres of palmettos to prepare new building sites for homes and businesses. Although small concentrations of saw-palmetto can be found from southern Mississippi to South Carolina, Florida is recognized with the only density of saw-palmetto large enough to gather the berries and honey in commercial quantities. The area from about Sarasota to Miami is identified as the “palmetto belt” as it is only in this region that saw palmetto bares fruits consistently and in quantities that support commercial honey and berry production. High humidity, and steady heat with the absence of winter lows make this local perfect for the saw palmetto.

The saw palmetto grows very slow with trunks that lay flat on the ground, that eventually turns 90° skyward to support a palm head 4 - 6 ft in diameter. Most palmetto patches grow 4 ft tall, however some varieties are as high as 20 ft tall and live to be over 700 years old.

Seeds from the palmetto are slow to germinate taking as much as 6 months to germinate and 6 years to fruit. The honey bee has become the primary pollinator of the saw palmetto, producing a secondary agricultural crop to this annual 120 million dollar industry.

Spain exported the first palmetto berries from St. Augustine Florida in the early 1600s. Based on the European exposure to the palmetto fruit, Italy, Germany and France have many years of laboratory trial findings that tout the lowly Florida palmetto berry as the answer to prostate swelling in men, libido enhancer, baldness inhibitor and urinary complications.

Gourmet Saw Palmetto Honey is produced in the pollinating of the number three herbal supplement sold in the U.S. Garlic and Echinacea are the only supplements that are sold more than Saw palmetto berry.

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Spring has an array of flowers and blooms that capture one’s eye from large, small and every color of the prism. The one bloom that always signals bright sun shiny days are here again in the Pacific Northwest is the delicate white blackberry bloom. These flowers will blanket the cane arbors along fencerows, ditches and steep hillsides.

Upon closer inspection these floral clusters of blackberry blossoms are alive with activity. There is a mild roar coming from the mountains of flowers. One of the finest annual culinary treats is about to begin. Bees are invading the blackberry patch with a vengeance and for good reason. The prolific nectar flow from the blackberry flowers is pure gold! The ancient instinct to build up winter stores causes the bees to work early and stay out late to harvest the abundant honey. Although Oregon has over 6100 acres of cultivated blackberries, this meager amount pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of wild acres of blackberries in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The wild blackberry acreage in the Pacific Northwest easily is greater than the worldwide-cultivated acreage of 66,000 acres.The Gourmet Blackberry Honey is possible only because the wild blackberries are so perfuse, bloom at a time when little other flower nectar is available from different kinds of flowers and most importantly, the weather conditions are ideal for bumper crops of blackberry nectar in the Pacific Northwest.

Mid July starts a blackberry harvest in Lower California and continues to move north. Bremerton, Washington Blackberry Festival occurs in September around Labor Day. Blackberries, syrups, gourmet honey, recipes, cooking and blackberry events highlight this festival. The southern tip of Alaska is about 2-3 weeks behind Washington with its blackberry harvest bounty.

Although this cycle starts with a beautiful bloom, honey bees and a warm spring day to make the sought after blackberry gourmet honey, the day does arrive in the warmer summer days of the blackberry harvest. These wild blackberries can be as big as your thumb to the first knuckle, and a black/purple in color. The blackberry should be all black with no or few red drupelets. The wild blackberries have monstrous thorns! This could be the reason few of these wild berries are harvested for produce. However, the blackberry thorns do not slow the bees. This region has a very important role in producing the majority of the world’s succulent blackberries, raspberries and blueberries.

Blackberry Gourmet Honey is a rare treat eaten by few and known by fewer. Seek out this bold flavor. When this honey is used to baste barbeque meats the results are heavenly. A hot biscuit, butter and blackberry honey, bagels and blackberry honey or just blackberry honey and fine music are exemplary ways to curl up with satisfaction.

Do not hesitate to include this diamond of a taste in your pantry.

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Honey bees are the buzz words of this year, this decade and for all times! You see these little hummers flying in the garden, yard and downtown doing what they do best; seeking out a flower to pollinate and nectar to collect. The honey bees pollinate as an accident while collecting pollen for their babies back at the hive. The collection of nectar for honey is on purpose as the honey and pollen is the only food honey bees eat.

The honey bee is one of the most beneficial creatures on earth to man! Upwards of 45% of ALL FOOD that you eat was created by the pollination of honey bees. Fruits vegetables, nuts, melons, beans, grains and grasses (for animals) are among the list of plants that must be pollinated by the honey bees. Most of the seeds to grow these food plants are made the year before by the pollinating honey bees. Therefore if we stand idly by and do nothing to discover WHAT is causing the honey bees to die off all over the world, we will be in a famine in less than 24 months!

You might have thought, “why do I care if the honey bees are dying?” “It’s about honey which I eat very little, right?” WRONG! A tremendous amount of Honey is used in commercial food processing and bread/pastry preparation. Man and animals are dependent upon the honey bees’ pollination service.

Thank your local beeman for suffering through economic disaster, many tireless nights, (honey bees used in commercial farms for pollination are moved at night when the honey bees are all home from the field) and enduring the missing bee mystery (CCD Colony Collasp Disorder). The biggest way to say thanks is to buy his honey on the internet, from the market, roadside stand or stop by his home and just give your encouragement. Honey is a healthy sugar substitute and would be much better for our diet than refined sugar.

We can care today or starve tomorrow. Today we have a choice…
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