I have had several people contact me about what to do with honey that seems too runny.
- Should I try to dry it?
Trying to dry honey that has been extracted can be a pretty tough thing to do but it can be done. It is better to dry the honey in the frames before you extract. The surface of the honey is where ti does the drying and the most surface exposed is on the face of the frame. Stacking the supers up so that a fan can circulate air through them can make a big difference. I used this method on a number of supers this year that were not capped and combined air flow with a room dehumidifier and pulled several percentage points of water out of the honey. Once the honey is extracted it is tough to get it to dry out without adding heat and time into the equation. Heat for any lengthy time will darken honey, remove flavor, and denature enzymes. The deeper the bucket the less surface area is exposed to air and the longer it will take to dry.
- Should I mix it with my thicker honey?
If you have some very dry honey this might be the thing to do with it. Before you do this it would be very helpful to know what the moisture levels are in each batch and do a small mix to see if the numbers work out right. I worry a lot if honey is above 20% moisture content. Sugar tolerant yeasts that are naturally present in honey can begin to grow and we all should know that yeast growing in a sweet plant juice yields wine or vinegar. Both of these are pretty nice products if the brewer controls the process but if you just let the honey ferment on its own the results will be far from palatable. (I will save mead making for another newsletter) Tang made some good honey vinegar and perhaps she will work up a how to make vinegar article for some future newsletter as well.
- How should I bottle it?
This honey can be bottled like any other honey but realize that it has a shorter shelf life and shouldn't be sold as regular honey because the consumer expects honey to be shelf stable and technically it could be argued that it is not even honey because it is not fully cured yet. Probably best to call it a syrup, nectar, or something other than honey. However, wet honey generally has better flavor and smells better than fully cured honey. It makes great syrups and toppings as well as sweetener for teas, oatmeal, and the like.
- How should I store it?
From the books that I have read, wet honey will not ferment if it is stored at temperatures below 50 degrees. Apparently, yeast needs a bit of a temperature to make it go. Also it can be pasteurized but that pulls aroma and flavor out.
One thing to think about is that honey when it crystallizes increases in moisture content as the solids (sugar molecules) leave the moisture behind as they build into crystals. Depending on how the honey sets up the free moisture can build by three or four percent quite easily. This is something to consider if you mixed the wet with the dry honey and got the total batch down to 18 or 19 percent moisture. Make sure that it is less likely to crystallize by filtering it pretty well and heating it up prior to storage. I don't mean to imply that this heat is the heat of pasteurization but rather the heat to retard crystal formation. Somewhere in the area of 120 to 125 degrees should be sufficient to keep it liquid for a number of months. While I am not sure what the temperature needs to be to pasteurize honey I would expect it to be in the range of 160 degrees or so.
If you would like to have your honey measured for water content bring some to the meeting or send a sample to Steve at the return address on this newsletter. You can put some honey in a soda straw and heat seal the ends of the straw. Stick it in a zip lock bag in case it leaks and mail it off. Testing requires about a drop of honey, so a half-length straw is more than enough to do the job.