Drought Honey

 About 2 weeks ago Gary went to work on a well at a place where they sell honey.  The lady gave him this jar of it.  It is quite different.  I am not sure how accurately this photo captures the color, but it is unusually dark.  She told Gary that this honey was from last summer.

Last summer we had a drought.  There were few, if any, wild flowers blooming, so the lady said the bees had to source their pollen from other plants, resulting in a much, much lower honey production and much darker honey.  (And another note; I thought perhaps she had just bottled it up so something because it had a bit of foam on it, and bubbles in the honey in the jar.  But Gary said she had just handed him the jar, as is, straight off the shelf.)

I took some of it over to a friend for her to sample, because I thought it was so interesting.  When she opened the jar the first thing she said was; "Oh, it smells like whiskey!"  This made me laugh.  Yes, it does have a strong smell; and a slightly stronger taste.

It's really good; just super different from store honey, even the 100% pure honey you can find at a store.

One snippet of trivia that I remembered from my botany class in my college years is that gin is made from cedar berries; which made me wonder if the bees perhaps had access to cedar trees.  A quick Google tells me that whiskey is made from different grains.  I have never had the opportunity to compare the smell of gin and whiskey, but maybe the alcohol content would make them similar.

So I went further on in my Google research and learned some interesting things.

Raw honey has yeast in it and can ferment, (think mead).  Fermented honey will taste and smell like alcohol and it will get foamy.  

Here is a quote from a Google search.  I'm not sure of the source.

"When the moisture level of the honey is slightly elevated and the temperature is warm, fermentation may occur, due to the enzymes and the yeast in honey."

 So the foam on top of the honey was from it fermenting, I believe, and that is why it smelled like alcohol.  

So from what I gathered from my research; during the drought last summer the bees sourced their pollen from plants other than wildflowers, which can change the color and taste of their honey. It would also seem that the heat during the drought started the fermentation process of the honey.  I am not sure if the honey was able to have a high moisture content during the drought, but perhaps if it's hot enough it will ferment it anyway.

Interesting.