Don't get stung buying honey online

Now I've put honey on eBay I've become a little more concerned about some of the dodgy dealing going on with Honey on the site. This has prompted me to write a quick guide to help people spot some of the cons going on with dodgy honey sales and hopefully help legitimate sellers with quality products, packaged and sold to meet legal requirements reach the sales they deserve.

Don't get stung, read This Guide.

However to save my dear readers the trouble of having to click and follow the link I've also copied the guide to here :) Harvard References (more or less) are at the end. Over time the guide may evolve as I add to it or even spell check it so the latest version will be on the eBay site. I may also add it as a stand alone page on here.

So if you ever buy honey online or plan to do so I suggest you make yourself a cup of tea and read on..

Guide to Buying Honey on eBay

Avoiding scams and unsafe products

This is a brief guide to safely buying Honey on eBay. Having seen very dodgy selling practices, illegally labelled products, misleading and fraudulent claims made by many Honey sellers on eBay and found Trading Standards unwilling to intervene such a guide needed writing. Full disclosure: I'm a Beekeeper, I sell Honey, I occasionally sell Honey on eBay. For further reading and evidence see the references at the end of the guide.
 
The health benefits of Honey are lauded and it's a hugely popular food and health product but Honey is unfortunately also one of the most frequently abused and adulterated products you'll find on the supermarket shelf. Supermarket shelf? Yes indeed. In December 2015 The European Commission published preliminary results of a study into Honey fraud in 30 countries including the UK (JRC-IRRM, 2015). Of the 2237 samples tested 19% were either from the wrong plant, wrong part of the world or were adulterated with sugar, and a further 13% were suspected of sugar adulteration or of different geographical origin to that claimed. What does this mean? It means Honey fraud is so prevalent even big business is being caught out, but that doesn't mean you have to be.
 
The situation online: A number of small scale Beekeepers and Honey sellers in the UK and abroad use eBay to reach customers, myself included. It's a great way to do it. It lets you reach a large customer base and allows customers to access more choice than the supermarket channels allow. You want Honey from your own city or home county? Try eBay. You want Honey from Yemen? Try eBay for that too! The choice is there and so are the customers. Everyone's a winner.
 
Adultery?
Unfortunately not everyone is a winner. As mentioned above Honey is not always what the label claims. Adulteration with cheap syrups (corn syrup, rice syrup, etc) is unfortunately nothing new and was touched upon in the 2007 documentary film The Vanishing of the Bees (Langworthy et al, 2011) and is still a reality as the European Commission study has shown (JRC-IRRM, 2015). Whilst commercial supply chains are working to avoid this it still happens to them and when you're buying direct over the internet from anonymous sources there are even less safeguards in place.
 
Location, location, location?
As mentioned earlier the European Commission found a lot of Honey on shelves isn't from the geographical region given on the label. Initially this might not seem relevant to you however due to different Beekeeping practices around the globe Honey from some countries can contain substances you probably don't want to eat -such as high level of antibiotics (Al-waili et al, 2012). In the UK Beekeepers don't have access to unprescribed antibiotics, but elsewhere in the world its a very different story and there's even been a ban on Honey from specific countries being imported to the European Union due to the high levels of antibiotics in their final product. Despite that it still slips into commercial channels occasionally having been transshipped. Buying direct from a seller who imports or buys honey from unknown sources with no accountability and no audit trails increases your chance of buying Honey that couldn't be sold in a supermarket. Unless you want particularly want tetracycline, oxytetracycline, doxycycline, chlortetracycline or chloramphenicol on your toast or in your tea you need to know where your honey is coming from.
 
 Is it really Organic?
As well as Honey being adulterated or mislabelled regarding content and origin another fraudulent claim often made by sellers is that their Honey is Organic.
 
For a product to be sold as Organic in the UK, whether produced locally or imported, it needs to be tested and certified as Organic by one of the UK's 9 organic control bodies (Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, 2016). It is completely illegal to claim your product is Organic without this certification. Certified Organic products then bear a logo on the label to show it is Certified Organic as who it was certified by, looking on eBay at so called Organic Honey check for a Certified Organic logo. You won't find it for two reasons.

The first being bees are unlikely to forage exclusively on organically reared plants. Foraging bees free range over an area of about 28 square miles around the hive and the bee keeper has no control over what food sources they use in that area. In such a large area it is very unlikely that all the plants the bees access are being grown organically, so to produce Organic Honey one needs huge swathes of land which a small operation is unlikely to have access to.   It's not impossible for example hives may in a large unmanaged woodland but it's unlikely.
 
The second reason is that getting Organic Certification for your product whether it's Honey, wine, potatoes or whatever is a very expensive process and needs repeating every year. The cost of Organic Certification places it well beyond the financial reach of the small scale beekeeper as well as all but the biggest commercial Bee Farmers. If a beekeeper or Honey seller is using eBay as their distribution channel they won't be selling a Certified Organic product, if they claim to be then they're either misrepresenting their product intentionally or do not understand Honey or the relevant food legislation all of which ought to be a red light for potential buyers.
 
What about Manuka Honey?
Ignoring the arguments abut the pros and cons of Manuka honey, the fact is people want to buy Manuka Honey and Manuka Honey is expensive as so little is currently made per season. This has led to a huge industry in fake Manuka Honey. New Zealand produces about 1,700 tons of Manuka Honey in a season but 10,000 tons are sold annually (Creasey, 2014). This means 4 out of 5 jars don't really contain Manuka and that's before factoring the large percentage of Manuka bought up by the pharmaceutical industry before it even reaches the jar. To protect their product New Zealand formed the Unique Manuka Factor Honey Association (UMFHA). There's over 70  suppliers  registered with UMFHA (UMFHA, 2016) so if you are buying Manuka Honey online check the UMFHA website to ensure it's coming from a licensed source.

So what can you do?
So how do you avoid buying fake, dodgy or adulterated Honey? It's not easy but here are a few things to look at  when buying online to help you buy safe, high quality honey.

The Seller: Try and make sure you buy direct from the Beekeeper selling their own honey rather than some guy moving a few buckets of Honey of unknown provenance they picked up at an auction or imported from who knows where and labelled as whatever they like. It's actually not that difficult to tell who is a beekeeper and who's not: look at their other items. Bees don't only make Honey so chances are a Beekeeper on eBay will be advertising other items made from the produce of their hives such as Beeswax Polish, Lip Balm, Wax, Propolis possibly even Bees and beekeeping equipment. Other clues may be in their About Me page if they have one. What does it tell you? Do they have a website, blog, Instagram or Facebook page for their small scale beekeeping operation? You could even just ask them -beekeepers tend to very happily talk about their bees and beekeeping practice.

The Honey: How much honey are they actually selling? There's at least one seller on eBay claiming to be a beekeeper who appears to have sold about 80 tonnes of honey using a number of different adverts. Selling that quantity of honey it would make more sense to do so through commercial channels rather than deal with the financial overheads of eBay fees, Paypal fees and postage as well as the considerable cost in time and effort to pack and process that many single jar sales. The fact they're selling such quantities in this way should ring a few alarm bells for the potential buyer.

The Label:  There are strict laws about food labelling (The Honey (England) Regulations, 2015). A jar of honey must be labelled with the word Honey, a metric measure of weight, the country of origin, a name and address for the supplier and a best before date. If the Honey is being sold through a third party it must also have a batch number.

If you’re seeing jar advertised on eBay with a label that doesn't meet these criteria then the seller isn’t following legislation set by the Food Standards Agency to protect the public. If a seller is ignoring or unaware of this they really should be avoided. If you see a seller claiming their honey is organic but doesn't have any Organic Certification they're fraudulently misrepresenting their product and should also be avoided.

  The Cost: Producing Honey takes work and an investment in both time and money. If you’re seeing Honey being sold for roughly the same price as a tin of Golden Syrup with free postage thrown in chances are you’re not getting what you think.
 
There are no guarantees but these are just a few ways to reduce your chances of being ripped off or buying something unsafe.

References
Al-waili N,Salom K, Al-Ghamdi A. & Ansari MJ (2012) Antibiotic, pesticide, and microbial   contaminants   of honey:  human  health hazards. The.  Scien.  World.  J.; doi: 10.1100/2012/930849.

Creasey S. (2014) Special investigation manuka honey. The Grocer 28/06/2014 p41-45.

Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2016) Organic farming: how to get certification and apply for funding.

JRC-IRRM  (2015)  Coordinated  control  plan  to establish  the  prevalence  of  fraudulent  practices in  the  marketing  of  honey.  Preliminary results. December 2015.

The Honey (England) Regulations 2015 (SI 2015/1348)

Langworthy G., Henein M., Erskine J., Gazecki W. & Page, E. (2011). Vanishing of the bees. Hive Mentality Films & Hipfuel Films.

UMFHA (2016) UMFHA Members . Unique Manuka Factor Honey Association website.

Hull Bees Honey now on eBay!

I've had a few enquiries to the Hull Bees Facebook Page from people wanting to buy my honey who live outside the city so finally I've put some on eBay. There's  454g/1lb and 250g/8.8oz jars of both set and liquid honey.

Hull Bees Honey, now on eBay!

It does mean charging a little more per jar and getting a smaller return per jar than selling locally but allows me to reach a bigger customer base and puts in in the reach of people who can't pop down to West Hull for a jar or twenty. I'll add a link to the banner above at some point.

In other news my Honey is still available at The English Muse on Newland Avenue and I've recently dropped off a batch of Propolis Tincture at Broomsticks, also on Newland Avenue.

Hamilton Converter

Been a while since I've posted about my beekeepery wood butchering efforts. Back in April last year I bought a colony of bees at the Beverley Beekeepers' Association Auction. They came in a National Hive and I've since moved the bees onto Commercial frames which are larger. The floor and roof the hive came with I can use with Commercial boxes but the Brood Box I don't have a use for as it is. However it can be altered to take 8 Commercial frames using a device called a Hamilton Converter. I don't know anything about Mr or Mrs Hamilton but the Converter sits on top of the National Brood Box raising it's height by 5 cm with a rebate for frame lugs alongside the box's thinner walls making a box with enough room for 8 Commercial Frames.

One National Brood Box minus frame runners.

Plans for a Hamilton Converter seem to be strangely absent from the Internet, however a few beekeeping suppliers make them so after looking at a couple of pictures online and checking National and Commercial Brood Box measurements I was able to knockout a rough plan for one. I was on my phone at the time and used Google Keep to rough it out. Never used Google Keep before, it's a note making app that handles a variety of media and includes a drawing faciltiy which I'll be using again.

My rough plan for a Hamilton Converter

The sides that fit in the rebates on the National could be made up using separate pieces but I decided to make them from one piece each. I initially made all the sides 460mm long then later trimmed the thinner sides down and cut rebates in the wider sides so I could make rabbet joints.

Cutting rebates

All four side pieces needed a rebate cutting along the length, the thick sides needed one at the bottom alonwing them to slot into the rebates already in the brood box, and the thinner sides needed rebates at the top to accommodate the frame lugs and runners. I used the tablesaw to cut the rebates the whole length of two pieces of wood. Once cut I then checked the outside edges of box thick and thin sides lined up. There'd be no point proceeding if they didn't.

They line up ok. Little victory.
Although that upside down 9 should be an 11.

That done the corners of the bottom of the wide sides needed trimming to fit into the National as the rebates stop at the outside edges. Hard to follow? I thought so.

Cutting corners

Between steps I kept checking things fitted together and lined up. I wouldn't like to say if it was due to my careful design, craftsmanship or blind luck but everything did.

Test fit.

With the wide sides in place I then trimmed down the thinner edges so they would overlap the wide ones by 20mm at either end, more or less. I used the sides to mark where to cut the rebates for them to fit into so it didn't matter too much if they weren't exactly the length I was aiming at. I also labelled each corner with a letter from A to D to ensure I was using the sides in the rebates I'd measured for them. It gets a little confusing and it's very easy to cut off the wrong part of the wood. I like to mark the offcuts with a big X to make that a little less likely.

Marking up rebates for the joints.

Finally I had all four pieces cut to size. With all the rebates and lugs the wide edges took a total of ten cuts each not including cutting the length.

I've made a flat pack.

All the wood cut to size I then used wood glue and screws to assemble it using the National Box and a huge wood clamp to keep it all in place. For the screws I drilled guide holes with counter sunk heads and lubricated the screws by putting wood glue in the threads. I trimmed some smaller pieces from offcuts and glued them into the ends of the rebates to tidy things up a bit. There's 3 screws per corner which along with the glue is probably overkill.

We're not finished yet.

With the wooden parts assembled it was time to add some metal runners. These protect the edge of the box and by reducing the amount of surface the frame lugs are resting on make it far easier to manage heavy frames when the box is in use. The runners are made to go in a regular size box not a weird cut down hybrid thing like this so I needed to trim them. Rather than dig out a tape measure I just held the runner to the Converter and marked in pen where to cut then lopped the end off with a hacksaw. I then used the shorter runner to mark where to cut the other one.

Metal Tin Bucket, as seen in the July 2016 edition. Wow.

After trimming both runners had lost a nail hole. To replace those I just used some radio pliers to hold a nail in place whilst I knocked it through the runner with a hammer then pulled the bent nails out for recycling. I could've probably used a drill but this was quicker and less messy with no metal filings.

Making new nail holes.

That done I nailed the new shorter runners in place. The radio pliers came in useful for that too as the nails were too short to hold and I didn't fancy banging my fingers on a cold January evening..

Runner in place.

Finally with the woodwork and metal work done it was time to throw on a coat of paint. I've had some ideas about colour coding hive parts to make them more recognisable at a glance and decided to make this a different colour to all the other brood boxes as it's only going to hold 8 frames instead of 11. Mixing a little reddy brown, green and black I wound up with a nice choclate brown colour which I now think would look good on all my brood boxes ah well..

Lower left? Yes, I did knock the paint over.

It was about 3 degrees Celcius outside and my Shed & Fence paint says not to apply it below 10 so I decided to do the painting indoors. I nipped out and bought a newspaper for the occasion and used it to line a big black plastic tray to contain any spillages. This turned out to be a great plan because at one point I did manage to knock over the yoghurt pot I was using as a paint caddy. Oops.

One National Brood Box converted to an 8 frame Commercial Brood Box.

I decided to give the old National Brood Box a lick of paint too, to give it some protection from the elements. With the box finally finished it's gone to wait in the shed till it's needed again. Ideally you should have two brood boxes for each colony you intend to keep so you can artificially swarm them, at the moment I have eight colonies and four spare brood boxes although I also have a few Nucs I can use to split colonies into.

Hull Bees Honey for Sale on Newland Avenue!

There isn't a huge amount for beekeepers to do in Winter, so blog posts are a little thin on the ground however here's an advertisement which should be good news for some of the folk who've asked about buying my honey. :)

Right now my honey is for sale at English Muse, 81 Newland Avenue, Hull, HU5 2AL. If you've walked up Newland Avenue you've probably seen The English Muse with it's distinctive Edwardian shopfront. Check out The English Muse - Coffee & Art Facebook Page for some images of the place.It's an interesting place to visit with an ever changing display of local artists talents on display as well as friendly staff and good food.

Go here! :-D

Buy this! :-D

 So if you're after something to go in your hot toddy or on your toast give them a visit, the paninis are excellent :)

Vintage Makery Do Winter Craft Fair 2016

I'm a little late writing this one up but Saturday 26th November 2016 was the third Vintage Makery Do, organised once again by Vintage Cafe on Chanterlands Avenue -the place for gluten free food and  top notch frothy coffee, they have an Instagram feed too. Each time the event seems to be growing with more stalls.  On arrival I was greeted by a large polar bear wearing a hat and holding a box. The bear wasn't alone, inside the hall there was what I'm fairly sure was a King Penguin with a chick.

Greetings and Salutations

I didn't get time to check out all the other stalls but once again Koh-Koh Chocolates was there, and helped unload my car -cheers! :) I tried a sample of dark chocolate and sour cherry which sold out very quickly. In fact trade was so brisk by the time I took a picture a lot had sold out

Koh-Koh Chocolates' White Chocolate and Raspberry Shards

I'm not sure how long Bricknell Brewery has been around but I've noticed their distinctive brown labelled bottles appear on the bar at 80 Day Beer Haus a while ago. It's a local microbrewery with a range of beers including a number of Pale Ales but also a Chocolate Porter, a Russian Stout and a Victorian era Ale. Making 120-140 litre batches they even grow  their own hops, the beer is bottle conditioned and made without finings -which means this beer is all vegan friendly. I came away with an Anchor Pale Ale, a Double Anchor IPA, a Saazy Blonde and a Cascade Pale.

Bricknell Brewery

I brought along a few jars of honey, beeswax polish, propolis salve and propolis tincture. I've also recently sourced some honey dippers so I brought those along too, I didn't sell many of those but they had an aesthetic value and I gave a couple away to people who made larger purchases. Speaking of aesthetics I also plonked a super and a hive tool on the table.

Local Honey..

I have a good time, saw a few friends and of course sold a lot of honey :) I didn't get many stall pictures this time as I was one of the last people to set up and it was a busy day. As well as being a fun event and an opportunity for sales the event raised £100 for Hull Animal Welfare too so winners all round.

Botchard

I've previously made a few Meads and Melomels and broadened my repertoire to include Banana Wine. This year I decided to have a go at making beer so I bought a used copy of Beers & Stouts 6th Edition (1995) by C.J.J.Berry from eBay. It's subtitled Full Instructions for all types of Beers, Stouts and Lagers. When he says all types he's really not kidding, there's even a dead rooster beer recipe in there. One thing that caught my eye was Honey Botchard. A beer strength Mead. Never heard of it? Me neither. A quick Google search shows me very few people have and the two references to it I found both mentioned Berry's recipe. It looked very simple to make too with only 5 ingredients including the water and takes about 6 weeks to reach drinkable.

I decided to give it a go and strayed from Berry's directions slightly. The recipe calls for 30g Hops, 560g Honey, 4.5 litres water, yeast and yeast nutrient. It's pretty basic but probably a good place to start and I'm sure any eager home brewers out there will be able to tweak and build on it.

I didn't know anything about hops. Not a thing. Now I know a little. But not a lot. There's a huge range of Hops and using them yields different flavours and aromas to suit different beers. I opted for one called Columbus or Tomahawk from eBay. This hop has 14.3% Alpha Acids. I don't really know what that means. Might be important though. It's described as a "high alpha variety" and is "used as a bittering hop with an intense aroma." I actually picked it because the name reminded me of the time I found a toy tomahawk on nightclub floor. At £2.25 for 25g including postage and packaged as a sort of huge tea bag  for ease of use it's an experiment with low financial risk.

For the honey I had half a 250g jar of my own set honey I'd been working through and a very granulated jar of liquid honey I'd kept back from a previous year. Doesn't matter that one was set and one was granulated liquid, they'll both melt the same.

Botchard ingredients minus yeast nutrient

First step is to boil up some water and simmer the hops for about half an hour. I used that £1.10 for 5 litres bottled water from Tesco. It's cheap, it's water, and probably has less crap in it than what comes out of my taps -Hull is riddled with lead pipes.. people don't really talk about it. I poured half the bottle into a huge saucepan I'd sterilised earlier and threw in the Tomahawk teabag, when I heard it boiling I turned the heat down then started making a 23 litre batch of beer, reracked two demijohns of Banana Wine and one demijohn of Kiwi Melomel. By the time I was more or less done I figured a half hour must have passed, although it was probably more like 90 minutes. If you really know your stuff there's a lot of complex calculations about steeping hops -how long on what temperature and so on you can do but I don't so I just left it till I'd finished doing other things. Using a sterilised spoon I whipped out the now huge tomahawk teabag -it'd  expanded a lot  in the liquid, and turned off the heat. Once the used hops were cooled I removed it from the bag and gave to my chickens but they weren't interested. I'm not too surprised really it smells pretty gross and tastes bitter as hell.

Berry says to actually simmer the honey for the same 30 minutes the hops are in but I did want to compromise the quality of the honey, I spooned the honey in along with some cold water and gave it a stir then left it to dissolve. Some mead recipes talk about boiling honey up as part of the process which I did with my first batch of mead but after a little more reading I stopped doing it and never had a problem. It does seem a bit pointless using a high quality raw honey if you're then going to ruin it by boiling, might as well use some cheap supermarket honey that's already been compromised by heating if that's your plan.

Once cooled Berry says to strain the liquid into a demijohn, I guess that must be to remove the hops, he wrote the book in 1963 so I guess compressed hop pellets prepared in teabag type things weren't the norm back then, so I decided to skip the straining. As I poured it into the demijohn I did notice some tiny particles in the bottom though. Once in the demijohn I threw in some yeast and yeast nutrient -he doesn't say how much of either so I went with a teaspoon of each, if there's not enough yeast I expect the yeast will just make more anyway, not so sure about the nutrient so I just crossed my fingers. The full demijohn didn't look very impressive to be honest, just a gallon of murky brownish water.

I appear to have made a gallon of dishwater.

Berry says to ferment it for 10 days in a warm room before bottling and leaving somewhere cool for a month. I left it in an upstairs room to stay warmish. After 10 days I was seeing about a bubble per second in the airlock and the liquid had lightened in colour to something approaching real lemonade and was starting to clear as sediment fell to the bottom of the demijohn. I topped up the water level a little with more bottled water. In total I used nearly 5 litres.

Into the fridge, looks like orange juice now

Moving a few shelves I put the demijohn complete with airlock into the fridge and left it overnight to drop the temperature then the next day I stirred a leaf of gelatin dissolved in bottled water by zapping it in a microwave a few times. You can buy finings but they're mostly just gelatin with a price hike although I think one the chemicals I use with my Harris Quickfine Filter for the meads is Isinglass. I gather what happens is the bits of yeast, proteins and whatever that are suspended in the liquid somehow bind to the gelatin as it sinks to the bottom of the demijohn, then you siphon the drink out leaving the sediment behind.

Berry says to siphon it into flagons which I think are the ceramic cider bottles Windy Miller in Camberwick Green used to drink his very strong homebrew cider from before passing out every week (they don't make kids programmes like they used to) but I don't think it really matters as long as you use a bottle that can contain the pressure of a carbonated drink without exploding or firing off it's closure. That rules out wine bottles but there's plenty of options still, beer bottles, cider bottles, plastic fizzy drink bottles, Champagne bottles, Prosecco bottles -they'll all do the job.

I used a bottling wand I'd removed from it's tap and attached to a regular siphon to fill the bottles. I just shoved the wand onto the end of the siphon's plastic tap. It didn't fit very well though and after it slipping out and losing drink on the floor I decided to hold the thing together whilst I used it. Next time I'll just attach a bit of hose to the wand for a better fit on the siphon tap. When it's working the wand is very easy to use and better than the Buon Vino Super Automatic Bottle Filler I've used before.

Bottled Botchard

I pressed some saved some Leffe Bottles into service and a half litre beer bottle. I could've actually filled 6 75cl bottles is there hadn't been some spillage along the way. Ooops. A note on bottles: they come in a variety of colours but brown provides the most protection from UV light for the contents, green provides less protection and clear provides none. I also gather the darker glass provide mores protection than lighter coloured glass. The proliferation of green bottles seems to be because they're cheaper and easier to make  then brown ones.

Corking Belgian Beer style bottles is a little trickier than regular wine bottles or capping beer bottles. The cork only goes half way in and then needs a metal cage attaching, they also use a wider cork than wine bottles. I watched a youtube video on how to recap belgian beer bottles then ordered champagne corks and cages and and a two lever corker online. The corker isn't really meant for wider champagne corks but it works. I had a practice run following the tutorial on an empty bottle and found the cork got pulled up a bit when removing the corker so I wound up putting them a little further into the bottle than required to compensate for that. I just used a pen to twist the wire cage tabs tight. Some labels were hastily knocked up in P-Touch Editor, printed on the thermal printer and slapped on the bottles. Almost got them straight. As these aren't for sale (no alcohol license) I didn't bother looking at legal labelling requirements.

Can see my reflection in those.

After bottling they were then left upright in an upstairs room for the remaining yeast to ferment the priming sugar an carbonate the contents. It should only take a week but as I'd used a little gelatin to clear the drink there was less yeast in the bottled Botchard than if I'd followed the original recipe so I gave it a fortnight to carbonate.

Berry recommends ageing it somewhere cool after carbonation but I was in a hurry to test it so after thirteen days I popped the smaller bottle into a fridge and left it overnight to cool. Whilst waiting I killed a little time by engraving a beer glass with my Dremmel, idle hands and all that.

In the bottle the Botchard was very clear but there was no way to tell if it was carbonated or not till it was opened. Carbonation was very successful. You probably can't tell in the photo due to condensation on the glass but the botchard came out crystal clear. Whilst it's made with hops it's still a mead rather than a beer. I think it probably qualifies as a Methyglin due to the presence of hops. The finial product is a light refreshing drink a little closer to Champagne than beer. I'm not sure of the alcohol content as I didn't bother checking the specific gravity at all during the making but I gather fermenting honey tends to ferment more completely than regular sugar so yields a higher alcohol content.

First glass of Botchard!
I can also cross glass engraving  off of my bucket list now.

I now need to put the remaining bottles someplace cool and dark to age. As they're closed with corks they need to be someplace the corks wont dry out and shrink which rules out using a fridge for long term storage. I'll probably put them in the brick outbuilding as my homegrown potatoes, onions, garlic and so on seem to last very well in there without shrivelling up. They'll need to be stored upright as the priming sugar is fermented in the bottle so as with any live beer there should be a little sediment in the bottom of the bottle.

So there we have it. An extremely easy drink to make and another reason to buy Honey, if you needed one. I think you could probably use a single pound jar of honey for a one gallon batch. Now to think about scaling up the recipe for a five gallon batch...

Tomorrow: Vintage Makery Do

Where else would you go on a cold November afternoon?

It's the Vintage Makery Do 2016 Winter Craft Fair tomorrow. 1-3pm Saturday, 26th November, at St Ninian's Church, Chanterlands Avenue, Hull. I'll be bringing along a lot of local honey as well as propolis products and a few other things.