Honey, Honey
Is there anyone who doesn't like honey? Not that I've ever found, but there are people who absolutely love it. After telling some of our friends we were going to Marshall's Honey Farm up in American Canyon near Napa, we suddenly had a good-sized list of people who wanted us to pick up some. Given the comments in our group, members of the B.A.C.C.H.U.S. Slow Food convivium based in Berkeley, we were not the only ones with such a list.
And while picking up some honey is easy to do, picking out the honey is much harder. Marshall's maintains hives all over the Bay Area, and the farm produces a huge variety of honeys from the different hives. Some of their honeys are blends, such as Saints & Sinners, which is a blend from hives at the Dominican College in San Rafael and San Quentin, the famous prison near Larkspur and San Rafael. Some are "pure" samples such as Jailbreak, which is made exclusively from the San Quentin hives. Some are more general blends, such as Contra Costa Wildflower, and some are from specific flowers, such as their Pumpkin Blossom Honey. When they selected some for a tasting, we had about twenty honeys to try, and there were plenty which didn't get pulled out.
The overwhelming number of varieties is a byproduct of the farm's artisanal nature. Virtually everything is done by hand, the only machines I saw being a device for removing the wax caps from the cells of the honeycomb and a centrifuge for efficiently extracting the honey, and so the farmers have more opportunities to experiment with different blends. Or to modify blends based on the characteristics of the component honeys.
Doing everything by hand might seem laborious, but most of the work in honey farming is done by the bees. And boy do they work. We learned that a healthy hive makes approximately 100 pounds of extra honey a year. And that's only 10% of the total amount of honey produced by the hive; the other 900 pounds is consumed by the bees. We further learned that an average worker bee only produces 1/12 of a teaspoon in her 4-6 week lifespan. Getting from 1/12 of a teaspoon to 1000 pounds involves some pretty mindboggling numbers. Once the honey is made, the honey farmer removes the honeycomb from the hive and extracts the honey. No additional processing is required.
Once we left the "honey house" where the honey is extracted and put into jars, it was time to try some of the different honeys. They conducted the tasting in their little store, which sells various honey-related items as well as beeswax candles, made on the farm from the beeswax left in the honeycombs after the honey is extracted. This is part of the farm's overall ethic to waste as little as possible. Even the honey which isn't extracted from the honeycombs is dealt with by leaving it out for the bees actually on the property to reprocess.
One interesting item we learned is that if you suffer from allergies caused by pollen, you can alleviate them by taking a small amount of locally produced honey, since it's made with the same local flowers which are causing your distress. Certainly the theory sounds good, but one could also argue that after a couple of weeks, the flowers might have stopped releasing pollen anyway. Certainly there are less pleasant homeopathic remedies, however!
Here are my tasting notes, which incorporate some of Melissa's comments as well. When you have twenty or so honeys to try, it's astonishing how different each one is, much like wine tastings. I should note that all the honey was delicious, but some stood out more than others.
- Big Valley Wildflower - good, but not spectacular
- Star Thistle - this was Melissa's favorite, an opinion shared by some other people in our group as well. It was a close second for me; I preferred the CIA honey (see below). But it's a knockout honey and we left with a big jar for ourselves and small jars for our friends.
- Orange blossom - obviously floral, but I found it somehow too sweet, though obviously that doesn't make much sense when talking about honey. Hard to pinpoint, but it came across as more cloying than I like.
- California Wildflower - this was good, but its most notable feature was how thick it was; we really had to work to get any out of the bottle.
- Honey, I'm Home - this is the honey made by the bees on the Marshall's Farm property. As I mention above, these bees not only service the local wildflowers but the excess honey on the honeycombs, and perhaps because of this I found this honey to have a nice level of complexity. A lot of flavors going on, with none really jumping to the forefront.
- Honey So Fresh - "the bees don't even know it's gone" is the way they complete the title. This is honey harvested just in the last week. I found nice herbal notes and a little menthol taste as well.
- Jailbreak - from the hives at San Quentin. The most obvious aspect of this honey was not in its taste but its texture; it was very gritty. Perhaps the honey had merely begun to crystallize (which, we learned, is easy to deal with; just remove the lid and partially submerge the jar in a hot-water bath -- 110 degrees-- until the crystallization goes away). Certainly Saints & Sinners didn't have this problem, and it incorporates this honey.
- CIA - this is taken from the hives in the Culinary Institute of America's herb garden. It was my favorite, slightly edging out the star thistle, with a nice level of complexity and nice herbal notes. We also left with a jar of this for ourselves.
- Eucalicious - made from honey produced from eucalyptus flowers, the menthol flavor characteristic of the plant jumped right out at me, though Melissa found it more subtle.
- Saints & Sinners - made from the hives at San Quentin and at the Dominican College. This was quite good, with a nice combination of flavors
- Pumpkin Blossom - one of their most expensive honeys, this honey had a very pronounced floral flavor, and was delicious.
- Buzzerkeley - made from hives around Berkeley, my tasting notes merely say "good"
- Manzanita - my comments from Melissa on this honey mention a noticeable tang
- Wild West Wildflower - this was good, with an interesting complexity. It was the darkest of the lot (we proceeded from lightest to darkest, which is just an artifact of the flowers that went into the honey)
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