What is Craft Honey?
Like craft beer, Craft Honey is different by design.
Its flavor is decided not by food engineers or flavor scientists, but by the bees, Mother Nature and, to a lesser extent, by the beekeepers.
Rather than blend a season’s worth of honey into a large, homogeneous batch (boring!), Craft Honey is small-batch honey that is made intentionally.
By harvesting right after a specific flower blooms, beekeepers can capture different flavors of honey throughout the spring and summer. This results in a variety of honey colors and favor profiles that are best described with words used by wine connoisseurs.
Imagine a beekeeper in North Carolina harvesting honey in the middle of the spring honey flow. If the resulting honey is dark in color with a rich buttery taste and smooth caramel feel, then the bees have been visiting the giant tulip poplar blossoms.
If the honey has an amber hue with a bright fruity flavor and a zestiness that lingers on the tongue, then the bees passed up the tulip poplar and spent their time pollinating the small, white flowers of the black locust.
It’s not unusual for hives in the same apiary to produce different honeys at the same time. The Craft Honey producer recognizes and takes advantage of Mother Nature’s diversity. This is in contrast to most commercial beekeepers who pour a year’s worth of honey into 55-gallon drums and ship it off to bulk packers where it is heat treated, blended with honey from who-knows-where, and bottled.
Mass-produced honey, like mass-produced beer, may be consistent, but it is also blah and unexciting. Not only are the different flavors blended away to a lackluster result, the heat treatment kills the natural enzymes found in raw honey.
At Craft Honey, our honey is not heat processed and has never seen the inside of a 55-gallon drum. Our dedicated backyard beekeepers harvest it by hand, filter it lightly to remove the beeswax, and quickly bottle it to preserve the fresh-from-the-flower flavor and natural enzymes.
CraftHoney.net is designed to share the benefits of raw, local honey with discerning customers, like you.
A medium-sized honey packer might process 10 million pounds of honey annually. By contrast, most of the honey varieties we sell are produced in batches measured in hundreds of pounds.
If you buy a variety of honey you love, we recommend you immediately buy more because when that honey is gone, it is often gone for good. The delicate balance of weather and other environmental factors that produced that honey may not occur again for years.
We also offer a wide range of bee-related or bee-inspired products for “bee people,” which is to say people who are attracted to or fascinated by bees, those who want to save the bees, and folks who just like bees and bee-related stuff. This includes most beekeepers, of course, making Craft Honey a great place to pick up gifts for the beekeeper in your life.
In addition to our honey, every product we sell is produced or designed by a backyard beekeeper, a homesteader, or other small producer, often assisted by their spouse or other family members.
The Craft Honey Promise
- Every drop of honey we sell has been harvested by a backyard beekeeper, homesteader or other small U.S.-based honey producer.
- All our honey is raw and unprocessed. It is not pasteurized or subjected to high heat.
- While our honey is lightly filtered to remove wax and other impurities, filtering does not remove the pollen or affect the enzymes and other beneficial properties of honey.
- Our honey is unadulterated. No fillers, syrups, artificial flavors, chemicals or other foreign substances have been added.
- The bulk of each honey sale goes to the individual or family that owns the beehives, cared for the bees and harvested the honey.
- Almost everything we sell was made or designed by beekeepers.
- Our beekeepers are dedicate to protecting their bees and supporting the honeybee population in North America.
- A portion of our profits are donated to to a nonprofit beekeeper association focused on education, beekeeper training and mentoring.
