Honey is the sweet substance we all know made by honeybees. Bees collect nectar from flowers, mix it with unique enzymes, deposit it into honeycomb and let it “ripen” until it contains only about 18% moisture. It is essentially highly concentrated flower nectar.
Beekeepers use centrifugal force to spin the honey from the comb during extraction. At that time, pollen gets mixed in with the honey as bees store pollen alongside honey in the honeycomb cells.
The liquid honey is then strained to remove wax particles. At this point, we have what the bees produced- raw honey. It is a living food as the enzymes honey contains are active and beneficial to human health.
Much commercially-available honey, however, is highly processed. It is filtered to remove pollen and heated to pasteurize it. This is done to preserve the shelf-life of the product. If the honey contains pollen and is not pasteurized, honey will crystallize much more quickly. Most people expect their honey to remain liquid and squeeze from a bear, and this presentation will not work with raw honey.
Our honey is bottled in a wide-mouth jar so you can reach the bottom once the honey crystallizes inside. We do not filter or pasteurize our honey. It is warmed to a maximum temperature of 110 degrees F to make it flow more easily during bottling, but that is all.
When honey is raw, it has a much richer, nuanced flavor than processed honey does. Honey may vary in color and look cloudy as it crystallizes and solidifies. That is completely natural and fine – honey is a natural product, and it’s not going to be totally uniform every single time. The small variations are actually a benefit to you, because that’s how you know you’ve found an honest source.
Note: There is no federal standard for raw honey. We follow the simple principle that our honey should be as close to the way bees made it as possible. However, the state of Utah did pass a Raw Honey Amendment, defining raw honey. We applaud their effort and mirror and exceed their standard.