mmmmm Honey Monster....

Do you remember that feeling when you had butterflies in your tummy because you were so excited but also so nervous about taking something into school, that you were really proud of making but didn't know what your teacher and friends would have to say about it?
Well, that was me on Tuesday night...
It was official tasting night down at the Apiary.
An opportunity for local bee keepers to get together, taste and score (gulp!) each others honeys!

I handed over my unlabelled anonymous jar and it was added to the line up...(I worked hard to keep visions of "The Usual Suspects" out of my mind...)

Can you believe that so many colours and textures are possible?

Honey tasting is serious stuff - we had proper official instructions...

So armed with score cards and straws the tasting commenced...

Perhaps we didn't take it that seriously....there was plenty of gentle conversation on just how little honey there had been to harvest this year...just how much feeding the bees were going to need to get them through the winter...and as the pile of used straws got bigger and bigger...

 

The comments about the honey drifted into the room...."so pale it looks like lemon juice",...."is that black treacle or liquorice I can taste",..."mmmm smell the lime"...
Throughout the evening rumours circulated of a "red herring honey" -apparently a neighbouring apiary had added a Sainsbury's basic to their honey tasting evening and had been horrified when members chose it as the winner..would our committee try the same trick on us? would we fall for it?
Score cards built up and were carefully recorded at mission control...

Soon enough a clear leader became apparent.

Which severely disappointed at least one honorary member who had been waiting patiently all evening for his expert opinion to be called upon for final adjudication...

The overall winner, scoring 335, (Colour 107:  Texture 102;  Taste 126) won on taste, had only been extracted from the frames the previous weekend...

Thankfully no Sainsbury's honey was there - but a £1.89 blended honey from Lidl scored 84 on taste placing it 20th.

The pure oilseed rape honey scored 88 on taste placing it 15th

But despite its caramel (or was it treacle?) smell and thick, sticky texture the forest honey from Malawi didn't appeal to many of us, scoring the lowest at 53 on taste

And what about my entry?... well here it is...

The official score for #23 was 297 (Taste 95: Texture 97: Colour 105) placing it 5th overall on the night

But do you know what, it doesn't really matter...it means more to me that son #2 has declared my honey on toast  to be his favourite breakfast EVER...and all the friends who've tasted it say they can taste the flowers  and the look on Dean's face when he exclaimed "That's nothing like the inside of a locket" was priceless...

So all I need to work out is how I give that feedback to the bees so we can start again next spring...