People like to buy local. In the case of honey, it seems like there are decent folk medicine beliefs that also justify shopping locally. People with allergies swear that local raw honey helps build a little resistance to the unpleasant pollen reactions in the spring and… in every Ohio season except for winter.
Health benefits aside, there are also claims of clear flavor superiority of raw local honey over the grocery stuff. That seems like a claim worth testing in the Deathmatch Laboratories. Actually, any trial that involves copious consumption of sugar seems like a worthy effort.
So, the flavor of honey would probably depend on the stuff the bees eat. The grocery honey bear doesn’t come in different bee-diet flavors. It comes in one flavor: clover. This lack of variety has always seemed perfectly okay.
Local raw honey comes in several flavors. In fact, the Honeyrun Farm has seasons of honey: spring, summer and fall. This particular trial involves the spring honey, because that is the bottle that ended up in the grocery bag. As luck would have it, it’s also listed as the “favorite” on the farm’s website.
The spring stuff is a lighter brown than the honey bear. It’s golden, where the honey bear is crayon brown. The texture of both is predictably thick and sticky.
And low and behold, the flavor is different.
This particular spring raw honey is not actually more intense than the processed stuff found in big grocery stores. It was lighter in flavor, almost sunny. The bear, meanwhile, had the stronger flavor. If you had to use words to define it, you might say it had molasses accents -but that terminology is really too intense to be accurate. Still, it was curious that the grocery stuff seemed to come on stronger.
Of course, there’s always room for more trials when it comes to sugar. And the Honeyrun Farm website notes that the different seasons of honey have different flavors. You can do your own investigation with flavors by visiting the stores that sell it listed here: www.honeyrunfarm.com.