Raw Honey

Honey can vary in taste and color.

What kind of vessel the honey is put into has a huge impact on how the honey will taste. Glass is the best container to put honey in as it helps the honey to retain its original taste. That is my number one choice. I prefer most of my containers especially if it is for food to be in glass containers. Say NO to chemicals leaching into your foods! 😛

If you take that same honey and put it into a metal container or a plastic container, both, will have a different taste. Both metal and plastic leech chemicals into the honey and can affect the flavor and the same goes for the color of the honey. The vessel can cause a reaction and the honey color can change. But to be fair, nature changes the honey color as well. For instance raw honey gets darker as it ages.

Flavor, taste, and color can also be different from season to season as well and where/what flowers the bees are getting the pollen from.

Now let’s talk “raw” honey. The main difference is raw honey is NOT heated. The honey you mostly see in stores; the clear, liquid honey, has been treated with heat through pasteurization. It gets filtered this way. Processing honey this way, kills most of the beneficial enzymes and nutrients.

Raw honey gets some filtration action, but they do it in such a way that the good stuff is still in the honey.  Unprocessed honey will give you the maximum amount of all natural antioxidants and the benefits as a whole food.

What I look for when buying honey is the wording raw and the wording un-pasteurized on the label. But it is not as simple as that; I know annoying! Make sure you know where your honey comes from and you can trust the source. Some honey producers will mix their honey with outside sourced honey. It’s cheaper for them to do this and what you are getting is not a good quality honey. Check it’s source!

Raw honey should look thick and cloudy. (see picture). It is a solid at room temp and of course a liquid when heated. The cloudy look means the honey still contains all the healthy goodness; vitamins, minerals, live enzymes, bee propolis and pollen granules.

Notice how the honey stays on the spoon and the color is not clear.

There are also a variety of unpasteurized honey you may have heard of; there is the raw honey, and buckwheat honey, manuka honey (from New Zealand), wild flower, and a few others.

For the healthiest, best for you honey, go for the raw. You want it unpasteurized, unfiltered, unheated, unprocessed, as it comes straight out of the bees home! Keeping all the goodness in so your body can reap all the benefits!

Go raw!

In awesome health, Koko