Judging the quality of honey by tasting it

[alfazer]

I have a co-worker from Poland who is crazy about buying only good quality honey. He believes all the honey in the shops here is poor quality and is amazed to find out that I keep bees.

Anyway, he buys honey through a source that brings it from Poland for him, but he is beginning to doubt if it is really "good quality" and wants me to taste it for him soon. I have little knowledge of judging honey apart from testing for water content. Is there any way for the average person to tell if the honey contains sugar syrup or corn syrup for example, or if it has been pasteurised in a factory?

He also buys bee-bread in a jar, which is something I have no experience of.

I tell him I'm really not an expert in these matters but believes that I must know good honey because I keep bees.

Any advice on how to judge his honey?

 

[Swarm]

Don't. Give him a jar of yours and tell him it's guaranteed good quality. Straight from the hive, etc.
I have a friend in Bulgaria who keeps bees and I have some of his honey. It's a nice colour, dark ruby red and it tastes OK but I wouldn't rate it against my own.

 

[masterBK]

The younger you are the better your sense of taste and smell so it is no good asking a man of eighty to taste/smell the honey and give a vakliod judgement as by then he/she may only have half the sensory cells in their nose and tastebuds that they had when they were twenty. People also vary a great deal in their ability to distinguish between different honies and there is a learning element too as I found I got better at it over the first ten years of judging honey during which time I had tasted several thousand jars of honey at numerous shows (I started judging in 1983 but have been entering my own honey in shows since 1970). Unfortunately at 71yrs my senses are beginning to wane and I intend giving up being a honey judge in the next year or so).

In some honey shows there is the "black jar" class where the honey is purely judged on its taste and aroma (the jar is surrounded by black paper to prevent the judge being influenced by visual clues like cloudiness or specs of debris).

In summary ask a qualified northern Irish honey judge for their opinion e.g Michael Young

 

[alfazer]

Yes, I enter black jar category at our show every year, but never picked up a place. It's also the most popular category, probably because it needs no prep.
I've tasted quite a few different honeys, stewarding with a judge at a honey show once, but really wouldn't have a clue about forming any kind of objective opinion on them. From what I see a lot of it is down to personal preference and nothing like wine tasting for example. I know I'm not skilled at tasting when I compare myself to my wife when wine tasting.

So I gave him a jar of my 2018 honey and a small jar of my 2017 ling. I think he was pretty impressed with the ling, which he hadn't tried before. (I was even explaining to him what a heather plant was, lol) He's going to swap me a jar of his polish honey to try.