Methodus Sensoria Mellis

Color

Colour is the first thing you see, and the easiest to misjudge: the same honey looks darker in a thick jar than in a thin layer. It is measured on the Pfund scale, graded in millimetres, from water white to dark amber.

The colour scale below follows it. Look at the honey while it is liquid: once crystallised, it looks paler than it is. Then slide the marker to its shade.

Colour speaks of where a honey comes from. It does not rank honeys from best to worst.

Textura

Most honeys crystallise over time. Honey holds more glucose than its water can keep dissolved: part of it settles out as crystals, fine or coarse. Honeys rich in glucose, such as oilseed rape, sunflower or dandelion, set quickly, oilseed rape sometimes while still in the hive; honeys rich in fructose, such as black locust or sweet chestnut, stay liquid for a long time. A cool room, between 10 and 20 °C, speeds crystallisation. The standards recognise liquid honey and crystallised honey alike.

Note the state of the honey and the size of the crystals as the tongue feels them.

Odor

Smell comes before taste.

First nose. Stir the honey with a spoon and bring it close: the note that leads at once is the first nose.

Second nose. Wait ten to twenty seconds and smell again. One or two further notes appear, or the first one settles.

Record how strong the smell is (none, faint, distinct, powerful) and no more than three notes, taken from the aroma wheel. Beyond three, words stop describing the honey and start covering it.

The aroma wheel gathers seven families. It is read twice: on the nose for odours, in the mouth for aromas.

Gustus

Honey is not drunk; it melts. Tasting it unfolds in three moments.

The attack. As it melts, the basic tastes arrive. Sweetness is always there; acidity and bitterness may be absent. Saltiness is rare: note it only if it shows.

The heart. The aroma rises from the back of the mouth to the nose. Note its strength and one to three words from the aroma wheel, often the same families as on the nose, not always.

The finish. Once swallowed, the taste lingers for a moment or for long: fleeting, medium, long, very long. Sometimes a note appears only at the end, such as the bitterness of some chestnut honeys, or a freshness: this is the aftertaste. One word is enough.

Some honeys also leave a sensation, astringent, cooling or prickly. Note it if it is there.

Genius loci

A honey begins as a landscape. Bees forage around the hive within a few kilometres, and what they find there depends on forest, meadow, scrubland, savanna or town.

The landscape chart offers eleven. Choose one: the engraving shows its typical plants and the families of the wheel most often met there.

A landscape does not explain a whole honey. It draws its frame.

Elevation profile

Altitude changes honey: higher up, the same plant flowers later, by one to nearly five days per hundred metres depending on the species in the Alps, and other plants take over.

Elevation profile, shown as an example. On each sheet it shows the relief around the apiary and its altitude, without revealing where it lies.

Flowers

The landscape tells where; the flowers tell what. The sheet first records the kind of plant the bees visited: a tree, a shrub, a wild plant, a cultivated plant.

A honey is multifloral when no single flower leads. It carries the name of a flower only if it comes wholly or mainly from that flower and has its character, which pollen, sensory and physico-chemical analysis together can establish.

Honeydew stands apart. It is not nectar but a sugary liquid left by small insects on the leaves and needles of trees, which the bees gather. It often makes dark honeys.

The herbarium can be browsed by kind of plant.

The flowering calendar

Each plant flowers in its own time, and the seasons do not fall in the same months the world over.

Slide through the months, then choose a zone: northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere or tropics. Each flowering keeps its own months, where it takes place.

“In flower”, “honey flow” and “harvest” do not mean the same thing: the plant is in bloom; the bees bring in nectar in quantity; the beekeeper takes the honey.

From frame to jar

Between hive and jar, the beekeeper makes choices. None is better than another in itself; each leaves its mark in the jar.

Follow the steps one by one: for each, what it changes in the jar.

Vintage

The vintage is the year of the harvest. From one year to the next, rain, cold or drought change what the hive gives, so that two jars from the same apiary may not be alike.

A honey also changes in the jar over time: it may crystallise, and it slowly darkens, faster if kept warm.

On the sheet, one records the year of the harvest, then the month it begins and the month it ends.