I made a honey bucket with a honey gate, or a spigot. The honey gate makes it easier to fill my jars of extracted honey. I used a 28-litre brewing bucket that I never use for brewing (from the one time I made mead). Food-grade buckets that look like 18-litre paint buckets are also available at some hardware stores. It doesn’t hurt to use a bucket with an air-tight cover.

I got the honey gate from Amazon. Two for $12, something like that.

The honey gate fits through a 1.75inch hole (~4.5cm). I didn’t have the proper drill attachment for that, so I just cut out the hole in the bucket with my pocket knife.

The threaded portion of the honey gate fits in the hole. Note that the honey gate has rubber seal on it. The really cheap ones don’t (though this one is pretty cheap too).

The hole needs to a be a few inches from the bottom of the bucket so the bucket can sit on a flat service without the honey gate touching the floor or the table.

The threaded portion of the honey gate poking through the hole on the inside of the bucket.

The threaded ring for tightening the honey gate to the bucket.

The threaded ring screws on tightly to the honey gate from inside the bucket.

Ta-da! Done. Notice that when the honey gate is open, it can hang well past the bottom of the bucket.

I cut a hole in the bucket lid that makes room for my honey strainer, which I also bought on Amazon as a “Stainless Steel Double Layer Honey Filter” for $38. A $5 kitchen strainer works too.

Things I wish I’d done differently: I wish I put the honey gate on the same side of the bucket as the volume measurements so I could see as the bucket is filling up how much honey I extract from each spin session of the extractor. The brewing bucket holds about 28 litres of honey, and there’s no way to lift a full bucket of honey without spilling it. The plastic bends. A bucket made of thicker food grade plastic would work better. But I made due with what I had and it worked. The bucket wasn’t difficult to lift once it was down to about 20 litres.