I ate some honey that’s been frozen in my freezer since 2011. It tasted like summer.
Eating honey six years after it was bottled.
It happens to be a bottle of honey from the first year I harvested honey when I kept bees in my tiny backyard on Golf Avenue in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I harvested honey twice that year. Once in the summer and again in the fall. The bottom of the bottle had the summer honey. The top of the bottle had the fall honey. The honeys had a different colour and a different flavour.
Two types of honey in one jar.
I kept the honey frozen in the jar all this time. When I ate it, it looked and tasted like it did when I bottled it. It brought me back to my first year of beekeeping. The beekeeping I did back then with hardly any money or any land was the most fun I’ve had in all the time I’ve kept bees.
There’s a sign in front of The Vinyl Café that says something I’ve always bought into: We may not be big, but we’re small. Beekeeping can get way out of hand, but it doesn’t need to.
The small backyard where I first kept bees close to downtown St. John’s.
Love your posts, really a joy to read :)
Thanks Mary.
Why was it frozen? Doesn’t honey keep well at room temperature also?
Honey keeps well at room temperature, but it will eventually crystallise or granulate. Honey kept frozen at a certain temperature won’t crystallise, or if it does, it will crystallise at a much slower rate.
I keep all of my personal stash of honey jars in the deep freeze until I’m ready to eat it.
I had frozen honey crystallise once because the freezer wasn’t quite cold enough. I’m not sure what the minimum temperature needs to be to put the honey in suspended animation, but I assume the colder the better.
Rusty Burlew has written about storing honey in detail:
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/store-honey-home/