The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 18 of 21
Honey that ferments
All chapters
- The two-kilometre circle
- Why six kilometres costs more than it brings
- Three and a half kilos of nectar
- What a flow actually is
- Maple, willow and the first dandelions
- Fruit blossom and hawthorn
- The main flow: black locust and clover
- Linden in July
- The gap in the middle of the year
- Goldenrod and the winter stores flow
- Ivy, the last flow
- Oilseed rape, the flow that sets in the comb
- What makes a jar monofloral
- Putting a super on at the start of a flow
- Pulling it at the end
- Reading a capping percentage
- Eighteen point six percent
- Honey that ferments
- Crystallisation is physics, not spoilage
- Creaming by the Dyce method
- A year of varieties and what each is worth
Honey does not spoil for want of a lid. The yeasts that spoil it are already in it, sugar-tolerant ones that lie dormant while the water activity stays under about 0.6. Most yeasts need more than 0.88 and moulds more than 0.65, which is why honey keeps at all.
Below 18.6 percent water it keeps indefinitely; between roughly 18.6 and 20 the risk rises; above about 20 percent it is very likely to ferment.
In this game a super pulled under 80 percent capped reaches the shelf as unripe honey, sells at neither channel, and turns after thirty days. Nothing marks honey unripe on its own. That outcome only follows a button that warned you first.