Bought it from a market stall in spring and kept it in a kitchen cupboard above the kettle. Last week the lid popped when I opened it, there is a pale foam on top, and it tastes faintly sour with a cidery smell. No visible mould, no fuzz, nothing floating. Do I bin two kilos of good honey or is there something sensible to do with it?
I keep both raw local honey and the pasteurised supermarket stuff on the same shelf and only the raw jars have ever done this. The pasteurised jars are heated and filtered which knocks the yeast count down, so they sit for years. Cold slows it a lot even though the honey will go grainy and hard, and the freezer stops it dead without hurting anything.
Everyone will tell you to make mead and that is fine, but taste it first. Fermented honey carries that sour note straight into anything you bake with it and I have ruined a batch of flapjacks that way. Mine went into marinades and a barbecue sauce where the acidity was actually welcome.
I lost about five kilos learning this. I stored buckets in a shed where the temperature swung twenty degrees a day, condensation formed under the lid and dripped back onto the surface, and the top three centimetres fermented while the rest was fine. Glass with a proper seal, indoors, stable temperature, and I stopped opening buckets to admire them.
Stable temperature beats a tighter seal every time. Sealing harder just means the moisture that gets in has nowhere to go.
The condensation drip explains why it is always the top layer that goes first. I lost the top of a bucket the same way and everything below it was perfect.
It is yeast. Keep it cold, use it fast, do not give it away as a gift.
@hem_and_haw · 2w ago · 3 replies
That is yeast, not spoilage in the scary sense. Honey only ferments when there is enough water in it for osmophilic yeasts to work, and the threshold usually quoted is somewhere around eighteen to nineteen percent water. Uncapped frames harvested early are the usual cause, and a cupboard above a kettle is exactly the humid warm spot that finishes the job. Not dangerous, but the flavour will keep going downhill, so use it or freeze it.
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@kitchen_table_talk · 2w ago
Above the kettle. Of course it was above the kettle. Moving the whole shelf today.
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@till_and_tally · 2w ago
A cheap honey refractometer settled arguments like this for me permanently. I test everything I buy in bulk now and anything over the line goes straight in the freezer or gets made into something.
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