Another Great One

-Posted by Isaac

Yes, "How Sweet It Is!" 

Or was...   How time does fly. We're now a full week beyond the Honeyfest and we still haven't given you an update. I think Jayne has more to say on this, but I just wanted to do a  quick post letting you know how wonderful it went. Once again! Thank you so much for coming out and supporting this awesome little festival. (In its 10th year!)

This year we were swamped. Due to some scheduling conflicts and some unforeseen bee issues, it was only four of us manning the booth the entire time.

Maggie and Paige were lifesavers. 

In fact, the week leading up to the Honeyfest also happened to be the busiest week we've ever had for grocery store orders. Funny how it works out like that. With wonderful Katie working overtime, we survived. But it took all hands on deck. Even the corporate brass had to get out and do some bottling.

The kids just ran wild.

They've truly gone feral in the past couple weeks.

Like a pack of wild dogs.

Summer Honey, Part II

-Posted by Isaac

Summer honey, here we go again. 

If you missed it, we were talking about the great honey flow this season, and showing how the the honey gets from here:

To here:

We left off with the extracting completed and the honey going into 55 gallon drums for storage. 

You prospective commercial beekeepers out there... I would highly encourage getting set up for drums. So much easier than lifting hundreds of 60 pound buckets. Easier for storing of the honey, moving of the honey, lifting of the honey, and when you run out of room, transport of the honey.

You do however need to be strong enough to wheel a 700 lb load around, and smart enough not to kill yourself doing it. Smart and strong... a hard combination to find these days... 

Fortunately we've had a guy with us for about four years now. He fits the bill.

I know a guy...

One awesome thing about this business is that you don't have to rush to move your product. Honey lasts forever--a food that never spoils. (As many of you know and like to tell me on a weekly basis.) (Is my fake astonishment sufficient?)

Honey does last forever. But it granulates. As I stated in that other post, the drums of liquid honey today will be rock hard six months from now. So what do you do? Well, you have to heat it.

But not too much. One of the selling points of our honey is that it's raw. A big selling point, actually. Almost all store bought commercial honey has been pasteurized (Heated beyond 150 and micro-filtered.) We heat the honey just enough to liquify it and pump it up into the bottling tanks.

This is done with what you see above: a blanket heater set at 100 degrees. It takes a few days to liquify. That shiny strip of metal sticking out is an idea I'm proud of. It's just a bucket band heater stretched out and placed under the center of the drum. This prevents a cone of granulated honey from remaining in the middle as the drum is pumped. I was so proud of my invention I posted it to the commercial beekeepers facebook page. And it got a whopping 4 "likes" ...taking the bee world by storm!

In the photo below, you can see the honey pump and the four 60 gallon bottling tanks we use for the grocery store honey. What you don't see is the filter. They're inside the tanks. The honey flows through a 400 micron mesh which takes out the small wax particles, but still lets all the pollen grains through. We want the honey raw. The tanks are set at a temperature just under 100 degrees.

(Nice plug for Mann Lake.)

The honey doesn't stay here long. Usually less than a week.

You can see the spring valves at the bottom of the bottling tanks.

Again, for you prospective commercial beekeepers, another tip: get a real bottling tank with a real valve! Yes, they're expensive... but so worth it. You'll never think about going back to that sticky bucket valve!

The four big tanks are for the wholesale grocery store stuff, but just around the corner we have five smaller tanks for the speciality honey. Yes, each honey variety needs its own tank.

(Nice plug for Maxant)

So once the honey is bottled, the clock starts ticking. Raw honey granulates! Some fast, some slow, but eventually you end up with a solid bottle of honey that cramps your hand when you try to squeeze it over your toast. A conundrum. What to do, what to do??

Well, you've got to keep it warm.

Above is a picture of our first heater box-- an old restaurant freezer converted to honey heater.

That idea worked so well, the next year I built an insulated cabinet for the same purpose:

And I liked that idea so much, we later just built an entire room:

These areas keep the bottled honey in the mid-nineties. They serve as both granulation prevention and honey storage. When we get a big order, we're ready!

Once or sometimes twice a week Jayne or I will make a honey delivery up to Columbus. A honeyrun... Haha. 

Grocery stores like their honey in cases. So we do what they like.

They also like UPC bar codes for the separate honeys and separate sizes. So we do what they like.

And we're very appreciative of those stores pushing our local honey.

We're almost done, but we haven't covered the final and most important step: You.

We love it that you love it! Thank you so much for the support. Thank you so much for seeking out honey that is raw and local. Real honey!

At some point in the near future a bottle of summer honey from Ohio bees moves through the checkout line and ends up in an Ohio kitchen. From there, who knows how it will be used...

We like to put real honey on fake honey.

Needs it!

Country Living Magazine Feature and a Granola Recipe

-posted by Jayne

Last month we were contacted by a writer for the Country Living Magazine (the one put out by South Central Power Company), asking if we'd like to be featured in their "Food Scene" section.  They asked me to contribute a few recipes and wanted to know if they could come out and take a tour and a few pictures.  If you don't subscribe to the magazine- you can view the full article here:

https://issuu.com/nationalcountrymarket/docs/clm0816southcentral/18

If you've been following our blog for a while, you've likely seen these recipes before.  But in case you're like me and don't keep track of all the recipes you might want to try- I will post one of them here once again.  This is a recipe for our Super Chunky Honey Almond Granola:

2/3 cup raw honey
4 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
5 cups old fashioned rolled oats
2 cups raw almonds, chopped course
2 cups raisins or other dried fruit
1. Adjust oven rack to upper middle position and pre-heat to 325 degrees. Line rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Chop almonds.
3. Whisk together the honey, vanilla, and salt in a large bowl. Whisk in oil. Fold in oats and almonds until thoroughly coated.
4. Transfer oat mixture to prepared baking sheet and spread across sheet into thin, even layer (about 3/8 in thick). Using a stiff metal spatula, compress oat mixture until very compact. Bake until lightly browned, about 30 mins, rotating pan once halfway through baking. Do not stir! This keeps the granola in "chunk" form rather than loose and dry. Here is what is looks like when finished.

5. Cool on a wire rack to room temperature, about 1 hour. Break cooled granola into pieces of desired size. Stir in dried fruit. I used a mixture of craisins and raisins, but I also like to use chopped dried apricots, too

And here is a fun tip from Cook's Illustrated. For better granola... you must have fat. Without the oil, the oats become crisp and dry. When the water in the honey evaporates in the heat of the oven, the sugars left behind develop into a thin coating on the oats and nuts. Without adding fat, the sugar coating becomes brittle and dry.  So as much as you might want to skip the fat- don't do it!  It's what makes granola taste like granola - not dry flaky oats!

summer honey 101

-Posted by Isaac

It's summer honey time! We've been pulling honey for the last two weeks, and it will continue for at least another two. Busy this year... Seth ran off to the Air Force, so it's now just me in the bee yards and Lafe in the extracting room.

It occurred to me that I may just have enough photos to show you the process-- how raw honey gets from a beehive to the grocery store shelf. And I do. Enough photos in fact, to make this a two-part blog post. Oh boy!

It all starts in a bee yard.

Well, not really. As you know, it starts with millions of honey bees and millions of flowers. But that magic is an entirely different and more complicated subject. For this post, we're going to assume that the bees did their job and the weather and everything else worked out just dandy. (This year it did!)

So our job starts with pulling honey supers off the hives and loading them on the truck. The top boxes are the honey supers. They can get heavy!

It's a fun job, pulling honey. But hot and exhausting. As I said in a previous post, much harder than baling hay I did growing up. On a good day, we'll pull over 3,000 pounds of honey.

Mostly you wait until the bees have all the honey capped off.

When it's capped, it's dry. We're hoping for under 18% moisture. This year with the humidity, we've been moving everything into the drying room for a day. We rush to get the summer honey off before the goldenrod blooms, and that means not everything is capped. So we dry it-- the room holds about 150 supers and has five big fans, two big dehumidifiers, and a heater.

After drying a day or so, the honey is ready for extracting.

Here you see the system- the 60 frame extractor is in the foreground, the big cappings wax spinner in the middle, and the 500 gallon bulk tank for honey storage in the upper right:

At the start of the extracting line is the uncapper. Honey frames are run down through a couple vibrating knives which slice off the wax capping.

You need to have the cappings removed because the frames will soon be pushed into the extractor which spins the  liquid honey out of the honeycomb cells. Just good old centripetal force. No heat needed.

(One sample permitted every eight hour shift.)

The honey simply flows out of the extractor into a 30 gallon sump, and is then pumped up into that big holding tank high in the corner.

At the end of the day, I fill drums with honey. We have yet to overflow the bulk tank, and if I'm diligent about doing this, we never will. A drum holds 55 gallons, and if Lafe is working alone, he can only fill the 500 gallon bulk tank to about three fourths.

The summer honey all goes into drums. Much easier to store, to move to handle...   All those buckets you saw in the above pictures are filled with spring honey. We had a great spring harvest this year. I'm sure at some point I'll be cussing all the lifting and pouring of those many buckets.

Most years we have far more summer honey than spring or fall. In a great year like this one, you can fill quite a few drums during a month of harvest.

And those drums now sit. And wait. And granulate. Within six months the honey will be solid as rock.

And I'll let you go with that. Next post we'll continue... from solid honey drum to liquid honey bottle to store shelf to your kitchen... the journey of raw honey.

Happy Anniversary

-Posted by Isaac

Eleven years ago I got lucky. I know I don't deserve her, and yet she still lets me hang around. Year after year. We have surpassed one decade together, and I'm feeling pretty good about my chances for a few more.

We have even multiplied.

(Bridger's dream Christmas)

The above picture was taken yesterday in Decatur IL. To celebrate 11 years, Jayne took the kids and ran off. Yes, another anniversary vacation without me. (Vacation?  4 kids?...) 

I'm sure she'll make the most of it.

But before leaving, we had ourselves a wonderful kidless evening at this swanky place.

The Avenue is a Cameron Mitchell restaurant. They use Honeyrun Farm honey. So does The Guild House, another Cameron Mitchell. 

 And so do many other places around town. Places more our style. Jayne and I sometimes like to stop in for a coffee or a "market date" meal. It's fun see how a business uses your product. It's fun to deliver honey by way of the back door and get a glimpse of the inner workings. 

So that's how they do it...

Until this Summer, I had only been privy to the receiving door at the classy Cameron Mitchell's. They were just too fancy for a market date! And too expensive to spend on, well, me. But between a birthday and an anniversary, both involving my beautiful wife, and grandparents who involved themselves with the watching of our kids, we have now managed to make it to both restaurants.

What a treat! For foodies. Wealthy foodies. And I suppose, wealthy beekeepers. Maybe it really is the best food I've ever had. Or maybe I'm just trying to believe it's worth the money. I don't know. It is different, I'll say that. Even for a foodie like Jayne.

The Cameron Mitchell Food: tall, dark, handsome, athletic build, with just the slightest hint of a sexy Spanish accent. 

How could I possibly compete?

So I finished my beer and began to glance around for the men's room. Didn't see it. Kept looking...didn't see it... maybe people don't pee in Cameron Mitchell restaurants?

Finally, about to burst, I asked Jayne.

"See that 'WC' in the corner? It stands for Water Closet," she said.

"Oh. Interesting...

...So where's the bathroom?"

Haha. Just kidding, I'm not that stupid. Everyone knows what a "water closet" is. 

It's this:

The guy in there smiled when I jokingly ordered a martini, but I detected a slight impatience. A bored annoyance with my country humor.

I did my business, really showed my class by taking a picture, then departed the water closet. (Let that be a lesson to you, guy. Fake smile = No tip.)

The evening had started with our waiter going over appetizers, one of which was a certain fondue dish served with Dan the Baker bread and drizzled with Honeyrun Farm honey. When the waiter took note of us making a big deal of ourselves, we assumed that the "free" dessert at the end of our meal was a little Cameron Mitchell token of appreciation. Or sympathy. (These are beekeepers... they're obviously not staying for our $6 slice of cheesecake.)

But we were wrong. It wasn't for our honey at all. It was simply a happy gesture of acknowledgment. A nod to the joys and woes of marital bliss; a salute to the brave, the bold, the stouthearted... the married. Another year, on the books! (And we liked it!)

The waiter winked and said, "You can even eat the little chocolate sign."

So we did.

And we liked it!

But I'm still waiting on that water closet martini.    Guy?