Jamun Honey

Details

Honey from hives worked through the jamun bloom, Syzygium cumini, in the plains of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The bloom runs a few weeks in spring and the boxes are moved to the groves for it, so this is one harvest off one flower rather than a year of mixed nectar. It is dark, close to the colour of thin molasses, and it finishes sharp and faintly astringent. A single-flower honey carries two problems rather than one. The first is the problem of every honey on an Indian shelf, which is sugar syrup. In 2020 an Indian investigation sent leading brands for NMR profiling in Germany, and most of them had passed India's own tests and failed the German one, because they had been cut with modified rice syrup built to sit outside the C3 and C4 isotope test India relied on. The second problem belongs to the named flower, which is that the name is worth money and nothing on the label proves it, so multifloral honey relabelled as jamun is the easy version of that lie. Pollen analysis is the answer, because the bee carries the pollen of the flower she worked into the jar along with the nectar, and a count under a microscope says which bloom dominated. Ultra-filtration strips the pollen out and with it the proof, which is exactly why this honey is not ultra-filtered.

• Syzygium cumini pollen dominant in the count, so the flower is checkable
• No sugar syrup of any kind, no rice syrup, no corn syrup, no invert sugar
• C3 and C4 isotope ratio, SMR, TMR and NMR profiling on every lot
• Not heated past hive temperature, HMF held below 40 mg per kg against an Indian limit of 80
• Not ultra-filtered, no added flavour, no added colour, no thickener
• Dark and sharp rather than light and floral, so it is not a swap for the honey you stir into tea
• We make no health claim for it, and no honey is a low-sugar food
• A short season, so a lot runs out and the next one tastes a little different
• Not for a child under one year old, which is true of all raw honey
• If you want the everyday jar instead of the single flower, the plain Raw Honey on this shelf runs the same panel of tests