It’s honey harvest time! As you learn more about the different products your bees create, you might want to try making creamed honey with part of your extracted honey this year.
“Creamed honey” sounds like it might have cream or butter mixed in, but it’s really 100% honey. (Though “honey butter” is also a worthy cornbread spread: Whip 3 tbs of honey into 1 stick of softened, salted butter and enjoy!) In Europe this off-white, spreadable honey is extremely popular. It’s something you can make at home to add variety to your honey stand and money to your wallet.
Pure honey (whether creamed or uncreamed) is shelf-stable and can be prepared at home without a commercial kitchen license. Be aware though, if ingredients such as cinnamon or dried fruit are added to your creamed honey, it may be subject to taxes or stricter processing requirements. Check with your state’s Department of Agriculture about the rules that apply to your honey.
Anne Frey making creamed honey in her kitchen.
So what makes creamed honey so special?
Creamed honey is warmed, liquid honey that has been forced to crystallize rapidly, under controlled conditions. Even though it has crystals in it, they’re all consistent fine-grained crystals that don’t feel rough or grainy on the tongue. The texture is smooth instead of the hard, crunchy texture that honey can get if it crystallizes slowly on its own.
For many years beekeepers would consider themselves lucky if their honey naturally developed a smooth, creamy texture as it crystallized. Perhaps it was the temperature of the cellar where they stored their honey jars? Perhaps it was the small sugar crystals naturally present in some of their honey? Whatever caused it, creamed honey was celebrated when it appeared, but there was no reliable way to consistently produce it from a batch of liquid honey, until a scientist decided to tackle the problem.
After much experimentation, Professor Elton J. Dyce of Guelph University, and later of Cornell, invented a dependable process to make creamed honey around 1935, but the technique is available to any beekeeper who wishes to follow his instructions.
The four essential steps of creating creamed honey are:
Step One: Be sure the liquid honey has no crystals to start out
This might mean immediately making your creamed honey from an early harvest, so no crystals have time to form. Or you could use stored honey or honey from later in the season, and heat it gently to carefully retain the flavor but melt any tiny sugar crystals floating in it. Honey naturally develops crystals over time, and they grow slowly, pulling sugar out of the honey and adding them to the existing crystals. With enough time, this process allows the crystals to reach large sizes, which results in a crunchy honey. Naturally crystallized honey is perfectly fine to eat, but not very appealing to most people. For the Dyce process any existing crystals need to be melted with a bit of added heat.
Step Two: Mix in a small amount of creamed honey
This serves as the “seed crystals” for your creamed honey batch, and causes the rest of the liquid honey to crystallize using the tiny crystals in that creamed honey “starter” as a guide. If you warmed your liquid honey first, it must be cooled before adding the starter, or the starter will just melt and become liquid honey too!
Step Three: Dispense it into its final containers
The creamed honey will set up and crystallize in the container you portion it into. Don’t let it set up in your large mixing container, unless you want to sell large mixing containers full of creamed honey!
Step Four: Keep cool and crystallize
The container of honey then need to be left alone for one to two weeks at a temperature of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit. At 54-60 degrees, the crystallization happens rapidly, which is the key to tiny undetectable crystals.
Those are the basics, but below we’ll add a few suggestions and details. For the most consistent success, read the full process as Professor Dyce described it, found in detail in ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, or here in his original patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f4/42/10/0015b5b3e2a244/US1987893.pdf
Simple at-home creamed honey
Even a hobbyist beekeeper with a small harvest can make some creamed honey with just a few items. First, you’ll need a small amount of quality creamed honey as your “starter.” The seeding ratio is a half pound to one pound creamed honey mixed in for every ten pounds of your liquid honey (5-10%).
Heat your liquid honey in a controlled manner to melt any stray crystals and kill any yeasts. For example, you might put 20 pounds of your honey into a deep pot, and then heat this pot inside a larger pot of water on the stove. Stir frequently to heat evenly, and use a candy thermometer to tell when the honey is 140 degrees F. Keep it here and no higher for 30 minutes. Cover and cool to 75 degrees F as rapidly as possible. When it’s cool, take two pounds of creamed honey and two pounds of your heated-then-cooled liquid honey and mix them thoroughly in a large deep bowl, with attention to eliminating lumps. Then take that mixture and mix it into the remainder of your honey.
Watch this video to see how easy it is to use a honey creaming drill attachment to mix big batches of honey. (If you like the video, please consider subscribing to our channel for more fun and educational content!)
Equipment upgrade 1: Making your life a little easier
Follow the procedure above once, and you may be interested in a mixing system that doesn’t put as much wear and tear on your mixing arm (or the gears of your kitchen mixer.) With your own electric drill, a 5-gallon mixing food-safe mixing bucket, and one of these attachments Creamed-honey-drill, 21 inch creamed-honey-mixer, 40 inch creamed-honey-mixer the 22 pound batch described above is very manageable. A battery drill can be quickly worn out by this process, so reach for an electric drill that plugs into an extension cord. Be sure your drill and bucket are both clean, and consider a bucket lid with a small hole cut in it to run the drill attachment through. This will protect your final product from contamination during the lengthy mixing process. Betterbee’s Head Beekeeper Anne Frey has years of experience using this method to make (and sell) batches of creamed honey from her hives, and has found it a successful (if time-intensive) way to turn honey into a desirable new product.
Mixing schedule and letting time (and temperature) do its work
It is absolutely necessary to mix thoroughly without introducing air to the mix. The action is more like folding than whipping. Mix with rests for at least 3 hours. For example, in each hour mix for 15 minutes and then let the honey sit covered for 45 minutes, ending with a last bout of mixing for a total of four 15-minute mixing sessions. Then allow it to rest and settle for a few hours at 65-75 degrees F, and dispense from a nylon-honey-gate near the bottom of the bucket into your final containers. Take your 22 pounds of soon-to-be creamed honey, and store the containers (like these: 1 pound creamed-honey-cup-with lid) somewhere that is consistently about 57 degrees F for 7-14 days. A cold area on your basement floor may be ideal, but it’s worth getting a thermometer and checking to find an area that is really the right temperature before you watch a whole batch of honey fail to crystallize properly.
The final product should be very smooth on the tongue, stiff enough not to slump, but not too hard to scoop and spread easily. Store and serve at 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit. (Remember that enough heat will melt your creamed honey right back into regular liquid honey!)
Equipment upgrade 2: Bringing out the big guns
For larger batches, such as 18 to 50 gallons, the Lyson Honey Creamer line is available. These are programmable machines with wonderful paddle-like mixers attached, and they’re engineered to deal with exactly the stresses of mixing huge batches of honey (unlike your poor kitchen stand mixer.)
We even sell an attachment Lyson-36-gal-Tank-Creamer that you can use with a regular 36 gallon heated bottling tank Lyson heated-36-gal-tank so the tank becomes a creamer. With this setup, you use your bottling tank to warm the honey to start the process, then drain out the hot water from the water jacket and fill again with cold water. This cools the honey as the mixing begins, which distributes the honey and helps with quick cooling. Then you add the creamed honey starter, the program begins, and away you go.
With the Lyson creamers the steps of the Dyce process are still used, but the effort of mixing and the details of timing are all handled by the machine. With a few default programs to choose from (or a custom program that you punch into the control pad) you can get in the mix quickly and easily. The only consistent complaint we hear about the Lyson creamers is that people wish they had bought a bigger one, because no matter how much creamed honey they make, they just can’t keep enough of it in stock to satisfy their customers.
Lyson honey creamer at work!
Creamed honey will delight your friends and customers! Give it a try, on whatever scale you think you’d like to start!
