Bees and tea

My mother actually turned me on to local raw honey and it's hard to imagine not having it around someday. I was also lucky to find a semi- local beekeeper who has honey in tons of types, red bamboo, thistle, clover, orange blossom, and on and on with so many exotic offerings I can't recall. Red Bamboo is amazing and very good paired with a number of teas, especially darker ones. Really cool if you can get into it, plus there's honey mead which is great too! Personally I'm happy to just pay the local guys to handle it but if it weren't for the getting stung and sticky/cleanup bits I'd do it in a heartbeat. Best of luck and I for one would love to be kept up to date on the venture.

- Dominic

A Georgian (ex Soviet) I have worked with has bought a small tea garden and has hives of bees busily making honey from Camellia sinensis flowers. As a teaman I dislike this - tea bushes should be kept in the non flowering juvenile phase of rapid leaf production by strict training and severe pruning - flowering bushes equals bad husbandry and butts should be kicked. As a businessman I see "Tea Honey" as a great product extension to my retail range of exotic teas and just sqeezable into the self imposed but oft confining title of "Nothing But Tea". However the European Union has very strict import restrictions on honey and Georgia has not yet done its homework to meet them, so as yet Georgian Tea Honey is still on the commercial drawing board. I'd be interested to know if anyone has seen genuine tea honey offered anywhere on their travels.

Nigel at Teacraft (and at Nothing But Tea)

Tea is my #1 passion. Honey is #2. An excellent source for new taste are the ethnic stores. The Arabic stores use it in their pastries like baklava so carry the different brands usually with comb and unpasturized. Talking to the honey guys is like talking to the tea guys. A lot of passion. One part of our state is famous for cantaloupes, watermelons, pumpkins which you find locally but worth a trip just for the best honey I've ever tasted. Our commercial raw honey comes from a mountain community noted for its wild flowers. I think the one thing that destroys the taste of tea is sweetness. So I never add honey to tea but everything else!

Jim

PS The club told me there is a 'Johnny Appleseed' of wild hives. He establishes hives all over the West and SouthWest. When he comes through town he has buckets of honey he harvested for sampling. Nothing is for sale. It is by invitation only. I'll have to suck up to someone to get in on that treat. I'll keep you posted. The first benchmark is setting up the hives in the Spring. The second harvest the following September.

Dom ...sweetness...

...buzzz...snip...

Very cool, I never knew you were into honey. I really enjoy talking to them as well, it is infinitely interesting and from my math/computer/ geek side I find the natural perfection and efficiency in design of the honeycomb to be awe-inspiring. I'm not normally one for any sort of sweetener myself, but my occasional exceptions are only for a few honey's and raw or yellow lump sugar. When I have a sore throat, want something sweet, or just for some strange reason. Sometimes it is just a basic Ceylon or even a Red Rose/Salada teabag steeped quickly and a nice copious amount of honey once it has cooled a good bit.

I touched on it in my first reply, but the cleanup must be terrible. I've seen the spotless facilities of my local guy and I have seen how sticky and covered everything is when it's running. It must be laborious and massively time consuming, but I guess like anything it can be made enjoyable and relaxing. I just have a natural aversion to sticky and it would be my personal nightmare/hell. Unless there is a trick beyond patience and time to cleanup.

- Dominic