Black Sage Honey
Black Sage Honey from the High Desert
The month ends with treats for kids, so I thought we’d start the month with a treat for adults. We enjoy sweet things, too, especially when they’re this rare and delicious.
And this honey is definitely both of those things.
This honey found its way to our shelves with the help of the fine folks at Kind Word Bee Company; a family of passionate honey lovers in the Pacific Northwest. Working within a co-op and accessing a network of beekeepers up and down the west coast, they’re finding and connecting single varietal, raw honey with folks like you and me that crave them.
I think the way they process their honey is key to getting the best flavor and—at least in this case—most of the health benefits in this particular honey. They do this by not heating it up (that increases volume, but decreases flavor) and by straining honey through cheesecloth and leave it at that. This is raw honey and that’s important when it comes to Black Sage because it keeps more pollen in the honey than other varietal and THAT stuff is good for you, full stop.
But as I mentioned, Black Sage honey is really rare because it’s not something that blooms every year. Heck, it might bloom every three years if conditions are right and you’re quick with the hives.
Black Sage grows in the high dessert of the southwest, in particular southern California and northern Mexico. It’s a pretty purple flower that ONLY comes after a very wet winter and a pretty darn wet spring that leads into a dry, hot summer. In short: the conditions have to be perfect for the plant to flower…and when it flowers, you have to be Johnny-on-the-Spot with those hives.
The only way to insure the honey only comes from the blossoms of the Black Sage, beekeepers have to move their hives to where the Black Sage is blooming and only the Black Sage is blooming. By proximity, the beekeepers guarantee the bees will (mostly) only tak the nectar from these flowers. Bees may be diligent and incredible workers, but they’re also efficient and if they don’t have to travel far for the flowers, they won’t.
The bees also don’t seem to produce a ton of honey from the few flowers they find, making it all the rarer.
But we care more about flavor than rarity and that’s where this honey really delivers. I prefer honeys on the lighter side of the sweetness spectrum. I love how this honey is a bit earthy, yet delicate. It’s incredibly smooth (which I really like) and it’ll stay that way because it doesn’t crystalize as quickly as most honeys.
It’s refined, it’s delicate, it’s rare, and it is really, really delicious.