Can You Tell If Honey Is Real?

Can You Tell If Honey Is Real? 

We used to think it would be easy.

If a jar said "honey", surely it was honey.

Then we started learning more.

About bees. About beekeepers. About where honey comes from. About the different ways honey can look, smell and taste.

And somewhere along the way, we realised that we had been looking at honey too simply.

The first time we tasted real raw honey

I still remember how surprised we were the first time we tasted a real raw honey.

Until then, we thought honey was honey.

Sweet. Golden. Something you drizzle over toast or stir into a drink.

But the first time we tasted raw honey at the bee hive, it stopped us.

It wasn't simply sweet.

There was aroma, texture and depth. Some honeys were floral, some darker and more earthy, while others had a flavour that stayed in your mouth long after the sweetness had gone.

Then we started tasting them side by side.

That's when we really began to understand.

Honey has a personality.

A Jarrah doesn't taste like a Red Bell.

A Marri doesn't taste like a Blackbutt.

And even the same honey can taste different from one season to the next.

The more we tasted, the more we realised that good raw honey doesn't have to taste like one thing. It can carry something of the flowers, the landscape and the season.

So, what does "real" honey taste like?

There isn't one taste that tells you whether honey is real. If only it were that simple.

When we first started tasting raw honey, we were surprised by how much there was beyond sweetness.

We began noticing the aroma first, then the flavour, texture and finish.

Some honeys were floral and delicate, while others were darker, richer or more earthy. Some had a flavour that stayed with you long after the sweetness had disappeared.

We started asking ourselves different questions.

What does this remind me of?

Is there something floral, woody, fruity or earthy in it? Does it have a character of its own? Does the flavour linger?

And perhaps the question we like most:

Does it taste like it came from somewhere?

A flower. A forest. An orchard. A particular season.

That was one of the things that made us fall in love with raw honey. 

You begin to realise that honey doesn't have one fixed taste. Its character can change with the flowers the bees visit, the landscape around the hive, the season and even the way the honey is handled afterwards.

And this is where we started noticing something else.

When a honey has been heavily diluted or replaced with cheaper syrup, it can sometimes taste much flatter — mostly sweetness, without the aroma, depth or lingering character we associate with a good raw honey.

But this is only a clue.

It is not a test.

A simple-tasting honey isn't necessarily fake, and a complex-tasting honey isn't automatically genuine. Honey naturally varies, and sophisticated adulterated honey can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish from genuine honey by taste alone.

Taste can tell us a great deal about honey.

It just can't tell us everything.

Why would anyone fake honey?

At first, we found this difficult to understand.

Why would anyone go to all the trouble of making something that looks like honey?

Then we started looking at the economics.

Honey takes time. Bees need flowers. Flowers depend on the season and the weather. Beekeepers can't simply turn production up when demand increases.

Sugar syrups, on the other hand, can be produced much more cheaply and at scale.

That creates an obvious temptation.

Food authorities around the world continue to test honey for this kind of economically motivated adulteration — adding undeclared, cheaper sweeteners such as syrups made from sugarcane, corn, rice or sugar beet. The FDA's FY2025 sampling found 4 of 102 tested honey samples to be violative for undeclared added sweeteners.

The European Union has also investigated the issue. In its coordinated 2021–22 investigation, 320 imported honey consignments were tested and 147 were considered suspicious for adulteration. That said, that figure applies to that targeted investigation — it does not mean 46% of all honey in the world is fake.

Still, the finding made us stop and think.

Behind every jar of genuine honey is something that cannot simply be manufactured faster.

The bees need to forage.

The flowers need to bloom.

The beekeeper has to wait.

Nature sets the pace.

The problem is, you can't always see it

This is what makes honey adulteration particularly difficult.

A syrup can be made to look like honey. It can be made to have the right colour and sweetness. And some adulterated products can be difficult to identify simply by tasting them.

So the little tests we see online — putting honey in water, watching how it drips, seeing whether it crystallises — aren't reliable ways to prove authenticity.

Even crystallisation doesn't tell you very much on its own. Different genuine honeys naturally crystallise at different rates depending on their composition and floral source.

Real honey is much more complicated than a kitchen test.

So how do you know?

This is where our journey took us beyond tasting.

We started becoming much more interested in where the honey came from.

Who kept the bees?

Where were the hives?

What was flowering?

What was the season like?

How was the honey harvested?

Who handled it afterwards?

We had our own bee farms. We worked alongside our beekeepers in Western Australia and Northern Thailand. We opened hives and harvested honey ourselves.

Today, we still visit our beekeepers, talk to them about the season and receive a lot of advice from them.

That relationship matters to us because provenance starts long before the honey reaches the jar.

But trust alone isn't enough.

Science has an important role to play too.

Science can look for the fingerprints of honey

Honey authenticity testing has become much more sophisticated.

Scientists can examine things such as sugar composition, isotope ratios and other chemical markers to look for signs that something has been added that shouldn't be there. Different analytical methods can reveal different clues, and authorities continue to develop better ways of detecting increasingly sophisticated forms of adulteration.

But there isn't one perfect test that catches every possible form of adulteration.

For us, that makes sense.

Trust the people. Know the place. And verify what you can.

So we test our honey too

For us, trust is important, but we don't think trust should be the only answer.

All our honeys are independently lab tested.

We send our honey for testing by an independent laboratory so that we can verify its quality and authenticity rather than simply taking anyone's word for it.

It is another part of the process we have built around our honey — knowing our beekeepers, knowing where the honey comes from, understanding how it is harvested, and then having the finished honey independently tested.

We think that's important because we are asking our customers to trust us.

We should be willing to verify what we put in the jar.

Today, we are happiest when our customers notice the difference

I think about our own journey quite often.

We started by thinking honey was simply sweet.

Then we tasted raw honey that made us stop and ask, "Why does this taste so different?"

That question took us to beekeepers, bee farms, forests, orchards and food laboratories. It made us curious about flowers, seasons, processing and eventually even the science behind honey itself.

Today, we are happiest when a customer tells us that they can taste the difference.

When someone tries a raw honey for the first time and says, "I didn't realise honey could taste like this."

Or when they taste two honeys side by side and start asking why one tastes so different from the other.

That's the moment we love.

Because it takes us back to where our own journey began — that first surprise that honey could have so much more than sweetness.

It can have aroma. Texture. Character. A sense of place.

And once you discover that, you start looking at honey a little differently.

Perhaps that's what "real" honey means to us now.

Not simply something that is sweet.

But something that has a story you can trace back to the flowers, the bees, the beekeeper and the place.

And that's the story we hope to share with every jar we make.