Can Singapore Create Its Own Honey Story?

Can Singapore Create Its Own Honey Story? 

For years, we travelled to places where honey had been part of the landscape for generations.

We went to Western Australia and spent time around the Jarrah forests. We travelled into Northern Thailand and followed our beekeepers to the longan orchards.

We learnt to look at the trees, the flowers, the seasons and the bees.

We learnt that a honey's story begins long before it reaches the jar.

And then, at some point, we started wondering:

What about Singapore?

We don't have vast Jarrah forests.

We don't have endless Longan orchards.

So could Singapore have its own honey story?

We didn't want to copy someone else's

Singapore isn't traditionally known for producing honey on the scale of Australia or Thailand.

But we have something else.

We have an extraordinary food culture.

We take flavours from different places, make them our own and turn them into something that feels distinctly Singaporean.

That made us wonder whether we could do something similar with honey.

Not try to make Singapore into Western Australia.

Not pretend our honey came from somewhere it didn't.

But ask a different question:

What could we create with honey, here in Singapore?

It started with a lot of questions

This was where our infused honey journey began.

We started experimenting with different ingredients and flavours, but we didn't want to simply mix things together and hope they worked.

So we spoke with food scientists in Singapore and eventually spent time experimenting in a food laboratory at a local polytechnic.

That experience was quite different from working with our beekeepers.

With our beekeepers, we were learning about nature.

In the food lab, we were learning about what happens when we start experimenting with what nature has already given us.

We tested.

We tasted.

We adjusted.

And then we did it again.

We quickly realised that creating a good infused honey wasn't as simple as adding another ingredient.

The honey still needed to have a voice of its own.

The new flavour needed to complement it rather than overwhelm it.

And the balance had to feel right.

Then we started looking closer to home

Some flavours were inspired simply by things we enjoyed.

Ginger.

Lemon.

Lime.

Yuzu.

Rose.

Peach.

Chili.

Each one gave the honey a different personality.

But eventually, we started asking a more distinctly Singaporean question.

Could honey tell a story about the place where we live?

That led us to flavours that were closer to home.

Teh Tarik was one of them.

We created it to celebrate Singapore's 60th anniversary, taking something so familiar from our everyday food culture and asking what it might become when brought together with honey.

It wasn't about trying to create a "Singapore honey".

It was about taking something we already knew and loved, and seeing it from a slightly different perspective.

We still listen to our beekeepers

Even though the ideas were being developed in Singapore, the honey still began somewhere else.

That distinction matters to us.

Our beekeepers remain an important part of the process. We receive a lot of advice from them, and their experience reminds us that the honey we are working with already has its own character.

We don't want to lose that.

If the honey is too strong, the flavour won't work.

If the added ingredient overwhelms it, there is no point.

The challenge is finding the balance between what the bees have already made and what we want to create around it.

Nature gives us the starting point. Curiosity takes us somewhere else.

Perhaps this is Singapore's part of the story

The more we think about it, the more we realise that Singapore doesn't need to have vast forests or orchards to have a place in the honey story.

Our contribution can be different.

It can be our curiosity.

Our food culture.

Our willingness to experiment.

Our instinct to take something familiar and look at it in a new way.

That's what happened with our infused range.

It started with a question, a few conversations with food scientists and a lot of tasting.

Today, it has grown into a broad collection of flavours, each one taking honey in a slightly different direction.

We are proud of that.

Not because we think we have found the final answer.

Quite the opposite.

We are excited because we are still experimenting.

Maybe every place has its own way of telling a honey story

Western Australia has its forests.

Northern Thailand has its orchards.

The bees and the landscapes there give us extraordinary honeys that we wouldn't want to change.

Singapore has something different.

We have a food culture that is constantly borrowing, adapting and creating.

So perhaps our honey story doesn't have to be about where the bees live.

Perhaps it can also be about what happens when honey arrives here and sparks a new idea.

We started Hives Keeper by travelling to understand where honey comes from.

Somewhere along the way, we realised that understanding honey also gave us the freedom to ask what it could become.

Perhaps Singapore can have its own honey story after all.

And ours is still being written.