Monday, September 20, 2010

A Bottling Tip

I noticed a day or two after bottling my first batch of honey that a foam developed at the tops of the jars. In some instances a trail of bubbles could be noticed running up a shoulder of the jars.


I guessed that this was from air introduced to the honey as a consequence of the extraction process. The radial extractor I used spins the frames and centrifugal force throws the honey from the comb against the sides of the extractor. It seems logical that all this spinning and throwing would result in some air getting mixed in with the honey.

I let the second batch of honey settle in the bottling bucket for 2 days before attempting to bottle it. This resulted in a frothy layer developing on the surface of the honey in the bottling bucket but crystal clear honey flowing into the bottles. As we came to the end of the bottling, this froth was limited to the last couple of jars which we'll use ourselves.

This second pass, Maureen also processed the wax from uncapping the honey and from burr comb collected throughout the season. It started out as a very messy process but Maureen learned quite a bit along the way. You can see some of the processed wax on the left side of the photo above. Maureen has agreed to provide a guest posting this week with some insights on what she learned.

Brian

2 comments:

  1. Your photography and label look very professional--like an ad one would see in a food or health magazine. Nicely done.

    ReplyDelete