> "The most used heating conditions appear to be 30 minutes at 140 to 150 F.
 > In general, lower temperatures, even for much longer times, will not be
 > effective." He seems to be saying that to produce honey that stay liquid
 > for a good period you need to EXCEED pasteurisation conditions.
 >
 > I know there is MUCH in the logs about temperature.  And I have gone over
 > it. But this temperature seems high to me.

I took a look too, and I know I've covered this before, so I checked the
"Substring search" checkbox and used "liqu AND temp" as the "Search for" key and
"allend OR dicka" for "The author's address is or contains" key at
http://listserv.albany.edu/archives/bee-l.html.

(This is the direct URL of the BEE-L search site.  I usually recommend people go
there via the entrance URLs mentioned in my .sig below because there are a
number of other useful items listed on the BEE-L pages (below) besides the
search.  Such items include a list of problems people may have posting, the
BEE-L guidelines, the original welcome messages, other list addresses, etc. --
in other words a complete BEE-L toolkit for newbie and veteran alike).

Yes, in searching, I found a lot of detail that I won't repeat here in several
of the 19 posts that came up, but I should expand on one of the points, since I
guess I did not state it clearly enough.  It is the trade secret to making honey
stay liquid for a long time on the shelf, and also the main reason for major
damage to natural honey on the way to the store shelf.  It is also the reason
for the puzzlement that intelligent beekeepers universally experience when
initially encountering the heat processes used in the commercial packing of
honey.

When honey comes into a processing facility in Canada, and most other places, in
a drum, it is usually solid.  In fact, producers often wait for it to set up
before shipping because the chance of loss due to puncture and/or spillage en
route is reduced if the honey is hard.  Thus, the honey needs to be gotten out
of the drum into and into a liquid state for processing.  The almost universal
solution, used for many, many years, is to either melt the honey in drums in a
hot room, and then dump into a tank, or to invert the drums in a heat cabinet
and let the honey run, as it melts, into a tank where it is held at about 110 to
120 degrees F for many hours.  There are some variations on this, but this is
basically how everyone does it.  AFAIK.

The logical question by anyone who has read all the info about honey is "Why do
they do this?".  I think I alluded to it before, but here is the reason stated
clearly: holding honey at the 110 to 120 degree (F) point for several days while
stirring is the only cheap and easy method that results in honey that will stay
liquid a very long time, and every packer knows this.

Even if commercially bottled honey is flash heated to 160 degrees F to filter,
it has likely been held at the lower temperature for a considerable period.
There are a number of reasons that the packers hold the honey at this
temperature, besides the question of staying liquid after packing: they usually
need to blend honies from different sources to achieve a consistent product and
to use all the varieties that they receive.  It takes time to melt the various
drums and to get them blended.  They need time to evaluate and adjust a batch
before bottling.  The holding vat is usually where this takes place.

While it is conceivable to have an ideal system that chips solid honey from each
drum and flash melts it, stirs it ultrasonically (instead of holding and
stirring at 115 degrees), pasteurises and filters it in a matter of moments, and
then quickly bottles and cools it, the fact that each drum may have unique
characteristics would result in a product that varied widely and brought
complaints from both stores and consumers.  Moreover, packers prefer to fill
containers with hot honey, since this helps ensure that the jar itself does not
contain nuclei that would hasten crystallization.  I am not saying that advanced
, gentler processing systems do not exist, but I have not heard of it and to my
knowledge, even the newest plants still use the old methods described here.  I'd
love to hear if anyone knows of any plants using gentler, more advanced
techniques.

Packing is a damned if you do and damned if you don't proposition that involves
many compromises.  No packer will ever produce honey that is as good as the
honey that comes out of a beekeeper's tap -- or as bad either.  The packers'
products will always be in the middle: the honey coming out of the plant will
always be significantly degraded from the average quality of the incoming honey,
at least as long as the standard methods described above are used.  Since this
method is cheap and convenient and low tech, and since most consumers cannot
detect the damage to the product, I cannot see it going away soon.

 > Do you think the conditions listed by Townsend for pasteurisation will also
 > be sufficient for long term liquefying?

Apparently not.  Liquid honey is a product that requires heat treatment beyond
the minimal amounts necessary for pasteurisation if it is to stay liquid for
long, unless it is made from a honey that naturally wants to stay liquid, and
most honies in my experience do not; or somehow processed by a method that will
have the same effect as holding for many hours at 100 to 120 degrees F.

Unfortunately, the processing of honey is a topic that is subject to much
secrecy, hypocrisy and misrepresentation.  I hope that I have been able to shed
a little light.

allen
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