Honey Judge

Recently, I had the honor of being a honey judge for the Good Food Awards. I gathered with a panel of judges in San Francisco and together we spent a day tasting hundreds of honeys from across the United States.

Each honey I tried was so different than the one before it. There was a cream-colored honey made by bees in Hawaii that tasted like tropical fruit, followed by a mahogany honey from Vermont that had the intoxicating scent of pine trees and campfires.

In order to be eligible for a Good Food Award, the honeys all had to meet specific criteria. They were produced in the USA, extracted with minimal heat by beekeepers who practice responsible husbandry and care for the health of all pollinators, and filtered to leave in pollen. Our job as judges was to determine the tastiness of each honey and to select only the best.

We were lucky to be led in the judging by Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center at UC Davis. She was enthusiastic, informative, and kind all at once.

Good Food Awards are given to outstanding American food producers in fourteen categories in addition to honey: beer, cider, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, confections, preserved fish, oils, pantry, pickles, preserves, spirits, and elixirs.

It was such fun to be part of an inspiring community of industry leaders, technical experts, activists, and journalists. I’m looking forward to finding out which tasty, authentic, and responsibly produced foods will receive the award this year. Winners will be announced soon!

{Bottom two photographs by Good Food Awards.}