Raw, Unfiltered, Never Heated
By Paxton · August 7, 2026 · Last checked September 30, 2026
Our honey goes through one large strainer on the way into the jar, to catch bees and bits of comb, and that's the only thing that happens to it. It's never heated, so the pollen and everything else is still in there. A quart is $20 and a gallon is $60, picked up in the Treasure Valley.
People ask what raw, unfiltered honey means, and the answer is that in the United States it doesn’t mean anything in law. Neither does pure or natural, and all four words are on jars in every grocery store in Idaho.
So instead of using the words and hoping, this is exactly what happens to our honey between the hive and the jar you take home. It’s a short list.
What happens to it
It comes off the hive. It goes through a large strainer. It goes into a mason jar and the lid goes on.
That’s the whole process. The strainer is there to catch bees, bits of comb and the pieces of hive that come along with honey, because nobody wants that in a jar. Nothing finer than that happens, and no heat is applied at any point.
What that leaves in is the pollen, the enzymes the bees put into it, the little bits of propolis and wax that make it through a coarse mesh, and whatever came out of the flowers that gives it a smell.
Those are the things people mean when they say raw, and they’re also exactly the things industrial processing takes out.
A strainer is not a filter
This is the difference the word “unfiltered” is supposed to carry, and it’s the one that gets blurred most.
Straining is coarse. Picture a mesh you could see through, taking out anything you could pick out with your fingers. It’s a tidying step.
Filtering is fine, and it’s usually done under pressure and with heat, because cold honey won’t go through a fine filter at any useful speed. That’s the point of it. Filtering takes out pollen, and it takes out the tiny particles that crystals would otherwise grow on.
What you get is honey that stays clear and liquid on a shelf for a year and looks the same in January as it did in June. That’s why it’s done. Clear honey sells, and honey that sets gets returned by shoppers who think it went bad.
What heat costs
Warming honey makes it thin, and thin honey pours, strains and bottles fast. That’s why nearly all commercial honey gets warmed somewhere along the way.
What you lose first is the smell. The compounds that give a honey its character are the ones that leave when you heat it, which is a big part of why supermarket honey tastes generically sweet and local honey tastes like somewhere.
Enzymes go next. Honey carries enzymes the bees added, and heat breaks them down the way heat breaks down enzymes in anything.
None of that makes heated honey bad. It’s still honey and it’s still good on toast. It’s just no longer the thing anybody buying “raw” was trying to buy.
What the testing found
Two findings are worth knowing about, and they’re about different problems.
In 2011, Food Safety News had honey from American grocery stores tested and found that more than three quarters of it had been ultrafiltered until no pollen could be detected at all. Pollen is the marker that tells you where a honey came from, so removing it means nobody, including a regulator, can check where it’s from.
Separately, the European Commission tested honey coming into EU borders between November 2021 and February 2022. Of 320 samples analyzed by the Commission’s Joint Research Center, 46 percent were strongly suspected of being cut with sugar syrup. In a similar round five years earlier the rate was 14 percent.
The second is about honey that isn’t honey. The first is about real honey that had its identity stripped out. Neither one is about the small producer down the road, and both are the reason the small producer down the road has customers.
Every word on a honey label
Almost none of these are defined in law. This is what each one actually tells you.
| Word | What it means | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Raw | No legal definition. Usually means unheated and coarsely strained, but nobody has to prove it | Only as good as the seller’s answer to what they do |
| Unfiltered | Nothing finer than a strainer. Pollen still in it | Real, if true. Ask what mesh |
| Unpasteurized | Not heated to a set temperature to kill yeasts. Says nothing about lower heating | Weak. Honey is often warmed well below pasteurizing |
| Pure | Nothing added. Says nothing about processing | Almost nothing |
| Natural | Nothing | Nothing |
| Filtered | Fine filtration, usually with heat. Pollen removed | Honest. It tells you it’s not raw |
| Ultrafiltered | Pressure filtration that strips pollen entirely | Honest, and the thing the 2011 testing was about |
| Creamed or spun | Crystallized on purpose, with the crystal size controlled | Fine, and often made from raw honey |
| Local | No radius defined. Anyone can use it | Ask where the hives are |
| Wildflower, clover, orange blossom | A claim about forage, testable but rarely tested | Ask if they had it tested. I haven’t, so I don’t use them |
The one to watch is “raw”, because it’s the word doing the most selling and carrying the least weight. It’s not a lie on most jars. It’s just not a promise anybody can be held to.
That last row catches me as much as anyone. I could put “wildflower” on this page tomorrow and no customer would ever check. I haven’t had it tested and the hives sit on different farms, so the word stays off.
How to check any honey, including mine
Don’t take a seller’s word for this. These are the checks you can do yourself.
Ask what happens to it. Not whether it’s raw, because everyone says yes to that. Ask what the actual steps are between the hive and the jar. A person who strains and jars will tell you in one sentence. A person who can’t answer is buying it from somebody else.
Watch whether it sets. Raw honey almost always crystallizes eventually, and how fast depends on the nectar. Honey that stays perfectly clear for a year has usually had the particles filtered out that crystals start on. There’s more on that in When Honey Turns Solid.
Look at the label. Ours is a plain Ball or Kerr mason jar with a sealed lid and no label at all, because the name is on the sign at the table instead of the jar. That’s not a virtue, it’s just what we do. I mention it because a jar with a beautiful label tells you about a designer, not a beekeeper.
And ask where the hives are. That’s the part I care about most.
Where this honey comes from
About 500 hives, and every one of them sits on an organic farm around the valley by agreement with the farmer who works it. None in a backyard, none parked wherever there was room.
A hive eats whatever grows where you set it down. What the bees bring home is what ends up in your jar, so the decision about where a hive goes is the decision about what the honey is, and it’s made before a single frame comes off. That rule costs me flexibility, and I keep it anyway. The reasoning is in Why Our Hives Sit on Organic Farms.
Idaho requires anyone running more than 50 colonies to register with the state Department of Agriculture. At 500, we’re a long way past that.
I don’t name the farms. That’s the farmers’ business, not something to put on a website.
Living with raw honey
Raw honey acts differently from the squeeze bottle, and two of those differences catch people in the first month.
It will set. Most raw honey crystallizes eventually, and the jar you left in a cold garage will do it faster than the one in the kitchen. That’s not a fault, and there’s a whole page on it in When Honey Turns Solid. The fix is a bowl of warm water and some patience.
It’s not consistent. Color, thickness and taste move between batches, because the forage changes through the season. A jar in June isn’t the same as a jar in September. Supermarket honey is identical every time because it was blended from many sources to be identical every time.
For cooking, treat it as sweeter than sugar and wetter. The usual swap is about three quarters of a cup of honey for a cup of sugar, with a little less liquid in the recipe and the oven turned down about 25 degrees, because honey browns faster.
For anything you’re heating hard anyway, use the cheaper honey. Baking raw honey into a loaf at 350 degrees undoes most of what you paid extra for. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the raw jar for toast and yogurt and a cooking jar for cooking. A quart at $20 is priced so you can do both.
And never give honey to a child under one year old, raw or otherwise. Babies can get seriously sick from it.
What I won’t tell you
I’m not going to give you a floral variety. People ask for wildflower or clover, and I could put either word on a page and nobody would check. But I haven’t had it tested and the hives sit on different farms.
And I’m not going to tell you honey will fix your allergies. It’s the most profitable sentence a local honey seller can say, and the evidence doesn’t back it up. That’s a whole page of its own: Does Local Honey Help Allergies?
What it costs and how you get it
A quart is $20. A gallon is $60. There’s a five gallon jug too, and you have to ask me for the price, because I gave a number from memory once and then couldn’t stand behind it.
There’s no shipping. Nothing goes in the mail. You send an order or a text, I confirm what’s on the shelf, we work out when you’re picking it up, and you pay by Venmo when you do.
Questions I get asked
- Is raw honey a regulated term in the United States?
- No. There's no federal standard behind the word, which is why it shows up on jars that were heated and finely filtered. What matters is what the seller says they actually do to it.
- What is the difference between straining and filtering honey?
- A strainer catches what you can see, like bees, wax and bits of comb. A filter goes much finer and takes out the pollen and the tiny particles honey needs to set. Ours is strained only.
- Does heating honey ruin it?
- Heat takes the smell out first and breaks down the enzymes, and the hotter and longer, the more you lose. Commercial honey usually gets warmed so it pours and filters easily. Ours never is.
- How can I tell if honey is really raw?
- The best everyday sign is that it sets eventually. Honey that stays perfectly clear and liquid for a year has almost always had the particles filtered out that crystals would form on.
- Do you sell honeycomb or small jars?
- No. Quart, gallon and five gallon, in plain mason jars.
