When Honey Turns Solid

Someone messages me about this every winter, usually a little embarrassed, thinking they did something wrong. They didn’t. Crystallized honey is what raw honey does, and I’d be more worried if it didn’t.

What’s happening in the jar

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution. It holds more sugar than water at that temperature should be able to hold, and that’s an unstable arrangement it will eventually leave.

The two main sugars are glucose and fructose. Fructose stays dissolved. Glucose doesn’t, and given time it comes out of solution and forms crystals.

Those crystals need something to start on. A speck of pollen, a bit of wax, a tiny air bubble. Once one crystal forms the rest follow, which is why honey often sets from one spot and works outward, or throws a grainy layer at the top or bottom before the whole jar goes.

Nothing has spoiled. Nothing has fermented. The sugar has moved.

Why it’s a good sign

The useful part of that is the crystals needing particles to grow on.

Take the particles out and the honey has nothing to set around, so it stays clear and liquid on a shelf for a year and looks the same in January as it did in June.

That’s exactly what fine filtering does. And cold honey won’t pass through a fine filter at any useful speed, so filtering usually comes with heat, and heat also dissolves any crystal seeds already in there.

So honey that never sets has usually been heated and finely filtered. Honey that sets usually hasn’t. It’s not a lab test and there are exceptions, but as an everyday check anyone with a cupboard can do, it’s the best one there is. What those words actually mean is in Raw, Unfiltered, Never Heated.

Why one jar sets faster than another

The glucose-to-fructose ratio decides it, and that comes from what the bees were foraging on.

Honey from clover and from canola sets fast, sometimes within weeks, because both are high in glucose. Honey from acacia or tupelo can stay liquid for years. Most honey is somewhere in between.

Temperature matters as much as what’s in it. Crystallization runs fastest around 50 to 57 degrees Fahrenheit, so a garage or an unheated pantry in an Idaho winter is about the worst place to keep it. A refrigerator isn’t far off that range either, so the fridge isn’t the answer even though it’s everyone’s first instinct.

Above about 77 degrees honey mostly stays liquid. A normal kitchen cupboard is fine.

I don’t tell people which flowers our honey came from, because the hives sit on different farms and I haven’t had it tested. That also means I can’t tell you how fast your jar will set. It will set.

Getting it liquid again

Stand the jar in a bowl or pan of warm water. Leave it twenty or thirty minutes and turn or stir it now and then.

Keep the water warm, not hot. Under about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about bath temperature and comfortable to hold your hand in. Above that you start losing the enzymes and the smell, which is what you were trying to keep by buying raw honey.

Two practical things. Take the lid off or loosen it, because a sealed jar in warm water builds pressure. And only warm what you need instead of the whole gallon, since heating and cooling honey over and over isn’t good for it and a gallon takes a long time to come around.

If you have a five gallon jug that’s set solid, message me before you fight it in the sink.

Don’t use the microwave

This is the one method I’d ask you not to use, and it’s the most popular one.

A microwave heats unevenly. Parts of the honey go well past 104 while other parts are still solid, so you get a jar that’s partly cooked and partly still crystallized, and you can’t see which is which.

If you already did it, the honey is still fine to eat. You just lost some of what you paid for.

Or leave it alone

There’s a third option nobody mentions, which is to keep it set.

Crystallized honey spreads easier than liquid honey and doesn’t run off toast onto your hands. Creamed honey, which people pay extra for, is crystallized honey where the crystal size was controlled to make it smooth.

If your jar has gone grainy and you like it that way, you’re done. Stir it, put it on toast, and skip the pan of water.

Making creamed honey out of it

If your honey has set and you like it, there’s one more step that turns a grainy jar into something smooth.

Creamed honey, sometimes called spun or whipped honey, is crystallized honey where the crystals stayed small. Big crystals feel gritty. Small ones feel like butter. The difference is all in how the setting was handled.

The home method is to stir a little already-smooth creamed honey into liquid honey, about one part in ten, and keep it around 57 degrees Fahrenheit for a week or two. The fine crystals act as seed and the whole jar sets like them instead of growing its own coarse ones.

Stir it every day for the first few days. And be patient, because a jar rushed at a warmer temperature sets coarse, and the only fix is melting it and starting over.

This is a nice thing to do with a gallon that’s gone hard on you, and it costs nothing but time. It’s also why a store charges more for creamed honey than for liquid. Someone managed the setting instead of preventing it, and that’s work.

What it doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean the honey is old. A jar can set in six weeks.

It doesn’t mean sugar was added. That’s the most common guess, and it’s backwards. Adding syrup to honey makes it less likely to crystallize, not more, which is one of the things testing labs look at.

And it doesn’t mean it’s gone bad. Honey doesn’t spoil in any normal sense. Sealed jars have come out of tombs still edible, and that’s the right fact for this even if people repeat it too often.

Your honey is fine. Run some warm water and stand the jar in the sink.