The original or a fake? How to determine the quality of honey in the home

Only beekeepers themselves know how natural and ecologically safe honey is with their apiaries, but a certain analysis can be made by any consumer. Before buying a large amount of this valuable product, it is advisable to purchase a small jar from the same lot, and to conduct the simplest studies.

How to determine the quality of honey at home, so as not to run into a fake?

Which honey is fake?

The history of the forgery of honey began long ago, the first mention of its falsification dates back to 1855. Since then, the methods of fraudsters have been improved to such an extent that it is sometimes possible to reliably determine its quality only in laboratories.

Which honey is fake:

• immature;
• Heated (melted);
• Honey with additives and impurities.

Most often in a natural product mix sugar honey and artificially inverted sugar, less often - starch and beet molasses.

How to determine the quality of honey in the home

Let's check the maturity first. Some beekeepers, for ignorance or for selfish reasons, tend to start pumping honey as early as possible in order to sell it with the greatest benefit.

What is bad raw honey? It will contain more than 20% moisture, it quickly loses its healing properties, it is worse kept, often begins to wander. In the process of fermentation fusel oils are formed , and such a product becomes unfit for consumption.

How to determine the quality of honey? Maturity is determined in many ways. The first is a viscosity test.

At a temperature of 20 ⁰ C, you need to take a spoonful of honey, arrange it horizontally, and start to rotate. Mature honey does not have time to drain, and winds on a spoon. If you lower the end of the cutlery down, honey drains off very slowly from it, and leaves a bump on the surface. Unripe honey starts to drip while spinning, and the surface quickly becomes level. At a lower temperature, the viscosity becomes smaller, while at a higher temperature it increases.

When testing, it is necessary to take into account the variety, as different types of honey have different viscosities:

1. Very liquid honey (acacia, orange, clover).
2. Liquid honey (mustard, linden).
3. Stellate (heathery).
4. Dense (sunflower, rapeseed, buckwheat).

The second way is to check the ratio of volume and weight. Weight (net) of one liter of mature honey should be not less than 1.4 kg.

Third: the bubbles. If honey has a sour smell, an alcohol taste, or on the surface slowly formed bubbles - honey wandered.

Fourth test: paper. A drop of honey is put on the newspaper sheet. If the honey is ripe, it will remain on the surface. If raw - crawls, leaving a wet trace.

The fifth method will work when the honey is already candied. If it breaks up into two layers of different density, there is a large percentage of water in it.

We shall deduce impurity on pure water!

To increase the volume and give the product a questionable quality of the kind of natural mature honey, it can be supplemented with various additives. How to determine the quality of honey? At home it is quite possible to determine its purity.

1. The presence of impurities is revealed simply: in a distilled water a small amount of honey is bred. The quality product will completely dissolve. If there are extraneous inclusions, they either precipitate or settle on the bottom.

2. Chalk can be detected by adding acetic acid in an aqueous solution of honey. If the mixture begins to sizzle and foam, honey is present in the chalk.

3. To increase the viscosity of honey, starch and flour can be added. In this case, there is nothing easier than to determine the quality of honey with iodine. Honey must be dissolved in water, and then drip iodine. If the solution turns blue, then the starch is added to the treat.

4. Gelatine is detected by adding 5% solution of tannin to a mixture of honey and water. If there are white flakes.

5. Patoku in honey will show ammonia. A few drops of alcohol, added to the aqueous solution of counterfeit, paint it in a brown color.

Determination of melted honey

Often sellers try to sell the crystallized old honey under the guise of a new crop.

How to determine the quality of honey in the home, if it was candied and melted? Signs of forgery:

• Greed honey is transparent and homogeneous, while the natural product is slightly cloudy due to the presence of protein compounds.
• The product has a faint aroma, caramel flavor, and from it noticeably pershit in the throat.
• When the temperature is reduced to +5 ⁰ C, vitreous fibers form in it. Natural honey behaves this way only in severe frost.

Sugar honey

Such honey has a white color and a very faint aroma (it should be taken into account that some types of honey, say, sunflower, also almost do not smell).

In the taste there is no characteristic astringency and light perspiration. If you smear a drop on the paper and set it on fire, there will be a smell of burnt sugar. In hot milk, this "honey" is curtailed.

Finally

When buying, you should trust the senses. Honey should be sweet, slightly tart and fragrant. From him a little is tickled in the throat, and he is very pleasant to the taste. The fragrance should be natural, floral. Crystallization is a normal process for a 3-4-month product and older. Frozen honey in winter should cause more confidence than liquid and transparent.