"Wet" Honey and How to Dry It

The rice harvest around here is in high gear.  I remember when harvesting, you take a sample and put it in the moisture machine to test to make sure the rice has the right percentage moisture.  If you make a mistake and fill the bins with wet rice, you run the risk of it mildewing.  Once that happens all you can do is sell it for chicken feed for next to nothing.  Ask me how I know.

As it turns out, honey requires the same moisture check.  If your honey is too "wet," it will ferment and turn into mead, the first alcoholic beverage in the world.  The find the moisture percentage, you need a little tool called a refractometer.  Looks high tech but only costs $20.  First you calibrate it using extra virgin olive oil.  To test the honey, you put a few drops of honey on the glass and close the lid.  Then you hold it to the light while looking through the eye piece.  Honey will hold if it is between 15.5% and 18.6% moisture.

How does honey get wet?  Well, most people will tell you that if you pull honey from frames that are fully capped, you'll be okay.  Others will tell you that if your frames are 80% capped, go ahead and pull it.  The 20% uncapped, they'll tell you, isn't honey, it's nectar.  We've learned that some 100% capped frames have high moisture content and some uncapped frames can be 17% and be considered dry.

Refractometer (Looks fancy and high tech)  

I tested each of our four 5 gallon buckets.  Unfortunately, each of the buckets tested 19.5 except for one that tested 19.0.  That means it runs the risk of fermenting.  This honey needs to be dehumidified.

In our guest bathroom, we transformed it into a honey drying house.  We put a dehumidifier in the bathroom and covered the honey with muslin cloth to keep anything from falling into the honey.

The humidity showed to be 35% in the bathroom with an 89.4 temperature.  Hopefully the drying will cause the honey to drop into the safe range.

After two days running, we really weren't making any headway in drying the honey.  So here is what we did:  We left the dehumidifier running on the north side of the bathroom.  We poured honey into the uncapping tank and a 5 gallon bucket with a honey gate on it.  We barely open the honey gate and let the honey drip slowly.  The honey drips into a filter that sits over another five gallon bucket.

The honey drips into the filter where it slowly spreads out, widening the surface area, before dripping into the 5 gallon bucket below.  On the other side of the bathroom, a fan is positioned to blow on the dripping honey.

After a day running the dehumidifier, I checked the humidity checker: 30% humidity with a 91 degree temperature reading in the room. 

Here is a photo of the first tank dripping very slowly through the filter and into the five gallon bucket.

Here are both of the buckets being dripped into by the uncapping tank honey valve and the five gallon bucket with a honey gate on.

We will continue to drip the honey like this until it is dry.  Today, I checked and the moisture content in the buckets we drip into had dropped a point!  From 19.5 to 18.5%  Mission accomplished.  We will do this same process with all of our five gallon buckets of honey.  Now we can start the bottling process!  We are almost out of honey to sell!  Only a few jars of the fall honey crop left.  We'll get this done so that when our honey customers stop in we'll have an inventory to sell.  Tricia picked up some jars from Rayne yesterday so that we can begin the bottling process.