Honey & Lemon, Done Properly
Almost everyone makes this wrong, and it's the same mistake every time. Boiling water.
If you pour boiling water straight onto raw honey you've undone most of what makes it worth buying. The delicate aromatics go first, and the TA rating on the jar is an activity measure taken on honey that hasn't been cooked. There's no sense paying for a lab-tested honey and then putting it through a kettle.
The fix takes ten extra seconds.
What you need
Makes one mug
1 to 2 tsp raw honey, Jarrah or Redgum TA20+
Juice of half a lemon
250ml water
Optional: a slice of fresh ginger, a strip of lemon peel, a few thyme leaves
Method
Boil the kettle, then let it sit for three or four minutes. You want the water somewhere around 50 to 60°C, hot enough to be comfortable to drink but not steaming. If you can hold the mug without flinching, you're about right.
Squeeze the lemon into the mug.
Add the honey and stir until it dissolves. It will dissolve easily at this temperature.
Top up with the warm water.
If you're using ginger, put that in first with a splash of properly hot water and let it steep for a couple of minutes, then let it cool before the honey goes in.
That's it. It tastes noticeably better than the boiling version, because you can actually taste the honey rather than just sweetness.
Which honey
Jarrah is the one we reach for. Deep, toffee-like, and it stands up to the lemon rather than disappearing underneath it.
Redgum TA20+ is smoother with a faint smokiness that works particularly well with ginger.
Both carry a Total Activity rating, which is an independently tested measure of the honey's antibacterial strength. Every batch of our active honey is tested by Analytica Laboratories and comes back with a number, so what's printed on the jar is what's in the jar.
The cold version
Worth knowing about for summer. Stir the honey into a little room-temperature water first until it dissolves, then add lemon juice, cold water and ice. Trying to stir honey straight into a cold drink just gives you a lump at the bottom of the glass.
Add mint and it becomes a very good thing to have in a jug in the fridge.
One thing worth saying
We're beekeepers, not doctors, and we're not going to tell you what honey will or won't do for you. What we can tell you is what's in the jar, where it came from and that it hasn't been heated. If you're unwell, see someone qualified.