'I’ve sat structural engineering exams, but nothing compared with this': How to become a honey sommelier
As challenging and prestigious as achieving a master of wine certificate, the quest to become a honey sommelier requires an elite sensory education.
A pot of deeply dark honey has just arrived by post and I find myself staring at it as if it’s 18-carat liquid gold. It comes from Scotland and stems from heather. According to scientific research, it has many of the properties that have made New Zealand’s manuka honey world famous, from healing wounds to soothing sore throats, with the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant powers that have turned that far-flung nectar into a superfood.
In truth, I am gazing at this jar as if it can repel anything — even defend us from an impending Third World War. Wishful thinking, of course. However, if any substance could claim to save the world, it might be this one. This is all thanks to the honey bee and a new and exclusive cohort of bee and honey lovers called honey sommeliers, who attended the first British-based course organised by the UK Honey Guild in Edinburgh last summer to attain their qualification.
We’ve long hailed honey bees as the planet’s tiny saviours for their pollination skills: no bees, no plants, no plants, no people. We’ve also long recognised the medicinal properties of honey. Yet few of us pause to consider the excellence of what bees create beyond that, namely as a fine food product.
'Certain shop-bought honeys have been described as one of the "most fraudulent products on the market"'
Among the first to recognise that officially were the Bolognese, the northern Italians famous for their appreciation of all things culinary and proud proponents of the slow-food movement. They began identifying the different types of honey bees can produce and established that honey doesn’t originate from a squeezy supermarket bottle, but from a terroir — the characteristic culture and environment of a region — and should be treated as such.
What followed was the creation of a honey sensory analysis course, said to be as challenging and prestigious as achieving a master of wine certificate. Those who have taken it often describe it as so difficult that we might wonder why anyone would subject themselves to it. ‘I’ve sat structural engineering exams, but nothing compared with this,’ admits Helen Rogers, one of the UK’s five fully fledged honey sommeliers, co-founder of the UK Honey Guild and a cantilever-stair specialist. ‘It was the hardest test I’ve ever done.’ Their determination could be said to equal that of worker bees, who live no more than five to six weeks to create a mere half a teaspoon of honey.
For the first time this year at Apimondia, the international federation promoting apiculture, a honey bar was established at its venue in Copenhagen, Denmark, and five British honeys featured at it, including a version of the heather honey I’m so enraptured by. This was all thanks, in part, to the establishment in 2024 of the UK’s Honey Guild, which was co-founded by its chairman Dr Gino Jabbar, a physicist and Scottish bee farmer, whose heather honey I’ve been tasting. Dr Jabbar also initiated the UK’s honey sommelier course, his aim being ‘to champion honey as a fine food. We want to develop a honey culture here and get people to ask for a particular variety of honey as they might do wine’.
Dale Gibson, of Bermondsey Street Bees, oversees rooftop apiaries across London at locations including Lambeth Palace.
The term honey sommelier was coined by American beekeeper and connoisseur Carla Marina Marchese in her book Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper: ‘I’ve never really understood why no one talks about honey the way they talk about wine or cheese or olive oil,’ she explains. ‘There are thousands of botanical sources that make so many types of honey.’ It’s a catchy term that trips off the tongue better than its true classification: member of the Italian National Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honeys. As Sally Chamberlain, chef, food judge and an attendant at the Bologna course elaborates, ‘sensory analyst sounds scientific and research-based, but sommelier invites people to taste, to explore’, which is what the mission of the UK Honey Guild is all about.
One of the most outspoken of honey experts and sommeliers, as well as adviser for the UK Honey Guild, is the writer Sarah Wyndham Lewis. Her husband, Dale Gibson, is a leading beekeeper, who is known for keeping bees on the rooftop of Lambeth Palace, London SE1, among other distinguished places and palaces. Together, they advise the Government, the Royal Household, Michelin-starred chefs and corporate businesses. Curiously, and not unusually for a honey sommelier, Sarah is allergic to bees. Perhaps that’s what drew her closer to them: creatures that could potentially kill her, yet also hold extraordinary healing powers. ‘What I quickly recognised was that the honey I was getting from different areas was very different,’ she points out. ‘I also understood that the only way that beekeepers are going to survive is if people buy and appreciate really good honey and become much more attuned to the fact that it’s a luxurious food product.’
Fellow sommelier, vintner and award-winning beekeeper Rebecca Beveridge agrees: ‘People look at a jar [priced] at £8.50 and think it’s expensive, but they’d happily spend that on a bottle of wine,’ she elaborates. ‘If you think about the journey of honey, and what it takes to produce it, it’s incredible value.’
There’s been extensive research in which scientists have studied samples of cheap honey from supermarket shelves and discovered that 98% of everything imported was ‘adulterated or cheap plant syrups’, Rebecca continues. In short, we might as well be using golden syrup in our food rather than what we imagine is a natural product. As a result, certain shop-bought honeys have been described as one of the ‘most fraudulent products on the market’. Cooks, too, have been misled, as Sarah laments: ‘I would be astonished at how, on MasterChef, contestants would go on about wild thyme or garlic they’d foraged, then add what they call honey from a squeezy bottle as a sweetener.’
'"Coo, this smells like cheesy feet," declares one attendee, referring to a rare dandelion honey that turns out to be delicious'
By contrast, there are those often major landowners who understand food and beekeeping. At Buckingham Palace, honey appears on menus in everything from lemon possets to honey-roast hams, and at Highgrove, Gloucestershire, The King has long championed his estate honey as part of his passion for provenance. The Queen sells her own jars of honey through Fortnum & Mason, raising money for her charities in the process, and, when The Princess of Wales invites schoolchildren to taste honey from the hives at her Norfolk home, she asks them whether it ‘tastes like flowers’.
Honey here is not merely sweetener, but also a statement: a food with a sense of place, as reflective of its surroundings as the claret in the cellar or the lamb from the parkland. It’s no coincidence that The King chose a bee to represent industry — and its ability to create something significant — on the first pound coins minted after his coronation. Today, many great houses — from Blenheim, Oxfordshire, to Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire — that once might have produced honey for beeswax candles to illuminate their rooms, now proudly jar their own honey, often for charitable purposes.
Certain chefs, too, are beginning to recognise the way that honey offers nuances of flavour that can transform food. Country Life’s own Gill Meller and food writers Nigel Slater and Diana Henry have waxed lyrical about it and Merlin Johnson of Michelin-starred Osip in Somerset is a key advocate. Former River Cafe pastry chef Anna Higham spins Helen Rogers’s beekeeping produce into queue-worthy honey custard buns and pies, honey and yoghurt scones and honey and ricotta tarts at her bakery, Quince, London N1. Meanwhile, fellow chef Sally Chamberlain eulogises: ‘Honey doesn’t only sweeten, it adds depth and character. It elevates rather than masks. It can often save and flavour dishes in a way that sugar can’t.’
To understand more, I attended a honey-tasting course at The Newt in Somerset, which champions bees in its Beezantium attraction, initially created by another honey advocate, Paula Carnell, and now curated by her former understudy, Kerry Redman. Both have attended the Bologna course. In the old cellars of the main house, 10 tiny glasses containing morsels of honey are set before us, ranging in colour from darkest gold to translucent yellow. With each jar, we are given a wooden stick — ‘something metal might interfere with the flavour,’ says Lady Redman — and told to ‘stir, savour and sniff’ before tasting.
Alchemy in action: Thousands of bees work their magic in the Beezantium at The Newt.
‘Coo, this smells like cheesy feet,’ declares one attendee, referring to a rare dandelion honey that turns out to be delicious. Another tastes like lemons and comes from lime trees. One of my favourites is from the Lowther estate in Cumbria, described by Lady Redman as the most ‘Pooh Bear type of honey’ — in other words, one you might enjoy unashamedly snuffling at. Each has a glorious individual flavour that captivates all of us and none of our comments is dismissed as ridiculous, smelly feet and all.
The message I learnt: honey sommeliers do for nectar what wine sommeliers do for grapes — sniffing, swirling, identifying and, most importantly, teaching the rest of us how to recognise and describe what lies within the jar on our breakfast table. As one member of the course put it: ‘I’m never going to look at honey in the same way again.’
Each spoonful of heather honey is a moorland in miniature, each jar of lime honey a summer avenue of trees. The bees themselves are the alchemists, drawing on blossoms we might pass by without noticing and transforming them into flavours that speak of time and place more eloquently than we ever could.
Meanwhile, I am still staring at what I now know is truly a pot of gold.
