Mutchilba Honey

Bee Species:

The European honey bee, Apis mellifera. Honey House Kuranda works its own hives across the district and buys from other beekeepers in it, moving colonies between the wet rainforest of the coast range and the dry woodland inland.

Color:

black to very dark amber; paler in seasons when the woodland flowers alone

Flavor Profile:

rich, deep, molasses-sweet, finishing on burnt toffee

Tasting Notes:

The sweetness arrives late and stays. Where the producer’s lighter tableland honeys read as toffee, this one reads as molasses – heavier on the tongue, less floral, closer to a dark cane sugar than to a blossom honey. The finish is the part people remember: a caught, almost-burnt toffee note that keeps the sweetness from going flat.

It is a cooking honey as much as a table honey. The producer’s own suggestion is to fold it through crushed macadamia and pour it over ice cream, which tells you where its weight sits.

Aroma:

warm and dark-sugared, faintly resinous

Forage Origin:

The bees work the dry, open woodland of the Mutchilba-Mareeba belt, in the rain shadow behind the Wet Tropics. The Queensland government’s soil survey of the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area describes the native vegetation of exactly this country as low open woodland of narrow-leaved ironbark and box, with occasional bloodwood and poplar gum over an understorey of cypress pine and tea tree. It is sclerophyll country: hard-leaved, fire-carrying, and nothing like the rainforest an hour to the east.

Within that woodland the trees do different work. Narrow-leaved ironbark (Eucalyptus crebra) is the most abundant, and it yields a light, delicately flavoured honey. The darker nectars belong to its neighbours – the bloodwoods (Corymbia, including red bloodwood and Dallachy’s gum) and the boxes, among them Molloy red box – which stand through the same woodland and make a fuller, deeper honey. Herberton ironbark, the Tableland’s own blue-leaved endemic, grows in this country too.

The fourth source is not native and not wild. Mutchilba lies inside an irrigation district of roughly eight hundred farms, and avocado is one of its three largest crops. Avocado nectar produces a honey of dark amber to mahogany, tasting of molasses and sorghum with a buttery toffee undertone. Bees do not much like avocado flowers – they are small, inconspicuous, and low on the list – but where the trees stand in enough numbers, the bees will work them and the beekeeper gets a crop. What reaches a Mutchilba jar is a small amount, taken at the tail of the avocado flowering, and it is the last dark note laid on top of the woodland.

Across a season the honey therefore runs roughly:

dry-season woodland flowering: ironbark, box and bloodwood, the ironbark pale and the box and bloodwood dark

end of the avocado bloom: a small avocado contribution from the surrounding orchards, dark and molasses-toned

wet years and weak years: the woodland flowers alone and the jar comes out lighter

Pairings:

Its weight suits it to dark, bitter and nutty partners rather than delicate ones. Use it where molasses or a dark brown sugar would go: over macadamia and ice cream, in gingerbread and spice baking, with sharp aged cheddar, or stirred into a marinade where its burnt-toffee edge can meet char.