Mint Honey

Botanical Name: Mints (Mentha spp.)

Botanical Family: Lamiaceae

Bee Species:

Every mint honey with a plant behind it is the work of Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee: the Croatian studies and bee-stomach work, Spain’s reference sheet, the Romanian samples and the Russian, Ukrainian and Chilean literature on honey plants all describe that bee.

The one exception is Vietnam’s Elsholtzia honey. The production method registered for Vietnam’s protected mint honey admits Apis cerana alone, the Asian hive bee, so no jar worked by the Western bee can carry the designation.

Color:

Amber to dark amber, usually with a reddish cast, and dark brown at the deepest; straw to pale gold in the Polish and Iranian jars; white, beige or cream once set

Flavor Profile:

Assertive and aromatic, lightly sweet, with an acid edge, a salty note on Spain’s reference sheet, and a plum aftertaste on the Italian descriptions

Tasting Notes:

The fullest description of this honey is one Italian competition taster’s card: golden with reddish highlights when liquid, white to beige when set, a very intense odour whose most diagnostic element is mint itself, and an assertive, not-very-sweet, slightly tart flavour with a plum aftertaste. A Piedmont grower who sells the honey names plum too, on a second Italian voice that is not a copy of the first.

Sweetness is where one village disagrees: two Piedmont producers call it barely sweet and the grower who grows the mint calls it sweet, while Spain’s reference sheet gives sweet with acid and salty notes, the salt belonging to no other source here. Low to moderate sweetness with an acid edge is as far as the evidence goes.

The finish is long and lightly cooling, which the Russian trade turns into a buyer’s test: if the chill is strong, something was added. Chinese beekeeping writing calls the mouthfeel relatively poor, against an Italian competition that has twice awarded the same honey a Goccia d’Oro, a drop of gold.

Aroma:

Very intense and recognisably of mint; floral with the pennyroyal’s clear mentholated note on Spain’s reference sheet, with hotrienol and linalool the compounds measured, with malted notes from holm-oak honeydew in Iberia

Defining Compounds:

One chemical characterisation of a Mentha honey has been published: six Croatian honeys off combs set in wild stands of water mint and pennyroyal, analysed against the stomach contents of seventy bees returning from the flowers. Four plant-derived compounds came out of it. Methyl syringate is the most abundant compound of every solvent extract at 38 to 56 per cent and vomifoliol the second at 7 to 27 per cent; both were in the bees' stomachs, so both come from the nectar. Hotrienol dominates the headspace at 31 to 38 per cent, forming from terpendiol I as the honey ripens. All four compounds occur in other honeys too, as the paper says: methyl syringate turns up in ten others and peaks in asphodel.

Menthofuran, the leading compound of water mint’s own oil, appears at 0.0 to 0.4 per cent of the extract.

The phenolics are reported by named compound. Chrysin, apigenin and p-coumaric acid are the most abundant individual phenols in all five Croatian samples measured for them, and lithospermic acid, which the authors call specific to three Mentha species, appears in three of the five. Mint led on gallic acid among six Italian honeys of its own family and on ferulic acid among twelve honeys from four countries, whose authors say their data do not let the honey’s activity be attributed to it; the same Romanian jar came second last of the twelve on two antioxidant assays, so a lead on one phenolic acid is not evidence of a strong antioxidant honey. And the whole corpus rests on about twenty-three Croatian samples.

Forage Origin:

The bees take floral nectar from mint flowers. Mentha is a cosmopolitan genus of the mint family, Lamiaceae, in the tribe Mentheae. Every species and natural hybrid in it carries an essential oil, and mints grow on every continent but Antarctica.

Most jars name the honey simply as mint. Four species carry a honey sold under a name of their own: pennyroyal, Mentha pulegium, in Portugal and Argentina; water mint, M. aquatica, in the Danube Delta; horse mint, M. longifolia, in Iran and one Polish apiary; and peppermint, M. x piperita, behind Piedmont’s honey. Everywhere else the jar says only mint, Croatia’s state specification included, which reads med od metvice (Mentha spp.).

Mint’s whole subfamily carries hexacolpate pollen, and routine light microscopy reports the finding at family level, so the species behind a mint-honey label is an inference from what was in flower. The genus is unstable too: of more than three thousand names published in it since 1753, perhaps ninety-five per cent are synonyms or illegitimate, because the mints hybridise easily.

What is printable is the ground. Croatian beekeeping writing calls marsh mint the genus’s most important plant for beekeeping, on floodplain and wet ground beside rivers and ponds, and calls peppermint a cultivated plant grown for oil. Spain’s reference sheet gives the production zone as damp meadows fringed with scrub.

Mint gives a hive much nectar and little pollen, and every threshold found for this honey sits low. Croatia and Serbia both set twenty per cent of Mentha pollen in law, which the Croatian ordinance writes into its own table as an exception to the forty-five per cent it otherwise asks of a unifloral honey, and Spain’s guide sets twelve. Five Croatian mint honeys bought direct from their producers measured 21 to 28 per cent, all just over the line, and their authors draw the consequence: when a mint honey can be a fifth mint pollen, what the other four fifths came from is an open question. The other measured shares run from 18 per cent in twelve Croatian samples to 65 in ten Romanian ones their producers label peppermint, each figure a country’s and not the genus’s.

The oil fields are the exception. Five agricultural authorities put the oil cut between a tenth and a half of the crop in flower, and what moves the figure inside that window is a procurement clause rather than the plant: Californian contracts once required menthofuran below 2.5 per cent, and because the compound concentrates in the flowers growers cut in the early bloom stages to meet it; after 2000 the contracts dropped the ceiling and growers began to delay harvest for leaf. Mint grown for dried leaf or herb is mown at the bud stage or before, ahead of the flowers.

Honey with mint added is a different product, and on an English-language shelf it is the commoner one: a retail sweep returned clover or wildflower honey with mint leaves or peppermint oil added, several jars titled Peppermint Honey with no mention of an infusion. The test is the ingredient line, and two markets draw it in their own words: Italian separates miele di menta, the single-flower honey, from miele alla menta, the flavoured one, and Polish separates miód miętowy, from mint nectar, from miód z miętą, honey with mint, the same houses selling both. On a German label, Minzhonig means the infusion.

Several honeys carry a mint word over another plant, one plant each. United States horsemint honey is Monarda, of mint’s own tribe, and so is the one current Russian jar, sold as mint honey (Мятный мёд, myatnyi myod). Australia’s peppermint honeys are eucalypts and its coastal peppermint is Agonis flexuosa, named for the bark and not the flavour. A Tenerife jar reading miel de poleo is Bystropogon origanifolius; an Argentine one is Lippia turbinata, a verbena; one Iranian jar carries a mountain-pennyroyal name, عسل پونه کوهی (asal-e pooneh-kuhi), over Vitex agnus-castus, which its seller’s own sheet calls chaste tree honey; and Florida pennyroyal is Piloblephis rigida. The commonest confusion is not with a mint at all: across seven countries the convergent descriptor for linden honey is menthol or mint, and the German beekeepers’ own sheet calls its smell and taste mentholartig, menthol-like.

One honey from another plant is sold as mint honey plainly, and with a state behind it. Vietnam’s mật ong bạc hà is named for bạc hà, the ordinary Vietnamese word for mint, and carries geographical indication No. 00035; the plant is an Elsholtzia whose species is contested three ways between the registration dossier, recent chemistry and one paper.

Mint itself is grown for flavour, and the flavours are chemical rather than botanical: peppermint rests on menthol and menthone, spearmint on carvone, a pennyroyal odour on pulegone. The one Mentha honey analysed builds its mint note from compounds of its own.

Pairings:

Piedmont’s producers sell it first for sweetening tea, herbal teas and infusions, where its own aroma carries rather than disappearing, and one Italian honey magazine puts it next on strawberries and berries and over vanilla or dark chocolate ice cream.