Good Quality Honey

For general people usually very difficult for choosing a good quality honey, even have compared with the genuine honey. Many disingenuous merchant sell mixed honey, but they said that their honey is pure. Good quality honey can function as medicine, but this is depend on the honey source.
When you navigating through the maze of all the different honey in the shops, you look out for certain specific information to ensure that the honey I buy is value for money. Good quality honey, that is, honey of value can be judged by five key factors, namely:

1. Water content
2. HMF(Hydroxymethylfurfural)
3. Inverted sugars
4. Impurities
5. Colour

Good quality honey essentially has low water content. Honey is likely to ferment if the water content of honey is greater than 19%. The reason is that all unpasteurized honey contains wild yeasts. Due to the high sugar concentration, these yeasts will pose little risk in low moisture honey because osmosis will draw sufficient water from the yeast to force them into dormancy. In honey that has a higher proportion of water, the yeast may survive and cause fermentation to begin in storage.

HMF is a break-down product of fructose (one of the main sugars in honey) formed slowly during storage and very quickly when honey is heated. The amount of HMF present in honey is therefore used as a guide to storage guide to storage length and the amount of heating which has taken place.

High levels of HMF (greater than 100 mg/kg) can also be an indicator of adulteration with inverted sugars. Cane sugar (sucrose) is "inverted" by heating with a food acid, and this process creates HMF. Many food items sweetened with high fructose corn syrups, e.g. carbonated soft drinks, can have levels of HMF up to 1,000 mg/kg.

For most consumers, good quality honey is expected to be visually free of defect -- clean and clear. Honey which has very high pollen content appears cloudy.

Honey defined by color graded into light, amber, and dark categories which do not really have any bearing on quality. Some of the most distinctively and strongly flavored honey varieties, such as basswood, are very light, while very mild and pleasant honeys such as tulip poplar can be quite dark.