Calibrating calibrating 123
What’s the connection between honey and extra virgin olive oil?
The real deal
Both are traditional, artisan products, strongly linked to their geographical location of production. They are also reported to be the most commonly faked food products in the world. The majority of mass market honey and extra virgin olive oil is, apparently, adulterated with cheaper stuff. In the case of honey, it is diluted with syrups that are designed to mimic honey and that pass the tests that try to detect honey fraud.
There’s also a practical link. Extra virgin olive oil has a water content that is reliably consistent at about 26.5 %, between 71 and 72 on the Brix scale. Bees cap honey when it reaches less than 20 % water, so “ripe” honey is 19 % water or less, whereas unripe honey and the nectar it is made from have a higher water content.
What I’m getting round to telling you, in a roundabout way, is that I am over the moon to have been given a bottle of extra virgin olive oil from my colleague Luca’s family farm in Italy*, and part of my excitement comes from being able to use it to calibrate my refractometer. The refractometer measures water content, and mine is designed to measure in a range of between 12 - 27 % water (i.e., the range appropriate for measuring honey), but the instrument needs to be calibrated against something of known water content in this range. Something like extra virgin olive oil, if you can get your hands on the genuine article.
The refractometer in its case
If you extract honey from capped honeycomb, you can be sure its water content is <20 %, but if you extract from a mixture of capped and uncapped honeycomb, which you might do at the end of a season, then it’s possible for the overall water content to be 20 % or more. And if it is, it’s at risk of fermentation. Honey is not a sterile product and it may pick up wild yeast from the air. That does nothing unless there is enough water. If there is enough water, the honey ferments, which is of course how mead is made - great when you want mead, but less great when a glass jar of honey goes fizzy or explodes. Which is why the bees reduce the water content of the honey to <20 % before capping it for storage in the hive, and which is why I have a refractometer to check water content of honey that goes into jars if any of the frames were not fully capped. I’ve never actually found any batch of honey to be high in water - I think the capped honey tends to be well under 20 %, so mixing with a minority of uncapped honey doesn’t bring the water level up too high.
Anyway, what better way could there be to calibrate the refractometer, than to use such a beautiful and pure extra virgin olive oil?
*in return for a honeycomb from Copper Bee Apiary - a pleasing exchange that the Romans would have approved of.