Creaming fast-setting ivy honey at home — 10% seed at 14°C, but does it need melting first?
Devon, fourth year, and my late supers came off last week with a good chunk of ivy in them. Ivy honey sets like concrete — the two buckets I extracted on Saturday are already going cloudy at the bottom after five days. Rather than fight it in jars I want to turn the lot (about 28 kg) into creamed honey, which my market customers keep asking for anyway.
What I think I know: seed with roughly 10% fine-grained creamed honey, stir it in when the bulk honey is cool (not warm), then hold it around 14°C for a week or two and stir daily-ish until it sets smooth.
Questions: if part of the bucket has already started to grain coarse, do I have to warm it back to fully liquid first so the coarse crystals don't spoil the texture? What temperature is safe for that without cooking it? And does creaming tame the ivy flavour at all, or is it still going to taste like ivy?
Crèmehoning is the default here in the Netherlands, so from nine years of doing it: yes, you must get rid of the coarse crystals first, otherwise the seed has nothing to work on and the result is gritty. Warm the bucket gently in a water bath or warming cabinet to about 40°C, no more, and give it a day — that melts the coarse grain without pushing HMF up. Then cool it to the low 20s before you stir the seed in, because warm honey dissolves your seed crystals. 10% is right. Hold at 14°C and stir once a day for the first few days; ivy will finish in well under two weeks.
CorkBeeRon · Sep 21, 2026
Cork, so ivy every October. Creaming does not remove the flavour, but it softens it — the sharpness is much less noticeable in a smooth set than in a jar that went rock hard. Blend it with something milder if you have any summer honey left, half and half creams beautifully. One warning: work fast. Ivy in a bucket can set solid in a week and then you're melting 28 kg, which is a miserable job.
PerthshireBees · Sep 21, 2026
Heather isn't ivy but the same principle — I cream anything that would otherwise grain coarse. A cheap wine-cooler fridge set to 14°C is the best bit of kit I own for it, far more consistent than a cold room in a Perthshire October. Don't over-stir: you want to distribute the seed and knock air out, not whip it. A slow paint mixer on a drill, thirty seconds, done.
DevonBees_Em · Sep 22, 2026
Brilliant, thank you. Water bath to 40°C tomorrow, cool it overnight, seed on Wednesday and into the garage which is sitting at 13-14°C now anyway. CorkBeeRon — I've a half bucket of July blackberry left so I'll cream a blended batch alongside a straight ivy one and see which the customers prefer. Will report back.