I've just decided that I will roll out the results of our honey tasting contest over a few blog posts... 'cuz the reality is, the final post will have lots of yummy information!Lets start with WTF is a honey tasting contest? In our case, we bought eight (8) different kinds of honey and invited people at a party to rank them on a scale of 1 - 10 on two attributes: 1) Distinctiveness and 2) Agreeability.
The results will be of interest to the brands we included, among others. The selection of our honeys was admittedly haphazard (that's a statistics term). HOWEVER, we did select them with the intent of providing our unsuspecting tasters with a range of flavors (we didn't "know" this, 'cuz we didn't taste the honeys in advance; we just used a little common sense; include a classic golden honey and a raw honey and tasters are pretty much guaranteed to be able to make a distinction.
Ah... that "distinction" concept. So, we judged the honeys using two categories (attributes), then combined the results of the individual attributes for a "Total" result and an over all winner. .....
So, what do we mean by distinctiveness and agreeability? Here's what we said in our honey tasting guidance:
1) Distinctive flavors stand out as being interesting, perhaps having a notable aroma. Distinctive flavors, however, might not be agreeable for regular use, perhaps being too strong in some way.
2) Agreeable flavors go beyond simply tasting sweet (it should have a honey flavor!!), but aren't so distinctive that they might offend someone, e.g., too yeasty.
We had local honeys (Maryland), honeys from Chile and New Zealand... and clover honey "North America." I'll get the tally of honeys and results to you in future posts. Stay tuned.
