Honey

[Allan]

August 2019 I extracted about 80 lbs of honey and jarred 60lb with 20lb going in an sealed tub
Around 2 weeks later, the honey started to turn into a cream colour, like set honey, it got thicker but retained a soft consistency lemon curd, the taste was excellent. This week I went to use the tub and found the lid bulging and the top covered in a thick foam. The honey tastes fine and when extracted had 19% reading
I was wondering whether anyone else has had a similar experience

[NigelP]

Only with heather honey at 23% moisture....It sounds like yeast are fermenting yours.
Where was it stored? Indoors and warm or out shed and cold.
I'm assuming it was a good seal on the lid as otherwise honey being hygroscopic will absorb water from the air at the interface. This causes the honey to dilute even more and allows yeasts to flourish.

I would remelt, check water % and jar. After jarring I would stick them in an oven at 65C and leave for an hour, this pasteurizing should kill most of the yeast. But it will increase levels of HMF, but nothing too serious.

[Patrick]

Sadly Allan you aren’t the first and won’t be the last. I suspect most of us have opened a tub and found similar. Nigel is right about the containers - some buckets do not form a decent seal. I suspect your problem was the 19% moisture at extraction, as it slowly crystallises the uncrystalised portion increases its moisture content at the top of the bucket and starts to ferment. Some wet summers even the capped homey is too moist - which is infuriating.

That either itself crystallises in time which only becomes apparent when melting down as a froth layer or remains liquid and forms a bready foamy mass.

Be honest with yourself here when tasting the lower part, if it tastes mildly alcoholic or yeasty then maybe best not to risk the good name of your honey?

[AdamD]

Sometimes honey can set in the bucket over time and when you have a look at it, you see an inch or so of foamy honey on the top. This can be scraped off with a heavy spoon and you can dig down to the decent honey below which is fine. (In my experience). The foamy stuff can be discarded or as Nigel suggests, you cold heat it and eat it yourself. Or make some mead.

[MickBBKA]

You can also end up with a watery layer on top of the crystalised honey which then ferments. If you scrape that off leaving just the good set honey it may be salvageable and worth doing as Nigel has suggested.

[Allan]

Thanks to everyone for your advice, it was definitely a strange one, I used a Thornes sealed tub the type which requires the seal to be broken before opening, so I was fairly sure that it was airtight, I thought that if it had fermented that there would have been a yeasty smell, taste , from the honey. The honey which I jarred didn’t granulate and was fine.
As always I will ultra safe and use this for my own use, this is why beekeeping is such a fantastic hobby, there is always something new to consider and of course discuss