The Way We Were Wednesday - Honey Packers

 If you ever visit a honey packing house, you never forget the smell.  It is honey, and beeswax, and always a little bit of sour fermentation.  Honey diluted with water rapidly begins to ferment.  Honey from a sealed honeycomb, has too little water in it to allow the natural yeasts to ferment, but add a little water and the smell reminds me of my childhood.  

My father took the photo above, in a packing plant in southeast Pennsylvania in the early 1960's.  The square metal cans are each five gallons, about 60 pounds of honey.  Most producers shipped in cans until the early 1960's then changed over to 55 gallon barrels.  I was never in this plant.  I was in one in the Detroit area, and one in south central Michigan,  they both smelled the same.  Lots of our friends growing up, had small scale packing rooms, they all smelled the same.  

My father was raised in the era where honey was a substitute for granulated table sugar, a time when the lighter the color, the milder the flavor, the more desirable it was considered. I disagreed with that, I thought the more complex the flavor the better, color didn't matter.  I would pack darker or oddly flavored honey and he would fuss that it would NEVER SELL, and no one would be happy with it.  It frequently flew off the shelf with requests for more.  We had a location near a maple syrup sugar house (where sap is boiled down to make maple syrup.) One years the bees gathered enough from the sugar house to produce honey with a unique maple flavor. I diverted that to the bottling tank, even my father liked it.  It sold well.  We were unable to repeat that the following year (the theory was that the bees always produced this, what happened that one year was other honey flows came early in the season and the bees didn't consume all of the maple honey, leaving some there for harvest season.) 

Oh well, this photo triggers those smell memories.