{"id":14777,"date":"2013-10-14T11:25:19","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T10:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=14777"},"modified":"2013-10-14T11:25:19","modified_gmt":"2013-10-14T10:25:19","slug":"honey-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2013\/10\/honey-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Honey Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

After spending all day baking and decorating cupcakes<\/a> on a Saturday it was time for the competition at the ABKA Honey Show on\u00a0Sunday.<\/p>\n

Actually, we had a few things to do before the show, I went for a run and swim in Machynlleth and Morgan went to Junior\u00a0Triathlon\u00a0Training for an hour afterwards giving Anna and I the chance to have a bacon sandwich, cake and coffee in the cafe together. We then headed home, gathered our cakes and honey and headed into Aberystwyth with delicately decorated cupcakes on our laps.<\/p>\n

The ABKA Honey Show is a fairly informal affair and there weren’t a huge number of entries in the various categories. In fact there were no entries for a couple of the classes and only one or two in some, but the “Ornamental display incorporating wax”, and the “Cupcake” classes were the most hotly contested. We all sat around drinking, tea, eating cake and biscuits, and chatting for a while. Once everyone was there, John got down to the serious business of judging the entries while everyone else took part in the annual honey tasting.<\/p>\n

The honey tasting is a blind tasting challenge where we all taste each others honey and rate it on a scale of 1-3. The scores are then tallied and the winners announced. We had 10 different honey’s to taste this year. Mike had entered two as he had so much honey but unfortunately they both scored right at the bottom of the list in 9th and 10th place. Ours scored in the middle, coming in 5th place amongst a number of very similar honeys all with very close scores. At the top of the list was Bill Rushden’s Honey.<\/p>\n

It was interesting to taste the\u00a0differences between so many honeys all produced within a fairly small geographic range, but there were quite a few similarities too and most looked fairly similar in the jars, with just subtle differences in colour and consistency.<\/p>\n

\"Honeys<\/a>

Honey’s for tasting<\/p><\/div>\n

After more tea and biscuits an with everyone on a bit of a sugar rush, John was ready to\u00a0announce winners from the show classes. The Honey and wax classes were taken quite seriously and he explained how he had judged them and the points that are taken into consideration within such classes at larger shows. John said that the light honey class was an exceptional class and that all entries would have done well at more\u00a0prestigious\u00a0shows. Robert Hughes took the top honours, but all entries were awarded a prize as they were so good. There weren’t any entries for the dark honey class and the single entry from Richard \u00a0in the granulated honey class\u00a0didn’t get such an exalted appraisal. In fact, even though it was the only entry into the class, Richard’s granulated honey only got 2nd prize and John put that down to the taste, commenting that he “wouldn’t even put it on his toast!”<\/p>\n

Richard redeemed himself however, as his frame of wax ready for extraction was described as an “absolute beauty” and won best in show, and the cakes of wax were very god too.<\/p>\n\n\t\t