Raw Honey

Raw honey is the most natural way to bring the work of our bees and our forest into your home. The defining features of our raw honey are”

• Unfiltered: We strain our raw honey to remove large pieces of wax and bits of bees but it is not ultra-filtered to make it crystal-clear.
• Unpasteurised and not ultra-heated. Our raw honey is only ever warmed (never beyond the temperature of a hive) to get it into the jar.
• Unprocessed: So that our honey retains all its natural components like fine pollen, propolis and beeswax particles, and live enzymes.

For us here at Manawa Honey NZ, the meaning of raw honey goes beyond just the definition in processing terms. Our worldview as forest-dwellers and tangata whenua (people of the land) dictates that “raw” is part of a larger covenant with the land and our forest:

• Provenance: Our Raw Honey, coming from the flowers and the environment of our forest trees, are a direct reflection of Te Urewera’s terroir and dynamic ecosystems, that cannot be replicated.
• Standout Taste: Ultra-heat and filtering flatten the unique taste of honey into a generic sweetness. In our Raw Honey, the floral notes and nuanced taste of our forest is protected to offer a genuine flavour experience that nature has crafted.
• Kaitiaki Responsibility: Like we as kaitiaki (guardians) work on protecting our native forests, we work to protect the line of origin and uniqueness from our forest to our raw honeys.
• Seasonal Vintage: In Te Urewera, our bees move with the seasons and the flowering of native trees such as Kānuka, Rewarewa, Tāwari and many others. Each season brings a different nectar, a slightly different honey with subtle differences in colour, aroma and texture.

We offer two types of Raw Honey:

• Natural Raw Honey is only gently warmed to get the honey into the jar, briefly stirred to homogenise the batch, and nothing else.
• Soft-set Raw Honey uses only low heat, but has a small amount of starter added from a previous batch, then slow stirred for 12 hours or more.