bought 430lbs of wildflower honey

My brewing club picked up 430 pounds of wildflower honey from a local apiary last night and got a great tour and Q&A session with the beekeeper. The plan is to do two large batches of mead in 55 gallon drums and then age them in barrels for a year. Is $1.25 a pound a good price?

What is that? About 40 gallons?


As for price, I dunno........ I know I paid like 5 times that amount at the grocery store....

Bobby_M said:

Is $1.25 a pound a good price?

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My sarcasm sense is tingling

good score

One gallon of honey = 12lbs so we got about 35 gallons.

Well, I've never bought more than 10 pounds or so at a time so I actually don't know if it's a good price at that bulk volume or not. By the pound, it's been around $3/lb at the grocery. We picked up using our own buckets so he didn't spend anything on packaging materials/labor.


This place was just swarming with bees. It was a little nerve wracking to say the least.

Foreigner said:

My sarcasm sense is tingling

good score

Click to expand...

A buck a pound is a very good price. Especially considering that generic clover is like 5 bucks a# retail

I have never purchased as much as that of course

Last year I paid $20 each for 5 gals.

With the bee thing I expect to pay more this year.

horrible price actually. Don't worry though, there are still gentlement out there in this world, I propose that I come pick this honey up from you and drive it (alone of course) straight back to the bee keepers to give them a piece of my mind.

I stopped in the Austin HBS on the way back to Missouri Saturday. They had a few 5 gallons buckets just came in. I bought a gallon at $3.47 per pound. So I will start the next batch as soon as I find out if I'm heading to San Antonio or not!

Looks like our local supply has some really good prices. a 60lb bucket of wild flower is $1.25/lb and Orange blossom is $1.50. Still a good find.

The big 100 gallon barrel mead brew is coming up this Saturday. It will be done in two 55 gallon drums then racked into oak barrels in a month for an additional 11 months before the club racks off their 5 gallon shares.

I'm thinking about documenting the process for youtube posterity as long as I don't have to be too hands on with the brew. I've never done a mead before so it will be a learning experience.

Mead is actually WAY simpler to do than AG brewing! You will enjoy it all, except the long wait.

I pay $2.30 a lb for mine iirc. Been 3 months since I bought it, but I think that's what I paid. Bought 15lbs and it was about $35. Just racked off the 5 gal batch into 3 fermenters. A one gallon with ~1lb of fresh blackberries and a few oak chips, a one gallon with no additives, and a 3 gallon with about 4.5-5 lbs of fresh blueberries. There's a berry farm up the road, and they're $1 a lb and you pick them yourself. My mom likes to go pick them, so I pay her for them and gladly use them. Tasted a little of the mead when I racked last night. After 3 months it still tastes like jet fuel....so it's fermenting nicely.

Here's the video...
It's pretty weak and brief because I was busy helping out and not recording much...

HAHAHA that's an absolutely crazy assembly you got there, Bobby! Lovin' how the camera tracked all of that massive length of tubing . Definitely better than lugging it around, though!

Yeah, we had a few counterflow/march pump naysayers. The arguement was that they could carry the bucket down and pour it out in half the time. They forgot to include the 15 minute cool down with the immersion chiller. It took 8 hours to do 110 gallons total. It took some time to hit our stride and we only had two burners.