蜂蜜品賞

Sometime ago, AhMo bought some 大崗山 蜂蜜 in LA and claimed it the Absolutely Best Honey in the world. After some exchanges of argument, he decided to give anyone interested in the honey a free bottle. It just happened that he got a new born granddaughter in Northern California. So everyone of us here in the Bay Area gets a free bottle of 大崗山蜂蜜. Under this circumstance, we should of course get together to hash our good old days. I came up with an idea of Honey Contest to settle whether this 大崗山 蜂蜜 is absolutely the best honey. This is really for fun, not a serious event. The real test is which honey is our favorite, no more, no less. Strictly speaking, the Absolutely Best Honey in the world is undefined or not very meaningful.

We held a honey tasting contest in Los Altos Hills on 3/10/2013 at the residence of Charles Hung. It was a '別開生面' 的 party. Here is our setup and rule of the contest: 

1. Get 5 bowls (normal dinner size) label with 1,2,3,4,5. 

2. Peggy (Charles Hung's wife) is assigned as the referee who randomly assign 1,2,3,4,5 to each bottle of honey and put label at the bottom the bottle.

3. Peggy then pours some amount of the honey to the bowls with number one-to-one correspondence, ie #1 bottle to #1 bowl.

The steps 1,2,3 are performed in the kitchen not seen by any participants.

4. Put the bowls outside (dining room) for everyone to try and taste, with cracker, tea or coffee or just hot water. 

5. I prepare a sheet listed with names (vertical) & ranking (horizontal).

6. Everyone put down his tasting result in his boxes with ranking A,B,C,D,E (A is the best)

7. After we finish the test, we then sum up the score (with A=5, B=4... E=1).

8. The highest score is the one that is our favorite. 

9. Check the number with the label of bottle, then we get the winner.

Peggy was in charge. She prepared all the sampled bread, tea, coffee, crackers and hot water etc. The following bottles of honey are selected for sampling: 

大崗山龍眼 蜂蜜, 崗山, Taiwan

Breitsamer Honig, Acacia ( 洋槐) Blossom Honey, 100% Natural, Munich, Germany

Hungary Bees, Wild Acacia Honey, Raw Honey, Hungary

Pacific Northwest, Clover (苜蓿) Glory Bee, Organic, 100% Pure Honey, Eugene, Oregon, US

White Gold Honey, Red Clover, Canada:

The honey selected gives us some international flavor that covers three continents. When everything was ready, Ahmo was nervous, anxious & agitated as he had no idea which bowl contains his Absolutely Best Honey. Instead of trusting his taste, he entered the kitchen and poured some of 大崗山蜂蜜 in his plate and tried to match the color of the honey in the bowls. This is the violation of the contest rule and only AhMo dared to do this. He somehow zeroed in to #3 as his honey by examining the color before tasting. We sure had good time, everyone sampled the honey, smell the aroma and tasted the quality of the sweetness of the honey. Then one by one, we filled in our ranking on the score sheet. Just before the final tally for score, I found that two rows of data were changed, one is mine, the other is Ben Hu. I found that it was AhMo trying to doctor the data and changed the ranking of #3 to 'A' for me and Ben Hu. Of course, this is an outright violation of the contest rule. He also put Z to all numbers except #3 with 'A'. So the contest is really invalid at this point. However, nothing is perfect in our life anyway, I decided to disqualify AhMo's data and correct the doctored data. After all the confusion, we got the final results: #1:19; #2:17; #3:27; #4:25, #5:22. As to which honey corresponding to what #, here is the finding from the kitchen (randomly assigned by Peggy): #1: Hungary, #2: Canada, #3: Taiwan; #4: Germany, #5: United States. Indeed our favorite is 大崗山龍眼 蜂蜜 from Taiwan. So all the worry and nervousness of AhMo actually were unnecessary. He should have just followed the rule and let the real data speak for itself. Here we try to decide which honey is the best. But somehow we forget the best policy to lead our life is honesty. Perhaps AhMo considered the whole thing was a joke and treated as such. 

Honey is like wine in a smaller sense as there are many species of bees and flowers. The combination is limitless. To compare 龍眼 蜂蜜 to 洋槐 (Acacia) honey is like Cabernet Sauvignon to Chardonnay. It is not very meaningful to say Which one is better. It is proper to say I like Chardonnay with fillet of sole and Cabernet Sauvignon with steak. It is more meaningful to compare same kind of honey such as acacia, clover etc. In our test, the honey White Gold from Canada has the lowest score. This is perhaps due to its highly concentrated creamy form. It is actually best for bread as it is like butter, spread and melt immediately. We are just not accustomed to this way of eating honey. 龍眼 蜂蜜 has plenty of sweet aroma that might tip our decision toward it. I actually found that Acacia honey has a very light and pleasant aroma (一股淡淡的清香). It enhances but not overwhelms the taste of the food or drink it applies. Life is a many-splendored thing. If we just focus on the best one and ignore all the rest, we will miss a lot in the pursuit of happiness.