2014 Old Blue Raw Honey for Sale

Finally finally, Old Blue Raw Honey is up for sale on our new website! I’m so excited and proud and anxious to share this news with y’all. Henry and his bees have been working like crazy all spring and summer to create the bounty that we now have stored away in buckets and bottles, ready to send out into the world.

This year, we have these cute 8-ounce squeeze bottles that that fit right into USPS small flat-rate boxes for efficient shipping. I was pretty skeptical about these jars before we ordered them because I kind of hate plastic, BUT I’ve since grown to love them. First off, they’re BPA-free, so you don’t have to worry about chemical junk tainting your pure, raw honey. Secondly, they’re perfect for doling out a thin wisp or a big dollop of honey without having to deal with a messy, sticky spoon. You can even rest them upside down to glean the “bottom of the barrel” so to speak. They’re also a great size for the honey connoisseur to collect a couple different varietals without feeling overwhelmed by a large quantity or skunked by high shipping and handling charges. So far, most of our customers have ordered two or three honey varietals at a time, and though you’re more than welcome to purchase just one, it’s probably more fun to order a pair or trio to do your own honey tasting or share a bottle with a friend without paying any extra for shipping.

You’ll notice on the Old Blue website that some honey varietals are marked as “limited release” and are priced a little higher. These varietals were harvested early in the season, and they contain significantly more pollen than main-season honeys and have distinct flavors. If you’re in the market for medicinal-quality, heavy terroir honeys, these are the ones you want. Early honeys are lower yielding, more labor intensive, and higher risk (because hives that are strong enough to produce spring honey are probably also on the edge of swarming, which is a loss that Henry works to prevent). You can read a little more about our early honey extraction here.

We have nine honey varietals currently for sale, but in the next couple months, you may see some of those go out of stock and a few new ones appear. We are only offering larger pint-size jars of main-season blackberry-nectar-based honey varietals. We’re also limiting shipping to within the United States. (Sorry, international folks!)

Our friend Halley Roberts designed our new labels, and Taylor Made Labels in Lake Oswego, Oregon printed them. We could not be more thrilled about how they turned out. If you ever need a few thousand (or hundreds of thousands of) labels printed, we highly recommend the consummate professionals at Taylor Made. Our website looks so classy only because I spent an afternoon around a kitchen table in Portland with Henry’s cousin, Ellie Harmon, who’s a computer genius and all-around interesting person (PCT through-hiker + PhD candidate). I gave Ellie a vague outline of what I wanted the website to look like (after studying the websites of friends in business including Block Shop Textiles, Nell & Mary, Clamlab, Portland Apothacary, Marble & Milkweed, etc.), and with the help of Shopify and a free customizable theme, she made my dream into a reality. I could have spent five times as much time working on it on my own, but the outcome would have only been half as good.

We’ll be doing several different honey tasting events in Portland in the between now and Christmas, and we’d love to see some of you and share our harvest. Our first event is coming up next Saturday, November 15 at Takara Studio in North Portland. For more details on upcoming events, you can keep track of us on the “Events” page of the Old Blue website.

Old Blue has a fledgling Facebook page here, and Henry’s been posting real-time beekeeping anecdotes on the @oldbluerawhoney Instagram feed. We also encourage you to sign up to receive the Old Blue email newsletter. I’m planning on sending out occasional (once a month?) emails including updates from our apiaries, information about our varietal honey availability, honey-centric recipes, and links to topical bee and beekeeping articles from national and international news. This link will take you to the sign up form.

One of the things that I really like about the new Old Blue website is that all of my beekeeping blog posts are now right there alongside our e-commerce platform to show folks that our honey is legit and give customers a sense of all the work that goes into managing our hives. Don’t worry, though. I’ll continue to publish blog posts about the bees here first, and then I’ll copy them over to there, too.

As you can see, there are lots of different ways that you can keep track of us and this business, or you can always email oldbluerawhoney@gmail.com if you have specific questions. Keep in mind that we prefer to address broad questions about our beekeeping practices through long-form blog posts. If you would like to know more about how we operate, you’re welcome to request a blog post on a certain subject, but it may take a while for us to get around to presenting it.

Thanks in advance for supporting us in this venture. We really appreciate it!