Some pictures of this year’s honey harvest in the San Luis Valley.

Brent Edelen harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, 2010

Harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010

Harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010

Brent Edelen harvesting honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010

Today Grampa’s Gourmet Honey was featured on the Edible Front Range Magazine’s blog!

We’ve been covered in the media before, but this is really the first article we’ve seen that truly captures what we are all about!

We had a visitor from the Edible Front Range Magazine Blog!

It was great having Kat Ethington and her husband visit us in Alamosa. We walked her through the end-to-end process of honey making: starting with a exciting visit (people did get stung!) to some of our honey hives where we picked up a few frames of honey. We then went back to the honey house and extracted the honey and sent everyone home with a jar of fresh, raw Colorado Clover honey!

Kat, who is a freelance photographer, also posted even more photos from the trip on her own photoblog.

Here are a couple of them:

Lots of pictures were taken that day...

Brent, explaining how bees cap honey.

You can kind of make out the bee hives in the darkness…

The silhouette on the horizon are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

We are happy offer a new honey starting today – Chamiso Honey!

Chamiso aka Rabbit Brush

Chamiso Brush aka Rabbit Brush is an evergreen brush prevalent throughout the South West. The brush is as tough as the landscape that it inhabits. Native Americans often used the flowers of the Chamiso to make tea for curing various illnesses including dizziness, diarrhea and lack of focus.

The healing properties of the Chamiso brush can be felt in its honey. According to legend the nectar (and therefore the honey) from Chamiso is said to help one maintain focus on details while still seeing the larger picture of the project at hand.

This honey will make you stand up and take notice. If you look closely as you pour the honey you will see the striking resemblance in color that the blossom of the plant and the honey share.

This honey was made in the fall of 2009 in Southern Colorado. We have pulled it out of reserve for the first time.

Bee on Chamiso Flowers (pic via Dave Beaudette)

Clover Honey

Clover is one of the mildest honeys we produce. Our Clover Honey comes from yellow and white sweet clover found in the high altitude of the San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico.

Unlike our other honeys, we are able to produce clover honey fairly consistently, although some color variation is normal from year to year.

Tamarisk Honey

Tamarisk, also know as Salt Cedar is a pine like tree that grows all along the Rio Grande river from Northern New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico. The tree has gained a reputation as a large water user and New Mexico currently has a program  to try to eradicate this tree through removal. As a result, we have been making less and less honey every year. This is my favorite honey; it is the Irish Stout of the honey world, dark, strong and very unusual. If you are a fan of buckwheat or Tupelo honey this is right up your alley!

White Honey

White Honey (sometimes called whipped, spun, or creamed) is honey that is naturally granulated under controlled circumstances. We use Mesquite honey to start the process and give it a nice smooth consistency. This white honey will stay soft in the jar forever and won’t run off of your toast! Keep it in a cool place, as if you warm it it will turn into regular liquid honey.

“Seasonal” New Mexico Wild Flower Honey

We call this honey “Seasonal” because it is produced in very limited quantities, and it has the most variation in terms of pollen source. This honey is from around Rodeo, NM where the bees freely roam the beautiful desert and have their choice of wild flowers (cactus flowers, star-thistle, etc).