It’s Official: The First Bottles of Desert Farms Apiary Honey Are Finished!
A few days ago, we said it was finally bottling time.
Now we can show you the finished product.
The first bottles of Desert Farms Apiary Raw Honey are filled, sealed, tagged, and getting ready to make their way out of our West Richland honey house and into the hands of our customers.
Seeing rows of finished bottles on the counter is a pretty special milestone for us.
What started with moving hives, equipment, honey supers, buckets, and an entire beekeeping operation has slowly turned into something tangible: a finished bottle of honey carrying the Desert Farms Apiary name.
And we couldn't be happier with how they turned out.
A Classic Bottle for a Classic Product
We chose Muth-style glass honey bottles for our initial product line because they have a connection to the history of American beekeeping.
The distinctive bottles feature an embossed beehive and the words “Pure Honey” molded directly into the glass. We paired them with natural cork closures, tamper-evident shrink bands, twine, and our Desert Farms Apiary hang tags.
The result is a bottle that feels appropriate for what is inside it: simple, traditional honey without a lot of unnecessary fuss.
Our initial lineup includes:
4 oz — a great smaller size for sampling, gifts, and holiday baskets
8 oz — an everyday-size bottle
16 oz — a full pound of honey
Each bottle is filled by net weight, rather than simply filling the container by volume.
What's Inside Matters Even More
Of course, a beautiful bottle doesn't mean much without good honey inside it.
Our honey is bottled as 100% pure and unfiltered raw honey. Before bottling, it goes through our honey-house clarification and settling process to remove wax and other material left behind during extraction while allowing us to avoid unnecessarily processing the honey.
We also test our honey before bottling. Our current inventory recently measured 14.6% moisture, an especially useful quality-control measurement for us as we prepare each batch for sale.
And then there's the part you can see in these photographs: that color.
Held up to the light, this honey has a gorgeous deep golden-to-amber appearance. One of the fascinating things about real honey is that its color and flavor can vary depending on the nectar sources available to the bees. That's part of what makes every crop of honey a little different.
From Honey House to Finished Bottle
There's considerably more work behind one of these little bottles than you might imagine.
Our process has involved preparing and sanitizing the honey-house equipment, warming crystallized inventory when necessary, clarifying the honey, allowing it to settle, preparing and sanitizing bottles and equipment, filling each bottle by weight, installing the corks, applying the tamper-evident seals, and finally adding the twine and individual product tags.
Now we're doing it repeatedly.
Seeing a single finished bottle was exciting.
Seeing rows of them lined up in the honey house is even better.
What's Next?
Production continues.
We'll be building inventory across our 4 oz, 8 oz, and 16 oz sizes as we prepare for sales, local events, holiday markets, gifts, and our first customers.
This also marks an important transition for Desert Farms Apiary. Much of what we've shared so far has been about building the operation—the bees, equipment, honey house, supplies, and countless little decisions required to get everything running.
Now we're beginning to share the result.
There are still plenty of things happening behind the scenes, and we'll continue bringing you along for that part of the journey too.
But for today, we're going to enjoy this milestone for a moment.
Our first finished bottles of Desert Farms Apiary Raw Honey are here.
Local bees. Local honey. Veteran owned.
— Desert Farms Apiary
West Richland, Washington