The Appalachian Honey So Highly Coveted It's Considered Liquid Gold

Whether your sweet stuff of choice is a simple raw honey in tea or drizzled hot honey on your pizza, honey is an ancient staple we all know and love. One type worth hunting down is sourwood honey. It's a true delicacy local to the Appalachian region of the southeast, and a common fixture around farmers' markets and roadside stands in the Carolinas and Tennessee particularly. 

Sourwood honey, made from the white flowers of the regional sourwood tree, is prized for its distinctive hue and especially its rich taste. It's not hyperbolic to call it liquid gold — hold a jar of the sweet stuff up to a light and marvel at the light, clear golden hue. And the taste is truly next level, with a mild, bright, and warm flavor. The taste is often described as buttery or caramel-like, almost like a cinnamon-sprinkled gingerbread cookie.

One of those obvious-but-you-might-not-have-thought-of-it things is the fact that honey takes the taste of whatever plants it's made from, and sourwood honey specifically hails from the sourwood tree. It's native to the Great Smoky Mountains of the Appalachian region, sometimes known as the sorrel tree or the Appalachian lily. The tree only blooms — and is therefore interesting to bees — for a few weeks each summer. This means that there's a tight window for bees to produce undiluted sourwood honey, making it all the more special and worth snatching up.

Sourwood isn't the mass-produced honey you'll see in plastic squeeze bottles on big store shelves — far from it. If you're exclusively grabbing the more affordable options from a retailer like Walmart or Kroger, it might be hard to know just where certain brands are sourcing their honey. Often, it's a mix of honey from many different hives from large-scale commercial farms. The honey production industry is mired in labeling and production controversy regarding honey's importing, processing, adulteration statuses. For example, Costco's Kirkland brand honey, even when jars are adorned with buzzwords like "raw" and "organic," the sweet stuff isn't even made in America.

Given the time and care it takes to produce sourwood honey, you can find a jar of liquid gold from several small Appalachian beekeeping businesses. The state of North Carolina actually requires a permit to sell honey under the sourwood label as an extra measure of protection. Once you've tried it, you'll want to explore all the unique ways to cook and bake with honey, and you'll never want to go back to standard store-bought jars.