Nine thousand years ago, somebody in what is now southern Turkey cooked with beeswax in a clay pot. We know because the wax is still in the clay, and chemists went looking for it in 2015. That is the oldest trace of people and bees together anywhere in the world, and it is not a hive. It is a container.
For most of the time since, the container was the comb. Bees build wax boxes for free and they do not need a lid, so honey sold in the wax it came in. That changed in the 1800s, when two inventions arrived within a few years of each other. The movable frame hive let a beekeeper take honey without wrecking the colony. The spinning extractor flung the honey out so the comb could go back in. Suddenly there were drums of liquid honey and nothing to put them in.
Everything since has been an answer to one question: how does a person get thick, sticky, crystallising honey out of a container and onto their toast?
Tin answered it first. Cheap, stackable, unbreakable, and you could print straight onto the metal. Lyle's Golden Syrup has been in the same green and gold tin since 1885. Tins are still how honey moves in bulk, and a drum is still how ours leaves the shed. The trouble with a tin is that you cannot see through it, and honey is a colour.
So the shelf went to glass. A jar shows the difference between a near black ironbark and a honey the colour of water, which is the most interesting thing about any batch and the reason the trade has graded honey by eye for a century.
Then, in 1957, a bear. A couple in Pennsylvania called Ralph and Luella Gamber put honey in a squeezable plastic bear. The early ones leaked out of the ears. By the mid nineties about fifteen per cent of the honey sold in America went out in one, and once somebody put a valve in the cap and turned the bottle upside down the argument was over. That is the bottle in most Australian pantries today.
Notice what is missing from all of that. Not one of those switches happened because of the environment. They happened because of somebody's hand, and a knife, and a sticky ring on the shelf.
Which brings us to wine. Wine spent the best part of four centuries defending cork, Australia included, and cork was quietly ruining a real share of bottles. Yalumba tried a screwcap in the 1970s and the market laughed at it. Then in 2000 a group of Clare Valley riesling makers put their best wine under screwcap together, on purpose, and explained why on the back label. Today around 98 per cent of Australian wine is screwcapped.
But look at what actually changed. Wine changed the cap. It kept the bottle. Twenty five years on most wine is still in glass, and the glass is still the heaviest thing about it.
That is the rule, and it holds for honey too. The part of a pack that does a job changes. The part that is a costume does not.
A honey pack is nearly all job. So ours is a clear plastic squeeze bottle, and these are the reasons, in the order they matter to you.
It arrives. We post every order, and a broken glass jar of honey in a satchel does not just ruin the honey. It ruins everything else in the van that day.
You can get the honey out. No knife, no drip, no ring on the shelf.
It comes back when it goes solid. And it will go solid, because that is what real honey does. Stand the bottle in warm water and it comes back. A glass jar does not love that.
You can see it. This is the one that matters most to us. Every bottle we send carries a batch code, and the code tells you the country that batch came off and the colour it graded. A clear bottle is the only pack where you can hold that up to the window and check it for yourself. A tin hides it. We would rather be checked.
Why plastic and not glass? Because we post every order and glass breaks. A plastic bottle also squeezes, it can be warmed in a sink when the honey candies, and it is clear, so you can see the colour your batch graded. Our bulk honey still goes out in drums and our pollen still comes in a tin. The bottle is the pack that suits a parcel.
Is it food safe? Yes. It is food grade and BPA free, and it is the same material the biggest honey packers in Australia use.
Isn't glass better for the environment? It depends what you are measuring, and we are not going to pretend we have run the numbers. Plastic is far lighter to post and it does not break, which is a real saving on every parcel. Glass is heavier to make and to move, and it is recycled well in Australia. Neither a honey jar nor a honey bottle earns a container deposit refund, because that scheme is for drinks. Put ours in the yellow bin with the lid off and the label on.
The bottle is not the point. The honey is. But a pack is a promise like everything else on the label, so we would rather tell you why ours is what it is. The honey is here, and every batch is here.