someone at work asked me about mad honey vs manuka honey like they were two options on the same shelf, and i realised i couldnt explain the difference past "theyre both expensive honey with a good story". help me not sound stupid on monday
theyre not really the same category of thing beyond both being honey with excellent PR. manuka is leptospermum nectar, NZ and parts of australia, and its graded on methylglyoxal which builds up from a precursor while the honey sits. thats measurable, so theres an actual number on the jar — UMF or MGO — sitting on top of an industry standard and a testing setup. mad honey is rhododendron nectar and the compounds people care about are grayanotoxins, which swing around by species, by patch, by season, sometimes hive to hive. no equivalent grading body, no number that means the same thing from one seller to the next. so with one youre buying against a published grade, with the other youre buying one batch's paperwork, if it exists
@Ben nails it. one has a certification body, the other has a guy with a phone and a ladder photo
That's the version to give your coworker. With manuka you check a grade against a standard that exists outside the seller; here you check one batch's document against that specific jar. "What grade is it" has no answer in this category, and anyone who hands you one invented it.
they get sold with the exact same face though. wooden spoon, moody light, the word rare. markets love a rare