The Best Specialty Honey Brands for Raw and Varietal Honey

Started by a beekeeper in Savannah who became genuinely obsessed with sourwood honey, the brand grew into one of the more serious honey companies in the US. Rare varietals like tupelo and orange blossom are sourced with the attention a sommelier gives to vineyard selection.

Founder Carly Stein started consuming propolis to fight a chronic strep infection and became convinced the beehive was a medicine cabinet the world was underusing. The brand built its line around raw honey, royal jelly, and propolis, citing specific studies rather than vague wellness claims.

The same farm. The same hives. The same family, for over forty years. Huckle Bee Farms extracts each batch without heat treatment to preserve the full spectrum of enzymes and pollen, and the consistency of single-farm sourcing means the honey tastes like something specific rather than something average.

Run by a beekeeper who splits time between managing hives and hand-rolling beeswax candles, Little Bee of Connecticut is genuinely vertically integrated. The honey and the beeswax products come from the same hives, which gives a rare degree of transparency about what is actually in the jar.

Bee Hollow approaches honey production with the same terroir-consciousness that good winemakers apply to their grapes. Their wildflower honey shifts in character year to year based on what is blooming around the hives, making each harvest a genuinely different product rather than a standardized one.

A Brooklyn pizza shop worker named Mike Kurtz started infusing honey with chilis after seeing local beekeepers in Brazil do something similar. What started as a condiment for restaurant co-workers in 2010 became a category-defining product that now appears on menus and in home kitchens nationwide.