How to Jar Honey – Abelo Jarring Machine Review – Full Instructional Guide

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. So as you can see, I've got my gloves on, I've got my hairnet on, we've had a thorough deep clean in the honey room. We always make sure we do that as part of our kind of hazard prevention processes. Today we're just going to kind of give you an instructional video on how we use the Abello jarring machine. So like I said, first things first, whenever you're doing any honey extraction, make sure you give all of your kit an incredibly thorough clean. You need to clean absolutely everything that you're going to use, and you need to disinfect stuff if that's part of your hazard management process. Make sure you wear a hairnet, keeps kind of any stray hairs out of your honey. Best practice to wear gloves as well, but I understand that kind of different people have different processes, so you don't necessarily need a hairnet, you don't necessarily need gloves. But I do think it is best practice for kind of whenever you're in an extraction environment, a food processing environment, that you should kind of use that kit. Clean fleece, do you know what I mean? Clean clothes, clean shoes, and make sure the environment's clean before you start extracting honey. So in today's video, I'm going to show you how we jar our honey using the Abello jarring machine. So first off, why did I need a jarring machine? Jarring honey is a sticky, time-consuming process, so if you've got 1 or 2 hives, you can kind of get away— you can probably get away without an extractor, but you can definitely get away without using kind of any specialist jarring machinery. A number of people do it in various ways, so you can do it using a honey gate and kind of putting the jars underneath and then eyeing them up and then weighing them to make sure that you've got sufficient weight within the jar. There's a number of kind of little contraptions that you can use to make that easier. I know some people who would just use a big bucket and a jar, and they'll get the jar and they'll put that in the bucket, and then they'll just kind of like dispense that into the jars by eye. Again, you've got to make sure in that process that you— that you— the end jars are clean on the outside. That is to say, there's no kind of sticky residue, otherwise your labels won't stick on properly, and it's just not a very professional way of doing it. I've seen people do it though like that, and it comes out very, very well, and they're quick at it, and they kind of learn the knack. I'm not very good at it at all, and I used to find jarring lots of honey, lots of jars of honey, really time-consuming and fiddly. So I invested in the Abello jarring machine. Now I looked around and kind of searched the market and thought, what jarring machine do I want? I'd narrowed it down to kind of 2 jarring machines, the Abello, so the Lysen one, and the Swenty one. And as always with me, it came down to cost. I couldn't justify the additional cost of a Suyenti. I wasn't a member of the Bee Farmers at the time, so maybe if you're going through the Bee Farmers, they might be comparable in cost now. But I probably don't want to look at that because it might get me down. So the other, the other thing that I was looking out for in a jarring machine is that I wanted one with a turntable. Now the reason I wanted one with the turntable is I found, and from the videos that I saw, I thought I could have a slicker, quicker process using the turntable. So Abello, Lysen do 2 variants of their turntable machine. They do a very, very large one which I think is about a meter in diameter or there or thereabouts, and then they do a smaller one which I think is about 600 millimeters in diameter. As you know, my honey room is very small, it's very compact. I did not have room for the, for the big tall one, so I went with the smaller one. So my choice with Lysen was the drawing machine on its own The 600mm turntable drying machine, and then the larger one. I think it's a meter diameter, the larger one. And I have to say, I'm over the moon that I went for the variant that I did. So the bigger one, I'm sure, is fine, and in a larger kind of manufacturing environment, a food processing environment, that would be the one to go for. But for me, the toss-up between not having the turntable and having the turntable, I'm so glad I kind of plumped and spent the extra money on the turntable. So you'll see later on in this video, it It just makes that process so much quicker and slicker, and it means that you're free to do other stuff as the machine works away. Now, that's definitely not to say this is a kind of push-and-play machine where you push it and you walk away. It's definitely not that, and you need to keep your eye on it all the time. And I'll discuss some of the areas that you really do need to pay attention with on this machine later on in the video. Like I say, it's not push and play. There's a lot of kind of operator engagement with the machine, so you just need to be aware of that. But what the turntable allows me to do is that it allows me to— I put loads of jars— sorry, I put loads of lids in the middle, I put all of my jars around the edge, I press play, and then it starts dispensing into the jars. And then as the jars come out with honey in them, I'm able to put a lid on them, put them into a box, and then at the same time take another empty jar from my empty box and put that on the beginning of the turntable run. So the turntable gives you the flexibility to kind of do all of those operations as the machine is running. You don't need to stop. It has really fine adjustment over the speed control, and I'll talk about that a little bit later in the video. But it's got a lot of good features and it just makes the jarring process so much easier. So to give you a kind of feel for the numbers in terms of where I was before, I was probably jarring maybe 1 jar a minute, and that would be kind of over a long period average, and that would include all of the mop-up time for when I spilt it, and that included consistent weighing of the jars. And this is something that the, the Abello jarring machine completely does away with. You don't need to weigh your jars. And then moving on to the jarring machine, so it advertises you can do about 350 an hour. I find I can do a few more than that, so I'm not sure where that number comes from, but I'm kind of averaging maybe, maybe 400 an hour. That's 8-ounce jars. And that is getting— taking the cleaned, pre-cleaned empty jars, putting them onto the turntable letting it run through the machine. The machine fills it up, I take it off, put the lid on, and put that in the box. So I get from one box of cleaned, dishwashed jars, I end up with jars of honey just like that. I mean, that's my end product, and I can do about 400 of those an hour. So the 2 machines that you see here, these are the machines that I use with the jarring machine. So I have a Lyson 100-litre premium settling tank. If you take the lid off there, I've got a sieve so I can put kind of pre-filtered honey down through here. It's got a conical strainer at the bottom. I can get 100 litres in there, which on average is about 300-350 pounds of honey. In my creaming machine, that's the same, it's a 100-litre, so I can get about 300-350 pounds worth of honey in there. So in total, between the two, I have about 700 pounds of honey. And then once I put that into my 8-ounce jars, I find that my 8-ounce jars take a bit more than half a pound. So at 700 pounds, I get about 1,250, maybe 1,250 jars, somewhere around that per session. And I do that in about 3 hours. So as you can see, I mean, it's a huge time saver for me, whereas before I was doing 1,200 jars And that would take me 1,200 minutes. So I'll do the maths and work out what that is. And now I can do 1,200 jars and it only takes me 3 hours. So it's a real time saver for me. I don't have a lot of time and a machine like this helps me massively along the way. So you can see the connections that I have down here on the settling tank and on the creaming machine. I've gone away from the honey gates that come with it. I bought a specially made Lyson 1¼-inch ball valve Now what that means is that I can connect my settling tank and my creaming machine directly to my jarring machine. And again, I've said it in previous videos, but that is what saves so much time. So I'm not kind of doing a batch of creamed honey and then thinking, right, how am I going to get that out to the receptacle that I'm going to use to feed the jarring machine? It is the receptacle, it does the work in the container that I want to connect into my jarring machine. So it's quick, it's slick, it only needs to be cleaned once at the beginning and once at the end. I don't have to faff around kind of like dispensing it into something else and then scraping everything out to make sure that I'm kind of not losing stuff by transferring it between containers. Um, they're absolutely fantastic, these ball valves. So I have these on everything. They're about kind of £90 each, but they're really, really good. I'm upgrading my extractor to also have a ball valve on it And then I'm going to run with the hoses from my extractor into my sump that I've not yet bought. So that's next one coming up, Damien. Um, and then I'm going to run my uncapping machine screw press into that sump as well. So I'm just trying to do everything, make it as quick and as slick and as lean as it possibly can be to save me time and result in a kind of greater end product because I can focus more on the kind of outputs. So as I say, today I've done a batch of soft set honey, or I'm in the middle of doing a batch of soft set honey. So I'll kind of give you a bit of a close-up on the machine. I'll show you some of the controls. I'll show you kind of how it connects to the ball valve, how it connects into the machine, and then I'll just kind of give you a show of the actual machine in action. You can get a feel for kind of how I operate the machine and how well it works. So a few words of caution firstly on the machine. Now as I said before, it's not a plug-and-play machine. I've I don't know any machines on the market that are that. And what I mean by a plug-and-play machine is that you kind of press a button and you walk out and you go and watch EastEnders and you come back and everything's jarred up with kind of lids and labels and everything. It's definitely not that. It only caters for one part of the honey packaging process, and that part of the process is it puts honey in the jar. That's it. It does nothing else. So you still need to kind of manually put the jars onto the turntable, you need to manually put the lids on, you need to manually take the jars out, put them in a box. And then obviously you need to do labels that I do in a completely separate process from this. That doesn't happen in my honey extraction room. So yeah, so a few words of caution on the machine. So the first one is you need to calibrate every single time you start this machine. So I did a batch of runny honey the other day, and I fill my jars up by eye as opposed to by weight. Now that might sound a little bit strange, So I sell 8-ounce jars, so that means they need to be 227 grams as an absolute minimum. When I put 227 grams in my 8-ounce jars, they look short. It doesn't look right at all. So what I do is I bring it up to the neck of the jar, and I know that that's kind of giving me about between 240 and 245 grams of honey in a jar. So I'm selling— I'm giving away more honey than I'm charging people for, but That's just the way I do it. I don't sell 12-ounce, I don't sell pound jars. I sell very, very full 8-ounce jars. That's what people come to expect, and I think it gives it really good shelf appeal as well. Otherwise, with the jars that I've got, if you fill it up to the correct weight, which would be the most kind of like financially efficient thing to do, it just doesn't look right on the shelf. It looks like you're shortchanging people, which I definitely don't want to kind of portray that image. So I was doing a batch of runny honey the other day And in order to kind of get it up to the neck of the jar, it was 250 grams on the machine. So the machine was telling me it was dispensing 250 grams of honey into the jar. Now when I weighed that, it was coming out between 235 grams and 240 grams, which is fine because I'm not fussed about the weights. It's more of a visual thing for me, as long as it's way, way above the 227 that's advertised on the jar. I've come in today to do a soft set honey, so So the honey here is a lot more viscous. It's a completely different consistency from the runny honey, and the machine auto-defaults to the previous setting. So I was running it at 250, did the first jar, and it was absolutely way short. It was coming out about 220 grams, so I was 7 grams below my target weight. So you just need to kind of bear that in mind. And for me, I just do not trust the numbers that the machine tells me. Once you've found a line or a level that you're happy with, it will dispense very, very accurately. So if you set it at, say, 260 grams, which is what I've set it at today, and it fires it up to the line of the jar that you're happy with— I went away, I measured that, it was coming in between kind of 240-245 grams, and then every single jar after that was exactly the same. So the first word of warning with it is that you need to calibrate it every single time you use it. Just get that first jar right and then you're good to go, okay? Don't trust the numbers on the machine, trust your accurate trader-certified scales. So the next word of caution is, and I've had a few issues with this machine and it's all my own fault with them, is that you need to understand that setting the turntable as fast as it can go with the idea that you're going to do more, you're going to be more productive because it's faster, is the worst false logic I've ever encountered in all of my life. The faster it goes, the easier it is to make mistakes, and when you make mistakes on this machine, it takes a while to clean up and it takes a while to start again because the honey goes everywhere. You've got to take the turntable off, you've got to clean it down, you've got to clean the jars that you've got honey on, you've got to set everything back up again, recalibrate It's a nightmare. So what I do, and I'll zoom in and I'll show you these controls in a bit, is I use the absolute slowest setting, and it's a snail's pace. And you'll see it on the video, you'll think that's really slow, but you only need to be able to match it to the speed in which you can put the lids on, take the jars off, and restock the jars. And as long as the machine's going quick enough for you to be able to do that, then There's no issue whatsoever. That is the speed in which you should work. So the only time I would ever change that speed, and I may get it up to kind of like 40%, 50% absolute maximum, is if I had a helper. So if I had someone feeding the machine and I was just responsible for putting the lids off and unboxing, so putting the jars in the box, then we could go quicker. And at that point, we would— it would speed up production and it would speed up efficiency. But when it's just me and it works perfectly fine as a one-person operating machine, Then I keep it as low and as slow as it possibly can go, and then I minimize the errors. So the third word of caution, and this frustrated me very, very early on with this machine, and I've cracked it now, and I'm hoping to share that advice with you, and I'll zoom in and do a close-up in a bit, is the way that the machine works is that it has kind of like a gate like this, a little clicker, and the jar comes along Comes along this way and it clicks into the clicker, goes like that, and then the honey's dispensed in it. The jar moves along and then the clicker comes back out again. That is very, very finely tuned. So what I started doing was setting it up thinking this is right, press, press go on the turntable, the first jar would go around, it'd hit the clicker, the honey would dispense all over the floor because I've got the clicker in the wrong place, and then I have to clean it up. And sometimes that would happen like 4 times in a row, and I'd have like pounds and pounds of honey on the floor. It'd drive me absolutely insane, screaming, shouting, the works. It's really annoying. I'd be like an hour before I'd get any honey in the jar. So I found a really simple way of dealing with that, and I'll share that with you. And what you do is you set it up as best as you possibly think it's going to work, and you press the start button, and you have an empty jar of honey in your hand. And then you see where the jar goes, and if it stops in the right position, and you can see if it's in the right position, great, the honey will dispense in the jar. If it's miles off, you get the other jar under there, and then you just kind of like collect that jar's honey, press stop, and then you reset, recalibrate, and go again. Because like I say, once you've got this working, once you've set the correct weight, and once you've got the little clicker in the right position, then it's fine. There's absolutely no issue with this machine whatsoever, and it's flawless all the way through. But if you don't kind of know those little tips and those little tricks at the beginning, it's incredibly frustrating. So hopefully this video will give you good guidance on kind of what to do, what not to do, the speeds, the speeds to use, the speeds not to use, and just a kind of general feel of how to set up that machine. So we'll do a few zoom-ins and close-ups, and I'll kind of just give you a bit of, a bit of a discussion around each of the kind of elements. So first off, we've got the creaming machine. That's what we're using as our tank for today. That runs off the 1¼-inch ball valve, and then you've got a food-grade honey hose that comes with the jarring machine. That's just a push fit into there, and then that feeds the honey into the jarring machine. So Abello do sell a huge kind of heated container which you have right above the honey tank like that. Sorry, right above the jarring machine. Now the idea with these machines is that they work off what's called a head difference, and that means that you have to have the honey or whatever it is you're pumping kind of directly above where you're dispensing. And then that means that you're not getting any air bubbles in the honey. So you can kind of see, you'll see it roughly from my setup, the head difference that I've got is minimal. And I actually kind of have a negative head difference where the pipe runs down like that. But it does work. But what it means is you need to prime the pump. So what I first start off doing is I set the pump, I set that jarring machine up. I'll take the hose, I'll pour some honey down the hose, I'll hold it up, I'll let the honey go into the impeller, I'll pump it through, and then that's primed. And then I connect it all back up again, I open the ball valve and let the honey flow through. And then the first couple, I don't use the turntable. First couple of jars, I do it manually. I just hit start and that will dispense until I hit stop. And I'll do that a couple of times. And the first 2 or 3, you might get a few air bubbles in there, it might not be very consistent. But once you've kind of primed that impeller and got all of the air out of it, then you're good to go. So like I say, you've got the creaming machine there, it's connected to the jarring machine by a food-grade hose that comes with it, and then you've got the ball valve to kind of stop the flow and open the flow as necessary. So as you can see there now, I'm not going to get in the picture to be able to show you this, I run my jarring machine on the floor. Now the reason for that is that I need to be able to create this head difference So I can't get my creamer machine up any higher because I can't kind of accurately get honey into it via a bucket if it were to be any higher in here. So in order to kind of make it work, make the head difference work, I have my jarring machine on the floor. Now that's not ideal in terms of kind of practicality. I have to sit on the floor when I'm doing it, but it's fine. I mean, I'll make sure I always kind of have a real good cleanup before I start any honey extraction. I mop all the floor, I do all my cleaning checks, um, so it being on the floor isn't a major issue. So I have, as you can see there, you have the hose running from the creaming machine ball valve and then it runs into the jarring machine. So we'll just stop it now and get a few close-ups on the jarring machine. So there's the jarring machine. As you can see, the honey hose there. I'm at the end of the run today doing the discussions kind of at the end, so you can see the air in the pipe. I've still got that honey left in the pipe that I'll kind of put through to the last jars, but this is to kind of give you a feel of some of the dials. So as you can see now, you've got the honey hose built from connecting the tank, the ball valve, into the dispensing unit here. You've got all of your turntable controls here. So this is the speed dial, that's maximum speed, and then minimum speeds this way. You've got a stop button and a start button. So I won't show you this now, but you just press, press the start button here, and then that will turn this turntable around. Over here you've got kind of all of your major controls, and I'll zoom in and give you a bit of detail on those. As I discussed previously, this is the main control unit here. So if I wasn't using the turntable, I would use this button to start the flow, and I would use this button to stop the flow. It's a bit tricky doing that. I would advise everyone to get the turntable version. It makes it a lot easier. But like I say, these are the buttons. That's to start and this is to stop. These buttons here dictate how many grams of honey go into your jars, and as I've discussed previously, you need to calibrate that for each batch of honey that you do. And today I'm running that at 260 grams for a soft set honey, and when I weigh it, it's coming out of in 240 and 245 grams. So do not trust the figures that are on. Here you need to trust your trade-certified scales, and that'll give you a much better representation. But what this will do is it will give you a very repeatable amount of honey on each, each unit that it dispenses. So it's incredibly accurate. It's just don't trust the numbers because they need to be calibrated absolutely every time. So like I say, this is the start button. If I just hit start now, nothing will happen because there's air in the unit. And then this is the stop button there. So as I discussed before, this, this clicker here is what stops and starts the unit. Um, so the honey, when the turntable is on, moves around here. The jars come in, it clicks that honey there, it goes click, and then it turns, and then the honey will dispense. So I'll show you that now. There's no honey in it, but it will turn on. So I'll just kind of show you roughly how that works, but you'll see it much better when I do the close-ups of the video. And you can see how slowly that goes around. That's the speed that I want. Hits the clicker, turns the unit on. Like I say, there's loads of air in the unit, so that's it. And then we press stop. So as you can see, do you know what I mean, I'm not doing this on a live test because I'll get honey everywhere. There's air in the pump, so that's why it comes out like that. But that's, that's the kind of idea behind it, is that you press start, it drives into that clicker, and that's what sets the unit off. So you've kind of got a live unit. So I'll show you it again with the same, same ones. So even if you've got like loads of distance, you know what I mean, you can't even see the jars in this bit here. I'll press start again on the turntable. The turntable's moving, the jars come kind of really, really slowly round towards it. This is the speed that I use. It's not dispensing honey yet because the clicker is not activated. The jar goes into the clicker, it recognizes the jar, and it fires it out. And then I press stop. So as you can see, it's a really, really kind of nice design. It works well, but you just need to be very, very kind of aware that that needs to be finely tuned each time, otherwise it can make a bit of a mess. So I'll give you a few close-ups of the machine in action. Like I say, I've done 200 jars here today and it's taken me about half an hour to do it. There's a bit of setup at the beginning, there's a bit of calibration to do, there's a bit of cleaning at the end. You need to make sure that you pump at least 40 to 50 liters of warm water through the impeller at the end to clean it. That's really important. If you don't do that, you could damage the internals of the machine. So the first thing to do once you've finished is pump 40 to 50 liters of warm water through it. You don't put any soap, you don't put anything like that in there, it's just warm water. That will clean away kind of any remnants of honey and stop it crystallizing within the impeller, which can damage it. So like I say, we'll cut to a few kind of Close-ups of me actually operating the machine, and you can get a feel for kind of how many jars come off one end, how many jars I get to put kind of on the other end, and just kind of the actual operation and process. So as you can see, hopefully I'm in the little bottom corner now. The machine is run very, very slowly indeed. It's not a race to the finish, it's just kind of plodding along, it's doing what it's supposed to do. Each time that jar kind of goes underneath the nozzle, the clicker recognises that the jar is there, it dispenses the correct calibrated amount of honey into the jar, and then it moves on and the next jar comes under the nozzle and the same thing happens again. The system I've developed here, really easy system, is put all of your lids into the middle of the rotating turntable and then that gives you easy access to the lids. As opposed to having to kind of go into a box each time to get it, which is what I was doing for ages. There is a sidebar that I don't use. So there's a sidebar to stop the same jar going around to be refilled again. It pushes it off to the middle, but I prefer that sidebar to kind of actually be completely out of the way. I will stand there and make sure that the same jar doesn't go around twice. And this is again why I use a very slow speed. I'm never at risk of kind of being overwhelmed. What I prefer to do, and you'll see this through the video at the moment as it's running, is I keep it continuously going. I have that very slow speed, so when I need to put more jars on, when I need to move jars into the honey box, when I need to put a new honey box there because it's full, I don't have to stop and start the machine. That's when I find that errors creep into this machine. It's when you stop and start it, it can become a little bit temperamental and it might dispense incorrectly. And again, it's down to operator error. So you might press the stop button in between cycles and it just kind of messes with it a little bit. So I like to have it as slow as I possibly can. I press start once at the beginning and I press stop once at the end. And I've done that for 1,200 jars. Like, I've literally not stopped the turntable once in 1,200 jars. Not today, I've only done a couple of hundred, just doing a small batch of soft set. But that's the speed in which you want to do it. You want it nice and slow, and it means that you can kind of go off. get boxes, restock the jars, use the lids. You can do everything you can while that machine is still operating, and you might get back and you're kind of 6 or 7 jars behind. You can quickly catch up by putting the lids on and getting them out of the way and restocking it as quickly as you possibly can. So it's quite therapeutic to watch. I'll let it run for a little bit longer, maybe speed it up. You don't want to be sitting here all day and just watching jars go through the machine, although sometimes I quite like to do that. Right, so we're at the end of the video now. Just a kind of bit of a recap of what we've discussed in the video. We've talked about the dispensing unit, so the 100 litre creaming machine, the 100 litre settling tank, the attachments that I've used with them, the 1¼ inch ball valve, which means that I can kind of adapt the unit in which I'm decanting the honey from to work directly with the jarring machine. Saves kind of putting anything into separate buckets or transferring things over. We've discussed how we get that honey from the unit into the jarring machine by ways of a hose. Make sure you always prime the machine by lifting up the hose and pouring in a jar of honey first. We've discussed how to kind of calibrate the machine, making sure that you're using your trade-certified scales as opposed to kind of the weights that are on the machine. We've discussed the turntable speed And how to have that as slow as you can possibly get away with. If you're a single operator, or if there's 2 of you, you can increase that speed. We have discussed the precautions to use when you're doing any honey jarring, so make sure you wear gloves, make sure you wear a hairnet, make sure everything's clean. We've discussed the, the care, aftercare for the machine, so how you clean the machine. 40 to 50 litres of warm water pumped through it to kind of Make sure that's kept in pristine condition. So that's it. I think we've covered pretty much everything there. Turns into quite a long video, you know what I mean? It's a bit of a review/instructional. What I would say with this is that there are a few kind of dials and things that you're not really sure what they do, buttons and so on. So read the manual. All of the detail is kept within the manual. If you've got any questions for anything that's outside of the manual, feel free to drop me a message or feel free to drop Damien from Abella Message is very helpful and gets back to you quickly kind of on all of his machinery. So I hope you've enjoyed the video today. We've got plenty more kind of honey room videos to go. We've still got the uncapping machine, we've still got the Mellow Flow Pro, the capping screw press, the honey extractor. We're buying a honey pump, we're buying a sump, so we've got loads more kind of reviews that we can do in the honey room. And obviously once we start extracting some honey for the season, it gets very, very busy in here, so there'll be plenty to see. Like I say, do hope you're enjoying the videos though. Please drop me any messages or comments below. Feel free to kind of discuss the machinery, and if you're, if you're thinking about getting a certain piece of machinery from Abello or anywhere else, I'm always kind of happy to discuss the options and what works well for me. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Please hit the bell so you're notified of kind of any upcoming videos, and then I'll see you next time.