Product Review - Abelo 100ltr Creaming Machine
In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey gives a detailed, hands‑on review of the Abelo 100‑liter insulated heated creamer. He explains why the machine is a core piece of his honey‑room workflow, describing its dual functions (creaming and de‑crystallising), the simple 24‑/48‑hour intermittent‑churn control, speed settings (typically 50 %), and temperature control (≈37 °C hive temperature). Edwards walks through the full process: warming runny honey, adding ~10 % seed honey, loading the creamer, selecting the 48‑hour mode, and using the built‑in ball‑valve to feed directly into his bottling line, eliminating manual transfers. He highlights the heating element’s value for rapid de‑crystallisation of large honey batches while avoiding excessive HMF formation. Cleaning is a quick warm‑water rinse with the heater on for 48 h. Capacity is roughly 600 eight‑ounce jars per full load, and he recommends the 100‑L size as the sweet‑spot for most small‑scale producers, noting that larger 150‑ or 200‑L units are only justified for very high volumes. Throughout, he stresses the machine’s space‑saving, time‑saving, and reliability benefits, and recommends adding the optional ball‑valve and pairing the creamer with the Abelo jarring machine for a fully integrated line.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We're in the honey room again today to give you a quick review of the Abelo 100 litre insulated heated creamer. So this is the creamer here, it's the 100 litre insulated non-premium version. And today I'm just going to give you a run through some of the functions, give it a bit of a review, tell you why I like it, tell you why I really, really like it. It's probably one of my favorite bits of kit I've got in here. Give you an idea of the kind of different functions that it has and what I use them for. Give you a bit of a feel as to where it saves me time and where it adds value into my process. And then if we've got enough time, we'll give it a bit of a spin, maybe put some honey in, maybe make a bit of soft set. We'll probably follow that up with another video. So first of all, what is the product we're talking about today? So as I said, it's the 100-liter heated insulated Abello crema. So it's a bit of a mouthful. Effectively, it's 2 machines in one though, and I'm in a relatively small honey room here. I've got a lot of equipment crammed in, so for me to have one machine that can perform 2 functions, maybe 3 functions, is a real, real good way of using up the space within my honey room. So that's what led me along the lines to get this product. So what does it do? Why do you need a creamer? Why does it need to be heated? Why do you need it insulated? So for me, the reason that I wanted to get a creamer is that I wanted to make soft-set honey. Now you can make soft-set honey using a number of different methods. You can use buckets, you can use drills, But on a— if you're doing it on kind of any kind of scale, you really need a dedicated creaming machine, and that's what this is. And the way that you cream honey is that you use a runny honey, and then you put a seed honey in. That's a honey with a very, very finely textured crystal within it. And then the creamer machine is designed to intersperse that small seed crystal throughout the runny honey. And then you leave it, or then you jar it and leave the jars around kind of 14°C, and then that's the perfect temperature for the kind of crystals to take hold of the runny honey, and it gives you that soft-set, spreadable honey that kind of everyone's used to. So I wanted something to do that en masse. I also wanted something that was going to be able to link up to my bottling machine. So when you're looking at kind of buying machinery, it's always worth thinking How is that going to work with my other pieces of machinery? Is it going to be compatible? Is it going to be a lean process? Am I going to have to kind of do manual alterations to make that work? So with this, there's absolutely no manual alterations. There's no additional steps. It's one of the big selling points for me is the fact that it has a ball valve. You have to buy that extra, but that ball valve, instead of a honeygate, means that it connects directly into the bottling machine. Using one of these food-grade hose connections. So real, real time saver for me. So I'll just talk you a little bit through the process, kind of how I get it from one machine to another. So I take runny honey that will be warmed to kind of hive temperature, so never above 37 degrees. I put that into the creaming machine through the gate at the top there, and then I add a seed honey. Now I tend to normally keep kind of like a bucket of seed honey for that purpose. But over Christmas I got greedy and I sold my seed honey, so I'm back to using it out of my own jars. I'm down to kind of like a very limited amount of that, so the next batch I'll make sure that I take off a nice bucket to use for seeding purposes. So the process is you put the runny honey in and then you want to add about 10% by weight seed honey. Seed honey again is that finely textured, smooth honey that you're used to kind of spreading on your toast. and you add that into here. Now, if you are doing it on kind of like a warm summer's day, that's it. There's no need for any of the heating elements at all. If it's really, really cold, you're doing it in kind of outbuildings, then you might want to just put the temperature on to like kind of 22, 23 degrees, but I'd never go kind of any warmer than that. You really, really don't need to. And then the way that this machine works is that it's got a creaming box controller up there. So this controller, just turn it on. Oh, nice. Um, is linked to drive this motor. Sorry, this motor here that drives the shaft that's into the honey. So we'll get a couple of close-ups of that. Sorry, the idea is that that shaft intersperses the seed honey throughout the runny honey, and that is effectively all this is. It's a big mixer. Um, now the automatic version of this, which is the one that I've got, the non-premium version, has It has incredibly simple controls, and that's what you want. You don't need anything fancy. So all it has, it has a 24-hour mode and it has a 48-hour mode. And what that means is that one mode runs for 24 hours, one mode runs for 48 hours, but what it is, is it'll give you 15 minutes churning per hour for 24 hours or for 48 hours. And that's all it needs. You also have a speed dial, so you can kind of go from very, very slow Up to very, very fast. I find bang in the middle, 50%, is where I always want to be. I'm not using this to whip honey. Like, I see a number of videos where the honey comes out like a, like a meringue or like a frothy kind of consistency. That's not what I'm looking for. That's not the method that I use. The method that I use is a very slow interspersing of seed crystals throughout my honey, and when it runs out, it kind of just looks like runny honey. It certainly doesn't look like a soft-set honey. It's 2 to 3 weeks in the jars, and that's where it sets for me. Now, I know some people, they'll run that and get it kind of thick in here. That's absolutely fine. It does work that way. That's just not my process. So to summarize the process again, I take the warm, runny honey, I put that in there, I add 10% seed honey to it, I put it on a 48-hour mode. I actually run that 48-hour mode back to back. I find that kind of 4 days is fine for me and it gives me a good product. I keep the settings on half speed. I never go above half speed. And then when I come to dispense, and this is the beauty of this product, is that I've got the ball valve on there. I take my hose, I connect my hose on, I take the other end of the hose and connect it into my bottling machine, and then I can dispense directly from the creaming machine into the jars. So there's no moving it from one machine to the other and then having to clean out the machines. Like, I do all of my mixing in there. It's kind of equivalent to having a slow cooker, cooking all your ingredients, putting your chicken in and your vegetables, doing everything in the pan, and then you just scoop it out and stick it on the plate and you eat it, as opposed to having numerous different frying pans on the go, and at the end of the day you've got loads of washing up to do. This method is clean, it's quick, it's very, very simple, and all of the machinery is compatible with one another, and that's what's really, really important. So the other function of the machine is the fact that it can heat honey up. Now, when I spoke to Damien at Abello, he convinced me to go for this machine, the heated variant, the insulated variant, as opposed to just going for the creaming one. And it cost me about an extra £800. It was a really, really difficult decision for me because at the time I thought, well, I don't need to heat it, I don't need to be able to heat the honey while I'm creaming it. I've seen the videos I'll just heat the honey in my warming cabinet, put it in there and mix it up, and I've got, I've got creamed honey ready to go into the jar. And the non-heated variant works, has all the same functionality. You can still connect the ball valve to it. All of that comes with it. But the huge, absolutely massive benefit that you get from having the heated variant is that you can use it for decrystallizing honey. So I have big kind of 70-80 pound buckets of honey. If I was going to put that into a warming cabinet in order to get it back down to a runny honey, you're talking high temperatures, you're talking 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 days. It kind of depends per bucket, but you're talking it potentially being in the honey cabinet for a long time, in the warming cabinet for a long time, which isn't what you want. And then you've got to go in and you've got to manually stir it, and it's It can become very, very difficult, and you're obviously increasing the risk of the HMF forming within the honey because you're heating it for so long. So this machine is perfect and completely mitigates all of those risks in terms of creating HMF within the honey, because all you do is— I'll put the honey in the warming cabinet, I'll blast it at 40 degrees for maybe 24 hours, I'll come back and I'll just scrape it out and stick it in there. If it tips out, great, it just goes in. 9 times out of 10, it comes out and it's really kind of solid hard crystals still. I just use a stainless steel trowel and I scrape that out and I just put it all in there. And then what I'll do is I'll set the temperature on the temperature function here to 37 degrees. That's the temperature that I always like to use. That's hive temperature, so you never go above the temperature that's within the hive. And because you've got a stirring action in there as well, put it on a 48-hour mode, let it stir for 15 minutes every hour for 48 hours. I come back after 24 hours and it's perfectly liquid. So that's a huge, huge time saver for me. And then the added benefit on top of that is that I'm already in the container that I need to connect my hose to in order to jar the honey. So again, I'm not kind of putting honey into one machine, doing the action, be it creaming, be it heating, and then having to decant that into another machine in order to jar. It's all managed within this one single machine. So you can see this machine is 60 centimeters diameter, and I've got all of these incredible functions that work so well just in this corner of the room. So I don't know where I'd be without this machine. Like, it really is kind of The key piece of machinery, apart from the extractor that I use, it's a key piece of machinery that makes my honey room effective and it makes the processes very, very lean. So I'll do a couple of close-ups. I'll just give you a bit of a close-up on the dials, a bit of a close-up kind of on the actual mechanism with inside, and then I'll just give you a show of how you actually make it work. Whenever I use it, I make sure I clean it first. Again, it's very, very easy to clean. All I do is I fill it with warm water, I put the heating function on, I let it run for 48 hours, I drain it all off, and then it's completely clean and sanitized and ready to use. So it's not been cleaned at the moment, so excuse any of the sugar crystals. So again, I'm just going to show you a little bit of a walk around, what the key features are and how you would use this machine. So you have a gate like that This is where you would put the honey. You kind of just decant directly into that. You have a controller. This controls the speed, so you can go kind of min or max, but I always leave that 50%. Don't see any need to go anywhere else apart from 50%. You have 3 buttons, so a start for the 48— sorry, a start for the 48-hour mode, a start for the 24-hour mode, and And a stop button, and that's it. Like, it's, it's such an incredibly simple piece of machinery. It's basically got a start button and a stop button, and that's it. Um, it's got a cutout, so you can't start it when you have the lid open. So the lid needs to be closed. So you would open it up, you'd put your runny honey in, you'd put your soft-set honey in, your seed, you'd close it, and then you press start. And then you can see it's a very kind of torquey startup. Like, this is what this machine is designed for, to have an incredibly high Torque to be able to kind of move through that really viscous honey. So that is the speed at 50%. If you press the 48-hour mode, that will run for 48 hours. It will turn like this for 15 minutes every hour, and then you have 45 minutes rest every hour. So that's the middling setting of speed. That's off. This is the slowest setting of speed. And that's the fastest setting of speed. So as you can see, even the fastest, it's not actually that fast. It's not designed to whisk, it's not designed to beat, it's very much a churning motion. It's designed to intersperse a seed crystal within your runny honey. So that's what it's used for. Like I say, I'm always at 50%. I don't see any other need for that. 50% is the function that I use, and I don't use the heating function when I'm making a creamed honey unless it's a very, very cold day and I need to kind of, um, just need to boost that temperature up just a tiny little bit. The actual motion of the churning mechanism in there does increase the temperature a little bit as well, so just be careful. You don't need to heat it up too much. We'll stop that. So then on the side you have this thermometer, and that is the temperature control. So within the insulation around the metal, um, there is heating units, and then that's controlled via this box here. So you can kind of turn the temperature up and down, and as you can see, it will flash. And then when you want it to go, you press the button. So that's turned it off, you see it's off. And then you turn it on, and then the light will come on to say it's on, and then that'll give you an indication of the temperature that it's sitting at at the moment. So that's it for today. I just wanted to give you a quick review of one of the key products within my honey room. It's the Abello 100-liter heated insulated creaming machine. If you're thinking about investing in a machine, I would highly recommend this product. It saves me an awful amount of hassle And it gives you a really kind of unique seeded honey that you can sell. If you do think about getting the, the creaming machine, I would highly recommend the ball valve to go with it. And obviously, if you're thinking about getting a jarring machine as well, I'd highly recommend the Abello jarring machine, but we'll do a completely separate review on that. If you're thinking about the sizes, I'd recommend the 100 litre. I think that really is kind of the sweet spot in terms of The size of it, and in terms of the actual cost, I wouldn't want to jump up to either the 150 or the 200 litre ones unless you're putting out a huge, huge amount. If you fill up the 100 litre one, it works out that I get about 600 8-ounce jars out of a full container, so it's kind of a really, really good way of doing it. And that's it. We will work our way around the honey room. We'll do kind of one review maybe every few weeks. Um, I'll definitely do an instructional video in terms of how I actually use, um, the machine. So I'll do one showing you me putting some honey into it, putting some seed into it, and then showing you how it comes out into the jarring machine, and then showing you kind of like 2 or 3 weeks later once it's seeded within the jar, because then that's a really, really useful video to do. But I just wanted to give you a feel for why I've bought the product, why I think it's a good product, and why I think you should definitely buy a product as well. So that's it for today's video. I really hope you've enjoyed it. Plenty of more videos to come from within the honey room. We're doing the— we've done the creamer, we've got the settling tank to do, we've got the automatic frame uncapping machine, we've got the Meliflow Pro, we've got the jarring machine, we've got the swing cage extractor, um, we've got a couple of sinks and hand wash stations as well. If you want me to do a review of those, we can do that, no problem. So I really hope you've enjoyed the video today. Please Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified for every video, and I'll see you next time.
