The Secret to Make Soft Set Honey That Works Every Time
In this tutorial and product‑review video, Laurence Edwards demonstrates how to produce large batches of perfectly smooth soft‑set honey using an Abello Lyson 200‑liter premium creamer. He explains why he upgraded from a 100‑liter classic model to the 200‑liter premium version, highlighting the machine’s sturdier build, advanced controller, built‑in heating element, and the added bottling valve that lets honey be decanted directly into jars. Edwards identifies the key to consistent results as the choice of honey: oilseed‑rape (canola) honey, which crystallises quickly and requires minimal heating. He walks through the full workflow – melting the honey to ~40 °C, loading it into the creamer, setting the churning speed to a low 25 % for slow grinding, running 15‑minute spin cycles with 45‑minute rests, and allowing the mixture to thicken over a couple of weeks until it reaches a viscous, silky texture. He contrasts this “OSR method” with his earlier “dice method,” noting the latter’s variability and extra steps. The video also showcases the creamer’s dual role as a settling tank, its temperature control (up to 55 °C for liquefying, 37‑38 °C for bottling), and the time‑saving benefits of the bottling valve. Edwards concludes with a brief endorsement of the Abello Lyson creamer and offers his own soft‑set honey for sale.
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In this video, I'm going to show you how I make a big batch of soft-set honey using my Abello Lyson 200-liter premium creamer. So first off, a little bit about this machine. Why have I changed over from the 100-liter version, the Classic line, over to the 200-liter Premium line? There was nothing wrong with my Classic one. In fact, it was one of my favorite bits of kit that I owned, Simple reason, it wasn't big enough for me. I had a 200-liter settling tank and a 100-liter creamer. I upped the 100-liter creamer to a 200 just so they matched up to make it easier when I'm doing my jarring, and I thought I'd go for that little premium extra on top of that. I'm glad that I did. I really do like the premium line from Abello, premium line from Lyson. The quality is just that little jump up. Everything's a little bit better, a bit sturdier, a bit thicker, but the big one for the creamer is that the controller has a lot of added functionality and and it'll keep on going for days on end without me having to come back in and press the button again. Now, the Classic line, the new version, actually does that as well, so the differences between the two are minimal. But what I really like about this creaming machine is the ability for it to double up as a settling tank and somewhere for me to decant my honey directly into my jars, with the addition of a bottling valve. So if you've watched my channel before, you may have seen a previous method that I used, which is called the dice method. And I used that in this creamer as well. I'll link it out at the end of this video 'cause I do think it's a valid method, but for me, I do it a completely different way now. With the dice method, it was a little bit hit and miss for me. Sometimes I'd get it perfectly smooth, sometimes I'd get it, say, 90% smooth. You really can notice it on your tongue with a soft-set honey. If it's not perfectly smooth, I really don't like it, and I wanted to find a way to get my soft-set honey 100% smooth every single time. I have now found that method. I've found the method, I've found the piece of equipment, and I'll let you in on the secret, the way to do it to get results every single time. And I won't make you wait until the end of the video. The secret is the honey that you use. All we use now for our soft-set honey is oilseed rape honey. If you're in the US, that's canola honey, but it makes the best soft-set honey. By a million miles. And it's a strange one because some people say they don't really like the taste of it, it's a bit too sweet, it's not got that much flavour, and I actually quite like the taste of it. Depends where you're getting your oilseed rape honey from. Ours has got like little other bits in there as well. There'll be dandelion, there'll be apple, they've got a good amount of forage there, so you get a little bit of extra flavour. But for me, if you're buying soft-set honey, it's all about the fact that it's soft-set. Doesn't matter if it's got a little bit of extra flavour and it's a bit grainy, that's no good for me. Needs to be perfectly smooth and silky every single time. And it was just going back and doing that analysis of my process and the honey that I was using and how I was trying to get the soft-set honey and how I was trying to temperature control the honey at the beginning of the process, whilst it's in the creamer, whilst it goes into the jars, and I just couldn't get that process to be really, really repeatable. Like I said, sometimes it would work fine, sometimes it wouldn't work fine, and I put that more down not to the temperature and the environment and my process, but more about the starting honey that I was using. It was generic wildflower honey, could have had anything in it. I don't know what the crystal size is going to be, and it was giving me slightly sporadic results. Now I've moved over to the oilseed rape soft-set honey only, not only do I get perfect results every time, The process is so much simpler. Right, I've rambled on for long enough there. Let's take a look how I make my soft set honey. So this is what it looks like in the bucket. It gets extracted into buckets and it gets left to set. This is a heavy bucket and it is absolutely rock solid set hard with honey. If you wanted to, you could try and scrape it out like this and just put it straight into the machine, and it would actually work like that because the machine does have a heating function and it obviously has the creaming kind of grinding function as well. But you don't need to do that, that's a lot of hard work. So what we do is we melt this honey down in our honey warmer and we take it up to around 40°C. Now the real benefit of using the oilseed rape honey like that is that you don't need to reset the crystal structure. So when you're doing the dice method, I found you need to bring it up to a certain level and we kind of played around with it a little bit, but you were pushing maybe 45, 46°C to get that crystal structure reset. before you could add your seed crystal. I didn't like heating it up that much, so I tried to do it a little bit lower, and I think that inadvertently impacted the results as well. However, with the Allseed Rape Honey, it makes it so much easier because it really is a mechanical grinding action, and that is what you're doing to get that really silky smooth honey down, which means you don't actually have to heat it up to anything past kind of liquid or even semi-liquid. Semi-liquid works absolutely fine in one of these creamers here because they're so powerful. They just churn through all of those crystals. So first step of the process is get your honey, get it in the buckets, put it through a warming cabinet. If it's oilseed rape honey, get it up to about 40 degrees. You just wanna get it so you can get it out of the bucket easily. And then you can take it over to the Lysen Premium Creaming Machine. So here's what it looks like once it's been melted down. And you do get a little bit of froth. You always get that with oilseed rape honey. Doesn't matter at all because it's gonna get blended in and you're gonna be generating air bubbles through the creaming process anyway. So I wouldn't worry about there being any sort of froth on your honey. That's no problem. It's already been filtered once, got out everything that I need to get out. We only do a coarse filter here, leave all the good stuff in. This one over here, that's what it looks like when it's completely set, rock solid, and then it's been melted down. That's what it looks like once it's been melted down. So here's the creaming machine, and as you can see, it is absolutely fantastic. Got a heating element on the side there. You can bring that up, take it up to around 55 degrees Celsius. And then at the top, you've got this big chunky motor and the control unit over there. So the beauty of this unit is you open it up and that is completely sealed in there. That's the last run that we emptied it out, only just emptied it out a couple of hours ago. And you can just go straight back in there and fill on top of it. You can see at the bottom, you've got the remnants of the previous batch of soft-set honey. And this just helps get the mix going. It really does help to speed it along a bit. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to pour in liquid honey into this mix here, and then we're going to set the machine going. So we'll just run that through now. I get 20 30 lb buckets into the machine, and then it's the simplest operation in the world. You press one button, and that's what turns the machine So for the creaming function, it couldn't be any easier. You've got some dials over here. You can take it up to 100%, and this percentage here is talking about the speed in which this goes round. You don't need it at 100%. I find 25%, which is the absolute lowest it will go, is perfect. What you're looking for here is a slow churning and grinding of the honey. You're not looking to whisk it. If you whisk it, you end up with a meringue. That's not what you want. Get it as slow as you possibly can, and that gives you really good top-quality soft-set honey. So like I said, it's just a one-finger operation. Press the button and that's it, start to move around. So you can see it moving around down there. The remnants from the previous batch that was left in there, that's solid. And then I've obviously got my warmed honey that I've poured in there. If you open that up, it completely shuts off. Safety mechanism there. It gives you an opportunity to look in. You can see the difference there. You've got soft-set honey, which is hard, and then a liquid honey that you've just poured in. I'm gonna run it for 15 minutes. I'll come back and take a look at the difference in the consistency. So after about half an hour of mixing there, and it does it in 15-minute intervals, so it will spin for 15 minutes, stops for 45 minutes, Spin for 15 minutes, stop for 45 minutes. That's the base setting that I've got it on. Here, I've just run that consecutively, so I've had 30 minutes of solid spinning. And as you can see, it's completely blended that up now. I'll just open it up, zoom in, and you can see. So hopefully you can see in there now at the base, that is completely blended together. Perfect, smooth, soft-set honey. So then once you've got all of your liquid honey in there, you might be thinking, well, that's very similar to the dice method. But no, the way that the OSR method works, and this is why this creamer is so good, is that you don't need any heating function. You don't need to get it up to a certain temperature to reset the crystals. You don't need to maintain it at a certain temperature while it's churning. You don't need to make sure it's at 14°C when you put it into the jars. All of this is done by mechanical action. So as this honey in here, liquid honey, begins to recrystallise, oilseed rape just has a natural tendency to crystallise very, very quickly. The colder it is, the quicker it will crystallise, but as long as you're kind of below, say, 25-30 degrees, it will end up rock solid anyway, as we know, 'cause it sets really easily into the frames. But at the moment, you've got liquid honey inside the creamer there. I would say run it for a couple of weeks. And whenever I say this to people, they're like, really, a couple of weeks? And I say, yeah, that's about right, a couple of weeks. Get it to the point that it's really nice and thick and viscous. That's where you want to get it to, and what that's going to indicate is that it's transformed from liquid honey back to set honey, but it's not set in the same way as you saw at the beginning of this video where it's set into a rock-solid mass in a bucket. You're coordinating and you're manipulating that crystal size, and you're grinding it down to the smallest possible crystal size that you can get, and that is how you end up with a super soft, silky soft-set honey. So the beauty of this machine here, and I know I've kind of combined this video a little bit as a product review for the Lysin creamer, which I can highly recommend, it is fantastic, and also a bit of a method of how to do real super soft set smooth honey using oilseed rape honey. I thought I'd just carry it on and kind of move over to what do I do next. So what I love about this machine is that with the addition of the Abello valve, you get the ability to just decant that directly into jars. And that is where I get a huge time saving, and I get real economy savings as well, because the honey comes out of a bucket, I scrape it out of the bucket, I put it into the creaming machine, and then I don't have to do a second cycle. So I don't have to decant out of the creaming machine back into buckets, and then when I want to actually jar up the honey, I have to warm it back up again and scrape it back out. You end up losing loads of honey doing it like that. So like I said, the beauty of this machine, you can put the bottling valve Just a straightforward stainless steel ball valve on there, and it means that you can connect up your bottling machine to get the honey out of that tank into your jars in one step. I won't cover that on a separate video. All you need to do is you just need to get the honey back up to a suitable temperature for bottling, and that is why this machine is so good because it has that functionality built in. If you didn't have the heated version here, you would end up seizing the motors and you would end up having to scrape out every last bit of honey, and it would be the biggest nightmare in the world. But what's so good about this machine is because it's got that insulated and heated feature on it, you can let the honey set rock solid in there and leave it for a few months if you want to leave it in there for a few months. It doesn't matter how long you leave it for because it doubles up as a storage/settling tank as well. And then as soon as you want to bottle it up, you go on, you turn the temperature back on, And again, you only need to get it up to a liquefying temperature, so somewhere between 37-38 degrees, and you can use the stirring creamer function on there to increase the speed that you're able to melt that honey down, get it back to liquid, completely liquid through. That can take, say, 3 or 4 days really at that low temperature, but it is a very, very low temperature. That's like temperature below what it is in the beehive, so you shouldn't be doing any damage to your honey by going through that temperature. process, and then you can decant directly into the jars. Believe me, it makes the very best soft-set honey. If you want to try the honey, we sell it on our website. I'll stand by it, it is the smoothest soft-set honey I've ever tasted. But if you are interested in using the other method that we used, it's called the dice method. It's a simple method where you liquefy your honey to reset the seed, add a seed of honey with a known crystal size, and then use this machine to disperse that through. It's a good method, I'd say it's not an excellent method, it's not quite as repeatable as this one, but check out this video here that's showing me use the dice method to make soft set honey.
