The Ultimate Guide: Best Honey for Cheese Boards in the UK
In the world of fine dining, the "perfect bite" is often a balance of opposites: salty and sweet, creamy and sharp. While crackers and chutneys are cheese board staples, the true secret of a connoisseur’s platter is raw, unpasteurised honey.
Honey on a cheese board?
There’s a reason honey has sat alongside cheese on tables since Roman times. It is, as food lovers have long known, the one condiment that works with every type of cheese – soft or hard, mild or pungent, fresh or aged. While chutneys can fight with a cheese’s flavour, a good raw honey draws out and amplifies it, marrying sweetness with savoury tang, floral depth with robust saltiness. The trouble is, not all honey is created equal.
If you’re building a serious cheese board, you deserve a serious honey – and that means looking beyond the supermarket shelf. This guide focuses on the exceptional raw artisan honeys from Honey Hills, an award-winning British honey company that sources unpasteurised, cold-filtered mountain honeys from remote Carpathian regions, where bees forage on wild flora far from intensive agriculture. Each jar tells a story of its origin – and each one brings something genuinely different to your board.
Why Raw Honey Makes All the Difference
Supermarket honey is almost always pasteurised and heavily filtered. The heat processing that extends shelf life also destroys the subtle aromatic compounds, enzymes and natural flavour notes that make artisan honey so compelling alongside cheese. Raw, cold-filtered honey retains its full character: the floral volatiles, the natural crystallisation, the complexity of the nectar source. On a cheese board, that complexity is everything.
Think of raw honey the way you’d think of good wine – it has layers, a beginning, middle and finish, and it interacts with cheese in ways that a processed product simply cannot.
How to Think About Honey and Cheese Pairings
The basic principle is contrast and complement. Light, floral honeys soften sharp cheeses and elevate creamy ones. Dark, robust honeys stand up to aged hard cheeses and blues. Herbal or fruity honeys bridge meat and cheese on a charcuterie-style board.
A good rule of thumb: match intensity. A delicate goat’s cheese wants a gentle honey; a mature, punchy blue welcomes something darker and more complex. And always serve both honey and cheese at room temperature – the flavour difference is remarkable.
The Best Honey Hills Honeys for Your Cheese Board
1. Dwarf Acacia Honey – The Crowd-pleaser | £13.00
Best with: Fresh goat’s cheese, Brie, Camembert, mild ricotta
Sourced from wild dwarf-acacia trees in a Danube Delta nature reserve, this is a light-textured, almost water-white honey with intense sweetness balanced by chamomile umami and a hint of butterscotch. It develops a fresh nougat character that fills the mouth and leaves a long finish. Its gentleness makes it the go-to pairing for the more delicate cheeses on your board – it lifts without overpowering. This is also a Great Taste Award winner, and it’s easy to see why.
Why it works: The floral sweetness contrasts the bright tang of goat’s cheese without competing with it. On Brie, it becomes almost dessert-like.
2. Fir Honeydew Honey – The Show-Stopper | £14.00
Best with: Aged Comté, Gruyère, Manchego, hard mountain cheeses
A 3-Star Great Taste Award 2025 winner. Fir honeydew is produced not from flower nectar but from the resinous secretions of aphids on silver fir trees – which sounds unusual but results in one of the most complex honeys in existence. There are notes of freshly lit incense, sandalwood, cedarwood and a sweet fir-resin finish that evokes a Christmas fireside. It’s dark, rich and extraordinary.
Why it works: The deep, resinous character of this honey holds its own against the nutty, crystalline intensity of an aged mountain cheese. It’s the pairing that will start the conversation.
3. Coriander Honey – The Unexpected Star | £13.00
Best with: Aged cheddar, Gouda, Wensleydale, semi-hard British cheeses
From organic coriander fields in the Carpathian foothills, this silky-smooth golden honey carries a brief café-crème opening that gives way to a long, rich white-chocolate fondant finish with a recognisable trace of coriander on the palate. Another Great Taste Award winner – the judges praised its remarkable distinctiveness.
Why it works: The herbaceous, slightly savoury quality of coriander honey is a natural companion to the caramel nuttiness of aged cheddar or Gouda. It’s one of those pairings that sounds odd until you try it.
4. Wild Cherry Blossom Honey – The Fruity Bridge | £10.50
Best with: Manchego, aged Pecorino, Wensleydale with cranberries, smoked cheeses
Collected from wild cherry blossoms in the Carpathian mountains, this is a Great Taste Award winner with a delicate fruity character that bridges the savoury and sweet halves of a board beautifully. Its light, clean sweetness plays wonderfully with cheeses that have nutty or smoky notes.
Why it works: Fruit and cheese is a classic combination – this honey delivers that fruity element in a more refined, drizzleable form. Perfect alongside smoked cheeses, where the sweetness counterpoints the smokiness.
5. Mountain Sumac Honey – The Adventurous Choice | £14.00
Best with: Blue cheeses (Stilton, Roquefort, Gorgonzola), sharp mature cheddar
This as a true adventure in taste – opening with sweetened citrus lime, maturing to lemon, and finally yielding a lingering essence of elderflower. It’s bright and citrusy where most honeys are simply sweet, making it one of the most interesting choices on any board. A Great Taste Award winner.
Why it works: Blue cheese needs something with enough character to meet it head on. The citrus brightness of Sumac honey cuts through the richness of a Stilton or Gorgonzola in the same way a good dessert wine does.
6. Mountain Silver Linden Honey – The Elegant All-Rounder | £11.50
Best with: Taleggio, Fontina, washed-rind cheeses, fresh mozzarella
Silver linden (lime blossom) honey has long been prized across Europe for its aromatic, almost mentholated floral character. Our Honey Hills award-winning version from the Carpathian mountains has a clean, refined sweetness that works with a wide variety of styles, particularly the more aromatic washed-rind and semi-soft cheeses.
Why it works: Washed-rind cheeses can be assertive. The linden honey’s herbal, floral quality provides a fragrant counterpoint without being overwhelmed.
7. Plum Blossom Honey – The Seasonal Treat | £11.00
Best with: Soft blue cheeses, aged goat’s cheese, Époisses
Plum blossom honey is rare – plum trees flower early in spring when bee colonies are still small, making this a genuinely limited harvest. Honey Hills’ version is dense and viscous with a rich, fruity-floral flavour and a delicious aroma. A Great Taste Award winner.
Why it works: Its richness and fruit depth make it a natural match for softer, creamier blues and strong-flavoured soft cheeses. Luxurious on the board and even more luxurious to taste.
Acacia Honeycomb in Wood Frame – The Visual Centrepiece | £19.50
If you want to make your cheese board truly memorable, a honeycomb is the answer. Honey Hills’ Acacia Honeycomb in a Wood Frame arrives in its original form, straight from the hive – all the raw honey sealed into the wax cells, ready to be broken over the cheese of your choice. It looks spectacular on a board and delivers honey in its most natural, unadulterated state.
Build the Perfect Board: A Suggested Honey Hills Selection
For a British-focused cheese board, try this combination:
- Honey: Dwarf Acacia Cheese: Baron Bigod (Suffolk Brie) or Ragstone goat’s cheese
- Honey: Coriander Cheese: Montgomery’s Cheddar or Westcombe Gouda
- Honey: Mountain Sumac Cheese: Cropwell Bishop Stilton
- Honey: Wild Cherry Blossom Cheese: Smoked Lancashire or Old Winchester
For a continental-style board, swap in Fir Honeydew with aged Comté, and Silver Linden with Taleggio.
Where to Buy
All Honey Hills honeys are available at honeyhills.co.uk, with free UK delivery on orders over £50.
The gift hampers – including the award-winning “Mountain Extremes” (Fir Honeydew & Sumac) and the “Double Gold” (Dwarf Acacia & Coriander) – make an excellent addition to a cheese board gift, or a thoughtful way to try two contrasting styles at once.
