The world’s most expensive honey and the sweet taste of success

Elvish honey is produced in log hives in mountains near the Black Sea

One such place is Kazim’s distant hive. Its altitude — getting on for 2,800m — puts it at the absolute limits of bee survival. Hungry bears prowl the woods below, seeking, among other things, honey. The hive, made in the traditional way from a hollowed-out tree trunk, is cunningly suspended on a rock face, beyond their reach. But Kazim is leaving nothing to chance: the contents of that hive are worth tens of thousands of pounds.

This is the secret source of Elvish honey: a rare and precious substance with a price tag that stings; the going rate for a 150ml jar from last year’s harvest is $1,033 (£810), which is equivalent to more than £5,400 a kilogram.

Kazim’s passion is for bees, not wealth. A middle-aged family man with a neat moustache and a modest manner, he is at his most animated when he speaks of his bees — big, hardy Caucasian greys (Apis mellifera caucasia) whose long tongues give them access to pollens that other bees cannot reach. He has a horror, he says, of “unnatural” practices such as sugar-feeding that put human greed before apian need. But he knows what his honey is worth. He keeps a loaded gun in his pocket and when he fires a few rounds, it is not only to scare off bears but to send a message to anyone who might have designs on the hive.

The name “Elvish” is a translation of the Turkish word peri, which is also rendered as “fairy” or, occasionally, “mad”. This can confuse. Mad honey (strictly speaking deli, not peri) refers traditionally to honey made from the pollen of certain plants from the Ericaceae (or heather) family, such as Rhododendron ponticum. These contain a mild hallucinogen, grayanotoxin, which over-stimulates the nervous system. Eating it can leave you “away with the fairies” or, in excessive quantities, poison you.

You can find mad honey in Nepal but it is mainly associated with the Black Sea region, where Rhododendron ponticum is abundant. Some seek it out deliberately for the “high” but it should be consumed with care. Classicists can find accounts by Xenophon and Strabo of how mad honey rendered Greek and Roman armies helpless when they passed through Laz country in, respectively, 401BC and 65BC. Others can Google “bear cub hallucinating on mad honey” for footage of contemporary over-indulgence.

But Elvish honey — Kazim’s honey — is different. It does contain traces of grayanotoxin because some of its pollen comes from the white and pink varieties of what locals call the komar flower, so it shouldn’t be consumed in excess. But pollen from other sources is also involved: wild blueberry, for example, and cherry laurel and a host of other mountain flora. The sensational flavour that is the result makes excess consumption hard to resist.

According to Perisima Kababulut, the founder and “chief dreamer” of the New York-registered company Elvish Honey, the honey’s particular magic reflects its unique geographical origin. “The beesget their pollen from two different ecosystems, Kackar and Caucasian,” she says, and the region is internationally recognised as a biodiversity hotspot.

Other hives benefit from this too and use similar methods to produce health-enhancing honeys. “Laz people have been doing this for thousands of years,” Kababulut says. But recent decades have exposed more and more beekeeping areas in the Black Sea to the polluting forces of modernity, and barely any hives are completely remote from human activity or from other bees. Hence the passion with which Kazim guards the most inaccessible and felicitously positioned of all of his hives.

Locals, including Kababulut’s husband, Efe, believe that the general physical resilience of people in these parts has much to do with their customary daily spoonful of raw honey. “My grandpa’s almost 90,” Efe says, “and he’s super-healthy.”

But the Kababuluts also believe that the secret mountain site offers something even more life-enhancing, thanks to an unimprovable combination of isolation, biodiversity, altitude and rock-face positioning. The result, they claim, is what ancient people meant by “the nectar of the gods”.

The Kababuluts trademarked the Elvish brand in 2021 and market it worldwide (subject to availability) as an authentic natural wonder, rich in health-boosting compounds (antioxidants, polyphenols, flavonoids, proline) and minerals (iron, calcium, potassium), and as a result a product that is as healthy as it is delicious. But supply is limited. Hence the price.

Nonetheless, Kababulut pours from an unnerving height a small wooden spoonful for me.

“See how dense it is?” Efe says, as we watch the glistening thread of honey make its slow way from jar to spoon. “That’s because of the altitude.”

I place the spoon under my tongue, as instructed. The amber liquid seeps like sunlight into my being. There’s a hint of sharpness at the back of the throat, like whisky. But mainly there’s a sensation of brilliant sweetness: not sugary, but bright, pure and floral, like the air in a mountain meadow.

“It’s genuinely very special stuff,” James Hagen, a chef, culinary adventurer and jet-set gourmet caterer, agrees. “It’s an intensely floral flavour that stays on the palate for an unusually long time.” Hagen’s firm, Skandl, recently became the official UK dealer of Elvish — although Hagen uses most of his supply for the meals he creates for Skandl’s upmarket dining clients. “It’s like introducing a fine wine into an eating experience. We give Elvish as a tasting, between courses, and it super-charges your tastebuds for the next ingredient.”

Some sense a wider boost: Adam Raw, a Czech fitness guru, called it “instant Viagra”. That’s a niche response, but most users experience at least a glow of perceived wellbeing. Elvish says its honey can regulate circulation, strengthen the immune system and help to relieve headaches and upper respiratory tract infections. This may or may not be true. “We need more research,” Kababulut says. But I don’t doubt that a daily spoonful would be a healthy addition to my routine. Whether that would justify the financial outlay is a different matter.

By some standards, however, Elvish is modestly priced. At the other end of the Black Sea, at a coastal resort a two-hour drive from Istanbul, Ahmet Eren Cakir seats me in the elegant conservatory of a discreet boutique hotel. On a table are three exquisitely crafted poplar boxes each containing a large jar of honey. I taste each in turn: Centauri Cave Nymph, sharply floral; Centauri Gourmand, meltingly creamy and sweet; Centauri Cave Plus, bitterly medicinal. Each is clearly a special honey, and left to myself I would probably attempt to consume the whole jar of the Gourmand. But it’s the prices that really linger: respectively per kilogram, $16,500 (£13,020), $55,000 (£43,400) and $80,000 (£63,140).

A 150ml jar of Elvish honey that costs more than a thousand dollars

Anyone can name a price and in Turkey many things are negotiable, but Guinness World Records has acknowledged Centauri as the most expensive honey on the basis of a rigorously authenticated sale in 2021 at €10,000 (£8,700) a kilogram.

“I’ve sold honey for much more than that,” says Cakir, “but I’m not going to pay Guinness a fee for each new submission.”

Cakir is 50 years old, but he won’t tell me much else about himself. He has enemies in the world of Big Pharma, he says, so he keeps his profile low. Nor will he discuss the location of the mountain cave from which his honey is harvested except to say that, like Elvish, it is in the Black Sea region at an altitude of about 2,500m above sea level. His honey is produced by a particular method — but that too is mostly secret. “The details are in a bank vault.”

Yet he does speak freely on one theme: good honey, he says, cannot be produced cheaply. “No one looks at an Hermès bag or a Cuban cigar and says. ‘Why are you charging so much per gram?’ Yet people expect great honey to be cheap. It doesn’t make sense.”

Makers of other premium honeys — New Zealand manuka, Malaysian tualang, Yemeni Sidr — would no doubt agree, yet these are rarely sold for more than a few hundred pounds a kilogram. What gives Elvish and Centauri their extra zeroes? In some respects the two have little in common. Elvish is harvested from a mountain cliff face; Centauri from within a mountain cave. Elvish is marketed primarily as a gourmet product; Centauri as a health food. Elvish attributes its magic to ancient wisdom and perfect location; Centauri’s secret methodology involves such ingenious interventions as “ageing” the honey deep within the cave and manipulating its herbal content by feeding the bees with carefully chosen honey from other organic sources.

But both harvest honey from mostly inaccessible parts of the Black Sea region. Both use Caucasian grey bees. Both place hives so that they can benefit from mineral-rich moisture seeping through rock. Both eschew “unnatural” modern beekeeping practices. And, as a result, both produce honey in very limited quantities. Elvish’s harvest for 2023 was far less than 10kg. Where would be the sense in selling it at a knockdown price?

Its users, such as Raw, say Elvish is “worth every penny”, while the Italian actress Ornella Muti, who takes a little Centauri each morning, calls it “miraculous”. She adds: “Yes, it’s expensive. But we take it for prevention.”

Cakir speaks eagerly of other satisfied customers: Fabio Fognini, the Italian tennis player (apparently enjoying a late-career revival since starting to take Centauri Cave Plus at 36); Ivana Sert, the Serbian-Turkish television presenter (who even puts it on her face); and a string of more prominent figures (a president, a prime minister, a Middle Eastern royal family member, a Manchester City footballer) whom discretion prevents him from naming. “The happiest moment for me,” Cakir says, “is when a customer places their second order.”

He highlights the testimony of a hotel-keeper in Trabzon called Neriman Kaya, who says that her husband’s regular use of Centauri helped him to defeat prostate cancer. Such claims prove nothing. Yet Cakir believes that Centauri will one day be recognized formally for its therapeutic benefits.

Honey, he points out, has been used in medicine for thousands of years. Only in the age of Big Pharma has it been marginalised as “alternative”. Hundreds of serious studies have confirmed the principle that — in the words of Professor Patricia Rijo, of the Research Centre for Biosciences and Health Technologies at Lusofona University in Lisbon — “due to its rich bioactive compound composition, honey possesses antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and potential anticancer properties”. Yet each micro-chain of cause and effect can take years to establish.

“We need chemistry and analysis to identify the reaction compounds and the concentrations at which they are active,” says Professor Thomas Henle, head of food chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden and an expert in the role of methylglyoxal in manuka honey’s powerful antibacterial activity.

Rijo believes that her own preliminary in vitro research into Centauri has uncovered “significant anti-inflammatory properties, particularly in relation to colon cancer”. This isn’t the first study to have noted a susceptibility in colon cancer cells to honey’s anti-inflammatory powers, but Rijo is now excited enough to describe Centauri as “a potential candidate for further research and therapeutic applications”.

Henle is more cautious. “Statements on an actual medical effect can only be made on the basis of well-founded clinical studies,” he emphasises – and those could be decades away.

Yet other statements can be made with confidence. Honey – and related bee products such as propolis, venom and royal jelly – has huge potential both as a source of new pharmaceutical components and as a more generalised therapy or health-food in its own right. This is increasingly recognised, not least in Turkey, where “apitherapy” has been officially accepted as an alternative therapy since 2014. Yet much of that medicinal potential remains unexplored and (to quote the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine), “grossly under-utilised”.

The sheer range of varieties, sources and uses makes systematic analysis of honey’s benefits difficult – and mainstream science is, as a result, suspicious. Yet in an age of growing drug resistance, there is an obvious need for new medicinal agents.

“I believe that there are many more types of honey with particular therapeutic effects,” says José Miguel Álvarez-Suárez, Professor in Food Science and Technology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, whose studies tend to focus on the “mechanisms and components” through which certain honeys exercise their anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial effects. He is currently excited about the honey of the stingless Melaponine bees of the Ecuadorian Amazon, which, he says, can be “up to five times more powerful even than Manuka against microorganisms with bio-resistance characteristics to various drugs.”. There is, however, a drawback: “They produce very little honey” – which echoes the supply issues cited by Elvish and Centauri.

A dramatic increase in demand from pharmaceutical multinationals could create powerful temptations, for corner-cutting or worse. “Research is very often quickly overloaded with a commercial interest,” warns Henle.

In this context, Elvish and Centauri could be said to be performing a valuable service. by normalising the idea that the best honeys are premium products, whose prices are appropriate because they – and we – are worth it.

Both brands hope that their honeys, too, will one day be subjected to the full rigour of international science. “We’d be delighted if scientists would really investigate Elvish,” says Efe Kababulut. “Properly, like they’ve done with Manuka.”

It seems unlikely that Elvish, with its traces of grayanotoxin, would be used much in treatments for the seriously ill (although Turkish “mad” honeys have been shown to have pronounced anti-bacterial and anti-fungal effects). But that does not mean that it cannot have a big future as a health-boosting foodstuff.

Yet broader statements can be made with confidence. “Some honeys have effects on the human body that go beyond the purpose of nutrition,” Henle says. These can include a very powerful subjective sense of wellbeing, for which those who can afford to are happy to pay. “This ‘wellbeing effect’ cannot be neglected,” Henle adds. “Physiology is more than just biomechanical interactions.”

Also important, he believes, is “respect for the production of food”. If consumers feel that by paying more they are supporting sustainable traditions of production, then that too can produce a powerful wellbeing effect. Elvish knows this, hence its plans to team up with Skandl to create an exclusive culinary “safari” in Laz country, for serious gourmets to experience how Elvish is made.

“One thing that makes Elvish special for us is that it’s fully traceable,” Hagen says. “So you fully understand the whole process. That’s so important in the luxury industry.”

A glimpse of Kazim’s secret bear-proof hive would be an obvious highlight of such a trip. But brighter still, I suspect, would be that first luminous spoonful of honey: a taste of the nectar of paradise, after which no ordinary honey can ever quite satisfy.
Richard Askwith flew to Istanbul and to Rize-Artvin with Pegasus Airlines and stayed in Istanbul at the Lazzoni hotel, lazzonihotel.com. Return flights with Pegasus from London, Birmingham or Manchester to Istanbul start from £54.99, flypgs.com. For bespoke themed tours in Turkey, including culinary tours, see istanbulite.com