Honey Peach Whiskey Sour featuring Sweet Cheeks Honey

In 2014, Mark & Sara Hewitt set out with a passion and an idea. The passion, to find a means to help pollinators on their farm. The idea, adding honey bees to their farm plan. Just like that, Sweet Cheeks Honey was born! Skip forward to 2015, Sweet Cheeks Honey has just finished packaging their first batch of honey! When Sara contacted me to be featured, I was overjoyed to give them an opportunity to share their story with my little slice of the Internet. Outside of their honey bee business, Sara is also a wonderful advocate for Agriculture and you may recognize her from their farm blog, Hewitt Farms Inc. I know you’re going to just love this feature, so I will get to it! Enjoy! 

SWEET CHEEKS HONEY – MARK & SARA HEWITT
Southern Minnesota

When did you start farming? What brought you into farming?

I am a 6^th generation farmer, and my husband is a 3^rd generation farmer. We farm land that has been in my family for over a hundred years which is pretty special. Even though we both grew up on farms, we didn’t think we would actively be farming. My father passed away in 2009, and 2 years after that, Mark and I, along with his brother, started farming that land, as well as farming with Mark’s dad too. We both still work full-time off the farm with hopes of coming home to the farm full-time someday. We are trying our best to figure out what coming home looks like for us, and honeybees are a large part of our farm plan.

What has been the most satisfying part of farming for you?

Learning something new every single day. Honey bees provide a very unique learning opportunity, and they are really unlike any kind of livestock out there, and require a very specific routine care and maintenance of their own. You have to know how to manage your hive health, and watch for when you need to add supers or if swarm cells are forming. We attend many classes and seminars on bees throughout the year to learn how to best care for them, extraction processes, and more. We also love that others want to learn about how we care for our bees and bottle honey.

What is your favorite thing to do with a food crop you grow? 

We make honey mead! We use our honey to brew honey mead and bottle it for ourselves. It is a fun treat to have on holidays with family and friends.

I love drizzling honey on cornbread and over ice cream. I also love making honey lemonade. You basically use honey as your sweetener instead of sugar, and it is delicious. You can also add other fruits in such as strawberries and raspberries.

What is one message you’d like to get across to the general public about what you do?

I want people to understand that we do the absolute best we can as farmers, every single day. Farmers never stop learning or improving. They want to do better for their land, animals, their farm, and their family. We take a great deal of pride in our product, and every single bottle someone purchases from us, makes us smile and do a little happy dance, really! We love getting the messages from customers who enjoyed it, and we want nothing more than for everyone to love our honey as much as we do. I cried when we bottled our first batch because so much work, time, and effort had gone into getting to that day, that bottling session. We truly do the best we can because we love our farm, and we love our customers.

You can find more from Mark & Sara and their honey bees at their website Sweet Cheeks Honey, tweet with them on Twitter, or follow their Facebook page! 

 

I use honey in a variety of dishes, baked goods, and of course cocktails! It is honestly one of my favorite sweeteners, mostly because it is one of North Dakota’s top agricultural commodities thanks to our sunflower production! Naturally, I took the boozy route here and tried to keep the honey in a more pure form. I infused the honey with some peaches and decided to put the simple syrup into one of my favorite cocktails… a traditional whiskey sour! 

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This post is part of my Thirty Days of Food series where I am writing about food and farming for the entire month of November, to find out more about it all or how to follow along, visit myThirty Days of Food page to find more great recipes with farmer features!