Vicent Juan Ferrer does not consume a single spoonful of sugar a year. He sweetens everything with honey, from coffee to cola-cao and even his juices. And he doesn’t use just any honey: he uses the one he collects from the beehives next to his house, the Mirador de Can Prats farmhouse, located between Morna and Sant Carles. It was awarded the prize for the best ‘tardor’ (autumn) variety of honey in the last Balearic Islands honey competition. You only have to taste a spoonful to understand why: it is dense, caramel-coloured and very dark due to the high percentage of carob pollen it contains. It has an intense flavour and leaves a liquorice aftertaste, like carob syrup.
Aged 66, Juan follows the teachings of his grandfather, Pep, and his mother, Catalina (93), lifelong beekeepers who even braided the frames of the hives they created by hand with juniper branches and “lined” them with white clay. For example, he uses a mixture of lavender, frigola and dried carob bark to smoke the hives, which even “disinfects them against varroa”, a parasite.
He had only eight hives when a couple of years ago he met Alfonso Romero, a Jerez native who went to Can Prats to fix an electrical fault. Romero always carries a suitcase with him with jars of honey from Rancho Cortesano, which his family has been producing in Jerez de la Frontera for three decades. He tried to sell a jar to Juan, but Juan told him he already had some of the good stuff. The friendship grew as soon as he showed him those few hives in his house: “I’m fascinated by beekeeping”, says Romero, who suggested that the Ibizan increase the number of hives to “300 or 500” and create his own brand, which has been christened Eivimiel and which will be launch on the market in Santa Eulària on the first Sunday in May, as long as bureaucracy does not get in the way.
“When I arrived, I saw that carob honey was undervalued, that it was not appreciated. I loved the honey from here. As soon as I tried it, it was like tasting the mountain”.
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