Unlike most food items, bees are the sole curator of their product. "Everything else has a human piece, but honey they do alone,” says Katie Flinn. “We do nothing but the uncapping.”

Flinn, a Warren County Farm Bureau member, is Iowa’s first honey sommelier and owner of Milk & Honey Orchard and Apiary near Indianola, along with her husband, Wade, and their four children.

She trained with the Italian Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey, ...