Honey nuts have a new hive to buzz about in downtown Centralia — Hub City Honey Company.
Owned by partners Jennah Kemp and Beau Gromley, the store sells a wide variety of locally-sourced honey, kits to make mead (alcohol from fermented honey), kombucha, honeycomb, beekeeping and farming literature, and more.
Located at 106 N. Tower Ave. next to Phantom Tattoo, Hub City Honey will hold its grand opening this weekend. Customers can come between 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday to browse the shop’s selection.
The owners are planning for regular hours in the same timeframe on Tuesdays through Saturdays following this weekend.
Kemp and Gromley moved to Centralia from Olympia about two years ago, they said.
In Olympia, the duo was involved with Garden Raised Bounty, known as GRuB, a local nonprofit which began with the goal of helping veterans who were interested in agriculture, specifically beekeeping.
Kemp served as a linguist in the U.S. Navy and Gromley loaded missiles onto both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.
The nonprofit expanded to include youth, seniors and those in marginalized communities, according to its website, and now engages around 1,500 people per year in programs for growing and cooking food.
“Our day job was gardening, farming and supporting veterans, and getting them into beekeeping and their farm businesses,” Gromley said. “We’ve been doing that for several years and became beekeepers ourselves and moved down here and fell in love with the community.”
As soon as they moved to Centralia, the community support was overwhelming, the couple said, which drove them to open the store.
“We’ve really been embraced by the local business owners here,” Kemp said. “We feel so lucky to have been able to get connected with them. The Ayala family, Greg across the street, the Shady Lady, all these people have just helped a ton.”
They consider themselves “hobby” beekeepers with 11 hives, though some of their own honey will be sold at the new shop. Kemp and Gromley decided to open up Hub City Honey as a place for other local beekeepers and farmers to sell their goods.
“We blend it with our mentor, Alan Woods, on Reynolds with Woods Bee (Co.). He’s the president of the Washington Beekeepers Association and he’s been teaching us beekeeping for several years,” said Gromley.
“We worked with him in a project at GRuB, too, supporting veterans getting into beekeeping, called ‘healing through hives,’ so he’s also our partner in that program,” Kemp added.
Aside from their new honey shop, the couple is starting a new statewide veteran beekeeping resource club to further foster beekeeping as a positive hobby for veterans.
The walls of Hub City Honey hold a wide variety of pollen-specific honeys and blends from beekeepers throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“We’ve got varieties from Washington, Oregon and California, and we try to source more exotic blends as we can find them and get them,” Gromley said.
Additionally, they seek out farmers who might be interested in owning bees to connect them with resources and training. The couple offers a variety of workshops and classes for those looking to learn.
“If they’re not free, we have nonprofit funding to support that so money should never be a barrier,” Gromley said. “We’re really just trying to take what we’ve been doing in Olympia on the nonprofit side and bring it down here, connect the veteran community and overall community with services, support and honey.”
Both local veterans and farmers interested in getting beekeeping resources or learning more can contact Gromley at Beau@hubcityhoney.com.
Kemp said the business is looking for local artists who are interested in having their work displayed for sale on the walls of Hub City Honey.
For more information, visit Hub City Honey Company’s website, https://hubcityhoneyco.com/, or find the shop on Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/hubcityhoneycompany/.
To learn more about GRuB, visit https://www.goodgrub.org/.
