ST. GEORGE — Life Happens. Coffee helps.
Paul Amargo, a coffee lover and the founder of White Hive Coffee, said his love increased after taking a coffee engineering course at the University of California, Davis — an agricultural school.
“I have this love for agriculture because of my family,” Amargo said. “Historically, they were Filipino farmers, so I went back to my roots, quite literally.”
While living in Arizona and working on his graduate degree, Amargo said he needed a side hustle. Familiar with plants, agriculture and cooking, he took his love for coffee and started his own company.
“I learned a lot about trade and sourcing,” Amargo said. “But I decided it would be a great idea to start my business maybe three months before the quarantine.”
As a college student, he didn’t have access to $500,000 roasters and instead used a fluid bed roaster — a smaller device that allowed him to control the different profiles and supervise smaller batches. One of the blessings of quarantine was the ability to travel to outdoorsy cities like St. George, where Amargo said he met Josiah Thorsland — the current owner of White Hive Coffee.
“Outdoors communities love coffee, and he’s an engineer,” Amargo said about Thorsland. “Honestly, that man is so smart. He knows the field; he knows the business. He has a love for coffee and quality and never dumbs down or cuts corners with it.”
Amargo said one of the things that set White Hive Coffee apart is the quality of the beans and the way they roast them to control the flavor profile. Companies like Starbucks are known for overroasting their coffee beans for uniformity, not quality.
“Oftentimes the coffee tastes the same because they intentionally do it for consistency, not necessarily for the flavor profile,” Amargo said.
Thorsland, who has owned White Hive Coffee since 2021, said he’s always been curious about how things are made. In college, he first learned the coffee bean roasting process in a popcorn machine, which used circulated air.
When he met Amargo and took over White Hive Coffee, the company came with a name and a coffee roaster but no contacts or customers.
“My focus was to have my coffee in local stores, build a loyal customer base and work on a website, T-shirts — that kind of thing,” Thorsland said.
He currently runs the business out of his home and offers single-origin roasts. He said all White Hive Coffee is fair trade organic and in stores. His line includes a light roast from Papua New Guinea, a medium roast from Uganda, a dark roast from Indonesia and a decaf option from Ethiopia. Custom roasts are available through direct ordering.
Packaging is an integral part of the brand, and Thorsland said he hand-stamps every product and collects art for the back of each bag. In addition to coffee roasts, he’s also added his own ceramic coffee mugs to the product line, which can be found on Instagram here.
For more information on White Hive Coffee, visit their website or follow them on Instagram and Facebook.
Thorsland provided the video footage seen above.
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