True Gold Honey

Discover something truly good.

Opening a jar of True Gold Honey is like opening a jar of liquid sunshine. Our honey comes from our family beekeeping business, Sample Family Apiaries. It is pure, raw, and unfiltered. We do not cook our honey or dilute our honey, so it retains all of its health benefits, including live antibodies, enzymes and minerals. Think of it as straight from our hives to your table. Click on the circles below to discover our five varieties honey.

Special Reserve

Pozo Wildflower

We are excited to introduce our 1st Special Reserve: Pozo Wildflower Honey! This amazing honey won a Good Food Award in 2020 along with rave reviews from all who taste it. Our Pozo Wildflower honey elevates every recipe, with a burst of fruity flavor and a deliciously distinctive texture. This honey crystallizes with both large and small crystals for great spreadability and enjoyable crunch. A true gift from mother nature’s assortment of flowers that bloom in the Pozo Mountain Range. In limited supply, try this lovely honey today!

Wild Buckwheat

Our award-winning Buckwheat Honey is a beautifully complex varietal with layers of flavors and a gorgeous rich amber color. Gathered in the foothills and the canyons surrounding Pleasant Valley, its flavor is enhanced by seasonal wildflowers in bloom. Buckwheat Honey’s versatility make it an all around champ. It’s delicious in tea or by itself for an afternoon pick me up. It’s a wonderful addition to baked goods and can be used as an all natural cleanser and moisturizer for your skin.

Avocado

This honey has attitude. Gathered from California avocado blossoms, its flavors are rich, bold, and buttery with a hint of molasses. The color can be a dark smoky quartz or a shimmery bronze. The bold flavors make this honey a cook’s favorite as it enhances recipes and is wonderful in dressings and sauces. Avocado Honey is also fantastic for your skin. Use it as a face wash and mask.

Orange Blossom

Orange Blossom is a radiant golden honey with a sweet citrusy scent and a light zesty flavor. A unique honey, it can only be harvested where the weather is mild enough for orange trees to survive. Our home is surrounded by orange groves, so our Orange Blossom Honey is literally produced in our own backyard. Orange Blossom is delightful on toast, an english muffin, or hot cereal. You can also eat it straight from the jar for a morning burst of energy and many people take it for allergy relief.

Coastal Mountain Sage

Coastal Mountain Sage Honey with its mild, delicate flavor is our sweetest honey. The nectar from the sage plant produces a honey that is slow to crystallize and retains its light color for years. Sage honey’s delicate flavor makes it a great complement to bold cheeses. We also love to put it in our morning coffee and have some set aside for any occasion.

Summer Valley Flowers

Summers in California provide our bees with a wealth of flowers to visit— from alfalfa and cotton fields to neighboring backyard gardens. The result is a lovely caramel-colored honey with a lightly sweet and tangy flavor. We love Summer Valley Flowers honey on toast, as the perfect topping on a bowl of ice cream, or drizzled over fresh cut peaches with a splash of cream.

We give our bees the same love and care we give our family.

True Gold is owned by mother-son duo Sarah and Tyler Sample, 3rd and 4th generation beekeepers. All our honey comes from our bee farm, Sample Family Apiaries. We constantly monitor our hives, ensuring they are healthy, strong and safe, so our bees can focus on the important work of pollinating and making honey. We harvest our honey by hand to keep it as raw and pure as possible, using sustainable practices to reduce waste and keep our impact on the earth to a minimum. All so you can enjoy honey that bursts with local flavor and has all its natural benefits intact.

Bees are a winding ribbon through my life

My parents started our family apiary in Ashland, Oregon in 1972 with 50 hives. My earliest memories are of me reading or playing in the truck after school or on the weekends while my parents worked the bees. Over the years I’ve been involved in almost every aspect of the beekeeping business, from working the bees in the field, extracting honey in the warehouse, helping my parents in the office until they retired, and now running the business with my husband, Dave.

Like me, Tyler grew up taking care of bees…

and being part of the family business. When he was about 13 my dad (his grandpa) paid him with hives in exchange for working at the apiary. Within just a few years Tyler was bottling and selling the honey from his own hives to friends, family, and even a local health food store. When he went away to college, Dave and I managed his hives for him.

My first memories…

of our family bee business are of working with my dad and grandpa driving forklifts around our property and working in the bee yards in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Growing up bees were part of my life, but music was my passion. I went to school to be an audio engineer and can play drums, sax, and a little guitar and bass. But this way of life—the bees, and the honey, and the business—called to me when I was working in the music industry in LA. So I returned home to join my parents in the business.

We want to ensure every member of our human hive thrives.

Our immediate family, extended family, and friends have dealt with the challenges of having family members with disabilities. That’s why we donate 1% of our sales to families impacted by disability. Our business is beekeeping, our craft is making honey, but our true love is family. True Gold Honey is our way to spread some of that authentic goodness.

Thank you for reaching out.