Each paid $125 for the first hour-long cupping session on Saturday, which included a tasting and a miniature, 40-gram container of Cuicateco beans to take home. Coffee Frinj.
Founded in 2017, Frinj is a Santa Barbara-based agricultural cooperative that grows the first commercially produced coffee in the continental United States. Its “ultra-specialty” coffee beans are grown on 35 private farms in San Diego and Santa Barbara counties.
How special are these beans? The first batch of Frinj coffee, weighing 500 pounds, sold for $18 a cup at Blue Bottle Coffee in the Bay Area in 2017. It sold out within two weeks.
Frinj founder and CEO Jay Ruskey said ultra-specialty coffee has the potential to become a national product as popular as craft beer, although it will never be as uncomplicated to produce because of the unique growing conditions coffee plants require.
“We think it’s the best coffee in the world,” Ruskey said.
Most of the world’s coffee beans are grown in the mountains of equatorial countries such as Ethiopia, Costa Rica and Colombia, which are characterized by reliably high levels of heated sun during the day, cold nights and rainfall.
In 2002, Ruskey realized he could replicate most of these growing conditions on his Goleta fruit tree farm, Good Organic EarthFor 12 years, he experimented quietly, planting a dozen different varieties of Arabica coffee plants in his avocado and lime groves. Despite being 18 degrees north of the equatorial coffee belt, the coastal region of Southern California had a near-perfect combination of sun, cold, and rolling farmland.
On the other hand, he realized that his coffee plants needed water to irrigate. Some varieties couldn’t handle the severe winter frosts. And the coffee cherries—each “cherry” has one or two beans inside—took almost twice as long to ripen as some equatorial varieties. But on the other hand, these slower-growing cherries have a richer, more intricate flavor, and with less rain, the plants aren’t as susceptible to fungi and other water-borne diseases.
In mid-2017, Frinj began selling teenage coffee seedlings to Southern California avocado farmers. Many of those initial plants will bear their first fruit for Frinj next year. It currently grows 35,000 coffee seedlings on 20 farms in Bonsall, Oceanside, Fallbrook, Escondido and Temecula, as well as 15 farms in Santa Barbara County. Another 17,000 plants will go into the ground this year, Ruskey said.
One such local farmer is Gayanah Krasnyanskiy, owner of Guyanah’s Farm in Escondido. Two years ago, she planted 1.2 acres of her 10-acre avocado ranch with coffee plants. This year, she’ll plant another 1.2 acres with coffee. She expects her first coffee harvest in 2020. Krasnyanskiy said she likes the idea of diversifying crops to produce higher yields.
Ruskey said the typical yield from an avocado grove in Southern California is $3,000 to $5,000 an acre. With the addition of mature coffee plants, the yield per acre can boost to $15,000 to $20,000.
In 2018, Frinj produced its second crop of 500 pounds of beans, but because the company is in a growth phase, more than half of the crop was used for planting and research. Most of the rest was sold to high-end buyers abroad. The only coffee from that crop sold in America was a “nano batch” of 17 pounds of beans to Bird Rock Roasters.
Ruskey said he chose Bird Rock as his sole U.S. distributor this year because the La Jolla-based roaster has a stellar reputation in the industry. Named Roaster Magazine’s 2012 Roaster of the Year, Bird Rock sources all of its coffees directly from farmers in Central America, Africa and now Southern California.
Bird Rock co-owner Jeff Taylor, who has been producing specialty coffee for 25 years, said there is a miniature but rapidly growing market of high-quality coffee consumers in the U.S. and Asia who are willing to pay “top dollar” for the world’s rarest and best coffees.
Frinj coffee stands out, Taylor said, because it is unique and has good flavor. Last week, he submitted Bird Rock’s freshly roasted Frinj Cuicateco beans to Coffee Review, the coffee industry’s version of Wine Spectator. They received an outstanding rating 92nd place in the ranking.
When Taylor introduced Frinj coffee to his customers last month, the cups sold out in two hours. The rest were snapped up within 12 hours through an online pre-sale of 200-gram cartons priced at $100.
“I don’t need all the customers in the world. I just need that little niche of people who love coffee and want that experience and are willing to pay for it,” Taylor said of the high-end specialty market.
After tasting the coffee on Saturday, Stabrawa said she loved tasting Cuicateco’s coffee, but she especially enjoyed supporting the region’s growing coffee industry.
“As a Californian, I am very proud that coffee is grown on California farms,” she said.
Originally published:
