STiR coffee and tea magazine

28 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 5, 2018 (October / November) J By Dan Shryock ay Ruskey walks among his coffee trees, pushing back branches in search of ripe cherries. A broad-brimmed hat shields his eyes from the bright Southern California sun on this warm June morning. He finds two ripened Caturra Rojo cherries and offers them to guests. He watches their surprise as they taste the fruit, then turns and walks toward another tree. "Want to try a geisha?" he asks. Ruskey is proud of his work. He's the first farmer to successfully cultivate a commer- cial coffee crop in the mainland United States. He also developed a collaborative network of what he calls "partner growers" that pools its harvest of specialty coffee beans. His new company, Frinj Coffee, Inc., then processes and sells it to Blue Bottle Coffee. It hasn't been easy, Ruskey admits. "I didn't wake up and just say 'let's do coffee, this is going to do it.' There was no specialty market at the time we first planted them," he says. "My trees developed as this market did. It's been an interesting evolution." It's been 16 years since that first planting. Frinj Coffee and its partner growers now have nearly 27,000 trees in the ground, all at different stages of maturity. Some farmers, like Robert D'Alessandri in rural Temecula, are planting for the first time. D'Alessandri's coffee crop eventually will complement his mandarin orange and grape production. Ruskey anticipates these farms will grow in scale over time. In 2017, the oldest trees produced 270 pounds of highly rated, organically grown beans in different varietals that Blue Bottle purchased at $60 to $80 per pound. And those beans are selling in Blue Bottle coffee shops for as much as $16 a cup. Harvest numbers for 2018 are not yet available but negotiations with Blue Bottle al- ready are underway. Some of this year's harvest is being set aside for other buyers as well. "Why? What?" Ruskey and his family traveled to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 2017 in search of their coffee. They found it at a downtown Blue Bottle shop, placed their order and Growing Coffee on the Frinj Farmers in Southern California are successfully cultivating 30,000 specialty coffee trees, planting at commercial scale for the first time on the US mainland Jay Ruskey at his Goleta, Calif. farm Photos by Carla Shryock

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