On a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we’re discovering what California coffee can become.

Coffee is still a young crop in California. Unlike regions where generations of growers have refined their understanding of how coffee responds to climate, elevation, soil, and season, growing it here means working within a landscape that is still being understood.

Not everything written about coffee growing translates directly to Southern California. Our climate is different. Our seasons are different. Even the relationship between elevation and coffee quality asks us to look at things differently.

For generations, high elevation has been closely associated with exceptional specialty coffee. There is good reason for that. In tropical growing regions, climbing higher generally means cooler temperatures, which can slow cherry maturation and allow more time for the seed to develop. This slower development is often associated with denser beans and the complexity prized in specialty coffee.

But elevation is only part of the story.

Here in Southern California, we grow at just 1,550 feet. What we lack in tropical elevation, our environment approaches in a different way. Our latitude places us much farther from the equator, bringing cooler seasonal conditions. Pacific air and morning fog moderate our hillside, while the mature avocado canopy shades the coffee beneath it and helps buffer temperature extremes.

And then winter arrives.

Rather than developing continuously through a tropical growing season, our cherries encounter California’s cooler months. Their development slows considerably before continuing into spring and summer. The result is an unusually long maturation cycle, with fruit often remaining on the tree for close to a year from flowering to harvest.

For us, this changes the conversation around altitude. Instead of asking whether our coffee grows high enough, we are interested in the conditions that high elevation traditionally provides: cooler temperatures, slower maturation, protection from heat, and time for the seed to develop. Here, latitude, seasonality, Pacific influence, and shade work together to create those conditions in a completely different way.

This is also why our avocado trees are much more than a canopy. They are part of the growing system itself. Their shade helps moderate the environment around our coffee, while the living soil beneath both crops forms the foundation of our regenerative approach.

We are part of a pioneering generation of California coffee growers, and there is no complete playbook for what we are doing. Research gives us a foundation, but much of what applies to traditional coffee regions has to be observed again under California conditions. We measure, experiment, document, adjust, and learn from the trees themselves.

There is only one harvest each year. Every cherry is picked by hand at peak ripeness, thoughtfully processed, and slowly dried, and the whole of it, from seed to cup, is certified organic by CCOF. Each season gives us another opportunity to understand how variety, climate, farming, and processing come together in the cup.

We are not trying to recreate coffee from somewhere else. We are discovering what coffee grown here can become.

One hillside. One harvest at a time. A new California terroir taking shape.