Farm Talk Podcast: California Coffee Collective

In this episode of Farm Talk, Paul is on location with Lisa Tate, founder of the California Coffee Collective at Rancho Faso outside of Santa Paula, California. Not only is California Coffee Collective one of the  first of five farms to grow coffee in California, their crop just went into commercial production last year! Lisa may be new to growing a coffee crop, but her family have been farmers since the 1800’s. 

In just under 30 minutes, Lisa discusses how an expertise in growing avocados led to a giant revelation. Listeners will also discover how an all women crew and volunteers do all of the harvesting  – and the tricks they have up their sleeve. One method Lisa devised is painting the women’s nails the exact color of a ripened coffee cherry.  The harvesters then only picked perfectly ripened coffee cherries which is a critically important part of the process. You’ll have to listen to the full episode to find out what happens to the leaves from the coffee bush!

Lisa and the Coffee Collective have proven coffee can be grown right here in Ventura County, but is the cuppa joe any good? (Spoiler –  it’s really great.) 

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Transcript – California Coffee Collective

Paul Ward:

Hi everyone. It’s Paul Ward here and welcome to another edition of Farm Talk. I’m very excited today. We’re gonna be talking about coffee and our guest is Lisa Tate with the California Coffee Collective. Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa Tate:

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Paul Ward:

And we’re in a beautiful setting. We’re at Rancho Faso outside of Santa Paula, California, little windy today, but still a beautiful setting. And thank you for having us.

Lisa Tate:

I’m so happy you’re here. This is exciting.

Paul Ward:

And of course we have to thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store. So Lisa, what is the California Coffee Collective?

Lisa Tate:

Well it’s a company we started in order to help support California coffee growers. So coffee is a new crop here in California and it requires a whole process to get it from the farm to the roaster. So we decided to do our own, since I’m growing coffee, I needed to have a way to get it to the next stages. So, we started up a corporation to do that and,gathered machinery from Colombia because they don’t, they don’t support the coffee industry in the continental United States. So we had to figure out how to get all that equipment here. And,we had to teach ourselves how to do this because we were all new at it. And we did, and we’re making some really great coffees.

Paul Ward:

That’s awesome. And it’s called a collective. So I, I would imagine you’ve got other growers that are part of the group.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. So we’re the first of five farms to be growing coffee in California. Our crop just went into commercial production last year at year five. And so there are other farms that will be coming up here and they’re gonna need the support of people who can process the coffee for them.

Paul Ward:

Okay. Cuz this is really avocado/lemon country.  And so what made you think about growing coffee?

Lisa Tate:

Well there’s a, there’s a lot of issues with this bug called this Asian citrus around here and it’s kind of decimated Florida’s citrus industry and the bug is here and this bug carries a little virus. And so we’re trying to keep this virus out as long as possible, but it’s, we’re afraid it’s going to really impact the citrus industry here. So we were looking for ways to diversify. I think growers are always looking for ways to diversify, right? So we ended up hearing about this coffee deal and we thought, well, we’ll give it a try. So we planted an acre and a half. We planted two varieties and then we wanted to see, can it grow here? You know? So we, we babied it, iit was cute. All of the little plants had their own little blankets for the first year to keep ’em warm. Cuz we, we were really worried about them getting through the winter and being warm enough through the winter and then they grew and they kept growing and, and then so now, okay. Yeah, we know we can grow it here, but does it taste good? So we had to wait and wait, wait and learn and yeah, it does taste good. It tastes really good.

Paul Ward:

So you’re growing two varieties.

Lisa Tate:

We’re growing a Geisha variety and Caturra variety. They’re both specialty coffees. And if we’re going to sell coffee in California, because our labor costs and our inputs are so much more expensive than in South America or in Africa, right. We really need to be selling specialty coffee and high, very high end specialty coffee. So, we’re growing two varieties. The Geisha is one of the more expensive varieties in the world and it has a very tea-like flavor, but it is a little bit more of a slow starter. So it took a while for that plant to get going and  it doesn’t produce as much fruit – we call it fruit. Butt and the Caturra is a little hardier and it grows a lot more fruit. And so,we wanted to kind of, again, diversify hedge our bets a little bit. So we planted both of those.

Paul Ward:

When you planted, did you have the support infrastructure to help with the harvesting and the and the, the roasting cuz I mean with avocados and lemons, it’s just kind of like a no brainer. Yeah but with the new crop, you kind of have to have somebody buy your fruit harvest, your fruit process. Did you have all that in place?

Lisa Tate:

Oh, we had some of that in place. What I tell people is that we’re farmers, so we know how to grow things and there’s lots of people around here that know how to grow things. And so we’ve basically taken our expertise in avocados and citrus and he’s the same principles, you know, plants, plants need food, they need food, water medicine, you know, they need to be kept warm or cool. So they it’s, it’s pretty basic, and then once we, once we were ready to harvest, that was when it was, it was difficult to figure out what we were gonna do. So first I’m really a big supporter of women in agriculture. So I hired an all women crew. And it was really fun cuz we were out there just harvesting. And what  we do is ,I found the exact color nail polish of a red ripe coffee cherry, and we painted our nails and then we just picked and you could, it’s hard in the shade to, to be able to see the exact right color, but it’s really important that you only get the exact ripest coffee cherries when you’re harvesting.

Lisa Tate:

And so we did that, so that was fun. And then in the last few years during COVID, I, I just kind of said, Hey, to all my friends that have Facebook, do guys wanna come harvest and everybody was looking for something to do outdoors. So we came out and we had a socially distanced coffee harvest  and everybody had so much fun and they said we would pay to do this. You know, we wanna bring our friends next time you do this. So I thought, oh, well that sounds cool. Maybe we’ll, we’ll make a thing out of this. So I haven’t paid for any harvesting since then. We’ve just had friends and family and just local people

Paul Ward:

So you throw like harvesting parties. Yeah. So harvesting started with friends and family and now you have these harvesting parties. Yeah. And so anybody can come at a certain date and time.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. I usually set a date. It’s hard cuz I have to figure out exactly when it’s gonna be ripe. Right. And so I do my best to estimate that and then I send out a message to all of our subscribers from our website and whoever’s interested comes orI also set up events through Eventbrite.

Paul Ward:

Okay. Very cool. Yeah. That’s the first I’ve heard of that.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. It’s it’s a lot of fun

Paul Ward:

 Yes. Interesting.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah and because I didn’t have to pay so much during my volunteer events, it gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with the coffee cuz I didn’t have that huge expenses that I would’ve had cuz it is a very labor intensive crop. I mean you have to think about it, it’s like picking a grape each individually, making sure that the color is exactly right on it. Right. So so yeah, and then once we had that then we had to learn how to process it. And so I watched YouTube videos and I talked to people and we had some people who had coffee farms and had some experience come talk to us and we kind of muddled our way through it the first few times. Right. And coffee cherries are very sticky. They have a lot of sugar in them, so my hair was sticking straight up and we were a mess and it was midnight cuz you have to process it really quickly or it starts to ferment too much. Right. Yeah. And, and I mean there’s a whole process, but basically we float them. And so all of the dense beans go to the bottom of the bucket of water and and those are the good ones . And so we use all the other ones for other things like possibly we’ll roast them and put ’em in chocolate. So, you know, we make different things out of the cherries too.

Paul Ward:

And who does your, are you in the roasting game too?

Lisa Tate:

So after all of the coffee is pulped and fermented and dried and then it sits, it takes about four months from the time that it’s picked a minimum of four months to the time that it can it’s ready to roast. So when it’s ready to roast, we have some co-owners of the California Coffee Collective Ragamuffin Roasters. The owners of Ragamuffin roasters, they do all of the roasting for us. Okay. And then yeah, you can buy the coffee from them. A lot of times we do them through through auctions or we sell through auctions or we sell what my favorite way to do it is through coffee cupping events, where we get to actually lead you through the event and do a whole….

Paul Ward:

Coffee cupping!

Lisa Tate:

Fancy. Yeah. A fancy it’s it’s a, it’s kind of a party for about eight people and yeah, we, we slurp it. It’s a lot of fun.

Paul Ward:

Yeah. Very cool. So if somebody’s listening or watching our show, could they go to a website and…

Lisa Tate:

Yeah, they can go to our website. Right now we’re, we’re all sold out for the coffee that we’re selling on our website. But if you if you’re interested in scheduling a, a private event, we can, we can discuss that. Or if you just wanna you can talk to me individually, I have a private reserve stashed away. 

Paul Ward:

Cool. And what is that? What is that website?

Lisa Tate:

It’s CaliforniaCoffee.com.

Paul Ward:

That’s a great name. That’s a great name. So you come from a long line of farmers and you’re the first one of many generations to break into coffee. 

Lisa Tate:

No, I’m the first one to get into coffee, but I’m not, yeah, my family, my great grandfather when he was eight years old, came on the Oregon trail and they made it up to Oregon. Barely. They barely survived and then he made his way down into the bay area. And then in about 1876, he made it to Ventura County and bought a farm, you know, at that time people were coming to the west for gold, but they were also coming for land. And so my family was here looking for land and that was not a get rich quick scheme. Right. You have to have a lot of patience to work the, by the land worked the land. And so they did and they just gradually, cculated farms. And then my great-grandfather found this farm and built his home here in 1926 and moved his family here. And, we’ve been here on this property ever since.

Paul Ward:

Wow. And this is called Rancho Filoso.

Lisa Tate:

Rancho Filoso means sharp ranch. And my family is a sharp family.

Paul Ward:

How do you determine the quality of your beans when you’re, when you’re picking and also too, if you have the public coming and harvesting, how do you teach them what to leave on the bush?

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. So, well, first of all, I would, I’m just gonna throw it out there. My goal is to have the best coffee in the entire world. So in order to do that, you have to have every single part of the process. Exactly. Perfect. You can’t make a mistake anywhere. And so we’ve been experimenting a lot too with that process. So first thing is you have to have healthy trees. That’s number one. The second thing is you have to harvest at exactly the right time. So only the ripe perfect beans that aren’t, have no flaws. And so that when my harvesters come in, I have the nail polish still and we, we either paint our nails or I have pieces of tape that are pre-painted and so they can wrap ’em around their fingers and they, they pick, but I’m, I’m around there watching to make sure and, and then we have a machine that they all go through that takes that cherry off of the bean.

Lisa Tate:

And that, that kind of sorts out some of the stuff too that isn’t quite right. They get floated. So they only, only the dense beans are used to make the coffee and then they go through a fermentation process. And that’s where we’ve been having a lot of fun too. Trying different things extending the fermentation times. We’ve tried things. We’ve tried these – they’re like spores  – that they used to make sake. For example, we’ve tried putting that in some of our experiments. We’ve been able to raise our cupping scores, four points, which is when you’re in really high levels. That’s impressive. So coffee’s scored on a scale from zero to 100, very similar to wine and,anything above an eighties considered specialty coffee, 83 solidly specialty coffee. So we were excited because our four year old coffee scored 89.25. So that was our immature coffee that we sent out to be professionally graded. Our coffee last year, we didn’t send out to be professionally graded, but the owners at Ragamuffin are very experienced. So we’re scoring above. We, we believe we hit past that 90 marks, which places you in, in the very top tiers of coffee.

Paul Ward:

Oh, that’s exciting. Yeah. And who’s doing this scoring. Is this in a group association?

Lisa Tate:

Yeah, there’s a specialty coffee association that provides training and certifications that you’re called a Q grader, if you are a coffee taster.

Paul Ward:

Okay. And so if you, if you get this rating a few years in a row, you’re kind of on the map and getting noticed.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. You’ll get noticed. And there’s also competitions, so I’d love to enter some of these competitions and the winner of those offten, you know, they’ll sell out their whole crop at $5,000 a pound type of prices.

Paul Ward:

Wow. That’s crazy. Yeah. That’s, that’s a lot better than avocados

Lisa Tate:

Yeah.

Paul Ward:

Now can any ranch in the area be a coffee grower? I take special climate, water, and soil. I mean, just like anything, I mean, how do you, you kind of, there was a little bit of luck involved. I mean, you took a risk. Yeah. But also your, your property lent itself to, to being a coffee, coffee property.

Lisa Tate:

It seems that our our coastal climate, our Southern California coastal climate seems to be able to produce these great coffees. I think they kind of mimic some of the mountainous regions in the tropics. So yeah, we seem to be doing okay here. I wouldn’t go too hot or too cold though. Right. You know? In fact,I was so worried about cold temperatures and then we had some really hot days that damaged our trees. A few years back. So.

Paul Ward:

And what, what equipment do you need to grow? Did you have to, you said you had to get some specialty equipment, did you get the fruit from Colombia? 

Lisa Tate:

No, no. We got the fruit from a nursery here in California. But we,  we’re working with another nursery as well, giving them seeds and they’re growing the seeds. So hopefully more and more farmers can, will be able to do this if they choose to , and then the equipment. Yeah. I had to get like pulping machines and holding machines, because you can do it by hand, right. And I did do it by hand, but it’s really tedious, extremely tedious work. And it would be too labor intensive to be sure. To make any economic sense. So we, we had to figure out where to get this equipment. We had to figure out how to get money to these countries that have this equipment, cuz the United States doesn’t necessarily have banking agreements with them. And right then we had to cross our fingers and hope they got here, but we were lucky that they did and my equipment is great. And , the greatest part about it is its low water equipment. We use no water really. So, of course water’s always a huge issue here. Right. And so I would say that coffee uses about the same amount of water as avocados.

Paul Ward:

Oh really? Yeah. Okay. So about three acre feet per year, somewhere. Yeah. The bush is smaller though. Isn’t it? It’s a lot smaller than not.

Lisa Tate:

No, they can get up. They can get up there pretty big. I mean, it is technically a bush, but I call them trees cuz they act more like trees. But we top ’em at about six feet cuz we don’t wanna have to get on ladders to harvest them.

Paul Ward:

Sure. Plus your volunteer harvesters.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. I don’t want anyone getting hurt.

Paul Ward:

Yeah.

Lisa Tate:

The other nice thing about it is we’re using all parts of the plant which is really exciting. So like we use the leaves, we can make tea out of the leaves. So when we prune them we obviously use the beans, but we’re using the cherry for all kinds of exciting things. And then also even the holes we’re using as a mulch and and recycling all, any water that we use back into the orchards to irrigate the plants.

Paul Ward:

So it’s a – every part of the, every part of the bean is being used.

Lisa Tate:

Every part of the bean and the plant. Yeah. And there’s caffeine in all parts of it too.

Paul Ward:

Oh really? Now do you determine the level of caffeine when you’re roasting?

Lisa Tate:

No, but I will say in those cherries you can eat the cherries. They’re pretty sweet. And they have a lot – 

Paul Ward:

You can, you can taste the buzz.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah. You can feel it.

Paul Ward:

Yeah. So do you notice that our region has,  produces a specific flavor of coffee or is it, or how does that work?

Lisa Tate:

Well, I don’t know because I haven’t tried too many other coffees in this region. Because it’s such a new thing, but I will say our coffee absolutely has a different flavor and it has a natural sweetness, which, yeah, it, you don’t even need to put sugar in it. Really really sweet. That’s sweet. And our coffee, the Geisha is known for being like tea, like so very smooth. You won’t taste any of the acid that, you know, normal coffees have and , and it definitely has some floral and tropical undertones depending on which variety you’re getting. So yeah. I mean a good coffee takes you on a kind of an experience. And so you Reta it when it’s warm and it, e, we smell it and we taste it and, and then as it cools, we taste it again and you get a whole different experience on the cool coffee.

Paul Ward:

So how did you get into the coffee game?

Lisa Tate:

Okay. My parents decided to do this before I came onboard. I was a stay at home mom for a while taking care of my kids and working here part-time so they and our branch manager made the decision to try out this coffee, not knowing what I was gonna get myself into. So five years later we developed this whole, whole new business out of it. But yeah, they were just, they really wanted to diversify and try something new I think it’s, it’s been really exciting, you know, trying something new. And when you see that first coffee cherry, I mean, it’s really exciting. There is a funny thing that we had this woman come and she’s a coffee grower in South America and she has 300 acres of coffee. That’s a big area.

 And she came over and she grabbed our cherries and she started squeezing them and she was watching it and there were all these drips coming out of it, cuz the fruit has a lot of water and sugar in it. And I was like, oh my God, what’s wrong with it? You know? Cause I, I was still learning and her eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger and, and finally said, what are you doing? She’s like, well, I’m milking the cherry. I said, what is that? And she said, she said, you, I just got six drips out of this. And I was like, oh, okay. She’s like, I’ve never gotten more than four. Wow. And I think that’s a testament to how healthy our plants are. And she was also amazed because we have fertilizer tanks. And so we get lab samples, we get soil analysis and we get tissue analysis.

Lisa Tate:

So we know exactly what our plants need and we give them the nutrients that they need. And she said, well, we couldn’t, we couldn’t do that because the tanks would be stolen in one night when we are. Oh, wow. So I think that’s one of the things people always ask me, like, how can you just come in here? You know, start something new and be really, you know, have this amazing hobby. And we have some advantages that maybe some other people in other places don’t have, and that we have all the science to back us and we have all this equipment to back us and we farm. That’s what we do too. So. Right. So I think, I think those have all helped us get us where we are

Paul Ward:

Interesting. That’s an interesting comment that she said that if she even had the tanks, they would be stolen. 

Lisa Tate:

Things we don’t have to worry about really thinking thing about.

Paul Ward:

Yeah.

Lisa Tate:

Yeah.

Paul Ward:

Interesting. So what is the name of the coffee? If I wanted to buy a bag of coffee?

Lisa Tate:

Oh, it’s called Filoso and it’s through the California Coffee Collective. Yeah. And actually we, you can’t buy in bags right now, but I would recommend holding off because our packaging is stuck on a ship and it comes with a really specialized glass to drink it out of. Because when you’re talking about coffees at this level,you wanna make sure you’re drinking it properly too, and it’ll come with a recipe as well on how we recommend you brew it and how you drink it.

Paul Ward:

So how do you drink a special coffee? I’d have to ask.

Lisa Tate:

Well, we recommend pour overs. Yeah. Just a normal pour over that, you could learn how to do watching YouTube, if you don’t already do it. Most people who are really into coffee already know how to do a pour over. But yeah. And then drinking it out, the glass, the glass is shaped so that you get the aromas too, that you’re meant to get, and you’re tasting it as it comes in at the right kind of places in your tongue. Interesting. Yeah. It’s I am

Paul Ward:

Drinking the wrong coffee. That’s all I can say. I am drinking the wrong stuff.

Lisa Tate:

This coffee’s not like any coffee that you’ve probably ever tasted. Like it doesn’t need creamer. It doesn’t need flavoring. It doesn’t need sugar. And that’s what makes it special. In fact, I would say that you would ruin it if you, if you do that because you, then you can taste what’s so great about it.

Paul Ward:

Yeah. I gotta taste

Lisa Tate:

So, yeah and the other thing that’s interesting about it is it’s our roaster. So I don’t, I’m not a roaster, but my partners are roasters. And they say roasting, it is unlike any coffee they’ve ever roasted. And they have over a decade worth of roasting experience. And they get coffees from all over the world for their shops. And normally you roast by sound, you hear it crack during the roasting process, you get a first crack and a second crack, but our coffee doesn’t crack. And so they’re having to do it by sight, which is not normal. So we don’t know why it doesn’t crack, but our roasting, it does roast very, very differently than other coffees. So if we were gonna sell our coffee to a roaster, we would definitely have some recommendations on how to get the best.

Paul Ward:

Now with the same bean grown in a different area, not crack, or we, or you’ have stuff now.

Lisa Tate:

No, it, it would crack, it would crack.

Paul Ward:So there’s something about the region.

Lisa Tate:

There’s something about, I don’t know if it’s the region or a farm, but something’s different about it.

Paul Ward:

Interesting. So they’re, they’re, they’re roasting beans from all over the world. And something about the local climate and bean combo. They’re not practicing.

Lisa Tate:

Something’s different. Yep.

Paul Ward:

Interesting. And don’t add cream and sugar.

Lisa Tate:

Don’t ruin it.

Paul Ward:

All right. So we’re in a beautiful spot, Rancho Filoso.

Lisa Tate:

A little windy. 

Paul Ward:

It’s a little windy today. We’re up on the hills. The ocean is off of the distance and you’re surrounded by beautiful avocado trees. Your property was hit by the Thomas fire in 2017.

Lisa Tate:

Yes. We lost about 50 acres of avocados in one night, just blew through. And our coffee trees were young and they were surrounded by avocado trees, but it was amazing because not one single coffee tree burned, even though all the avocado trees around it burned. And they were, there were some that got hot , you know, they got scorched cuz it was really close, but yeah, none of them burned. So interesting. They’re little miracle plants.

Paul Ward:

So Lisa Tate, I want to thank you for being our guest on this edition of farm talk.

Lisa Tate:

Thank you. Thanks for thinking of us. And I love being able to share all of my adventures in coffee.

Paul Ward:

So absolutely. And if anybody else wants to learn more about coffee growing in our region, we will definitely refer them to you and the California Coffee Collective.

Lisa Tate:

Great.

Paul Ward:

And of course we wanna thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store and be sure to tune in next time for another edition of Farm Talk.