Vedder Ranch California Gesha | FRINJ Coffee

FRINJ Coffee is a company pioneering a new terroir for specialty coffee in California. The company, founded in 2017, is a continuation of the work of visionary farmer Jay Ruskey, who planted the first commercial coffee trees in California in 2002. Today it works with a network of over 40 farms that stretch from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. This coffee was received and processed at FRINJ’s post-harvest mill in Ventura, CA.

Vedder Ranch is a farm in the foothills above Carpinteria, a classic California beach town in Santa Barbara County. The farm, like all California coffee farms, is just 130 MASL, close to sea level, an altitude that would be untenable for high-quality coffee production in the tropics. This farm however is not in the tropics, it is located at 34°N latitude, which puts it a full 10.5 degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer. Low elevations at this latitude, combined with Carpinteria’s coastal microclimate, create diurnal temperature fluctuations that reach the high 80s during the day and low 50s during the evening—conditions similar to high-elevation coffee farms in the tropics. In California, cherries ripen slowly, over the course of 10 months, which produces high sugar content and complexity that yield cups that rival the world’s high-altitude origins.