Changing Latitudes: Coffee Grows in Santa Barbara and, Someday, May Grow Here {Edible Monterey Bay}

Along with my article about coffee roasting in the Winter 2013 edition of Edible Monterey Bay, there's this piece about Jay Ruskey and his Good Land Organics. Click to read it online: here. It's the second piece down. Keep scrolling!

Changing Latitudes: Coffee Grows in Santa Barbara and, Someday, May Grow Here

by Camilla M. Mann

Jay Ruskey has created a sub-tropical haven of exotic crops at his ranch called Good Land Organics in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara. With the warm, southern orientation of his Condor Ridge Ranch, Ruskey cultivates cherimoyas, dragon fruits, white sapotes and goji berries.

Nine years ago, he also began growing coffee, but he didn’t have high expectations.

“I was skeptical when I saw blossoms,” he says. “Berries followed. And suddenly we had mature red coffee cherries.”

Almost all of the world’s coffee grows between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and until Ruskey began his experiment together with Mark Gaskell of UC Santa Barbara’s Cooperative Extension, the northernmost place that anyone was growing coffee was some 19° latitude to the south. Since then, Ruskey has become the first American farmer outside of Hawaii to sell coffee.

Ruskey and Gaskell are evaluating all aspects of growing coffee in California and testing a dozen varieties of high-quality Arabica coffee plants. Among them is Geisha, an ancient Ethiopian bean prized as a single-origin coffee with a lightly floral aroma; coffee magnate Price Peterson, of Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama, personally transported the plants to Ruskey.

“As with wine, you can’t make a good wine with bad grapes, right? Well, you can’t make a good cup of coffee with inferior beans,” Ruskey says.

Coffee plants normally require moderately warm temperatures and humidity to flourish, and rely on a rainy season typical of the tropics to properly flower and pollinate. Hawaii is the only U.S. state that offers these kinds of conditions.

Still, Good Land’s coffee plants are adapting. Under the protective shade of Ruskey’s avocado trees, Ruskey’s coffee bushes operate on a different growing cycle, with their coffee cherries taking 12 months to mature—longer than anywhere else. Slower maturation means that the bean has more time to darken and develop. Dark red coffee cherries have the highest sugar level, which translates into a better cup of coffee—and indeed Good Land’s coffee has received excellent ratings. But the bushes are continuously producing new berries, and the long-term effects of this lack of a rest period for the plants are unknown.

And there are other challenges to growing a profitable local cup of coffee in California.

“One tree yields 6–7 pounds of ripe cherries, or about 1 pound of roasted coffee beans per year. That’s a lot of picking and processing for a small yield,” Ruskey says.

Still, the value of good coffee has increased—and is rising all the time.

Only a short time ago, Americans were content with unspecified coffee blends. Today, more discerning consumer palates have raised the bar for coffee—and the prices. The Geisha variety, for example, can sell for upwards of $100 per pound; Ruskey is currently selling his Caturra/Typica variety through Good Land’s website for $22 per 5-ounce bag, or about $70 per pound. (If that price isn’t too staggering, place your order and your locally grown coffee will be roasted-to-order.)

Farmers have tried over the years to grow coffee in California and, in fact, coffee was cultivated successfully near Santa Barbara in the 1870s. But coffee pioneers were hindered by the high cost of labor and low productivity of the plants in these temperate regions.

Today, considering the growing interest in specialty coffees and the current ardent appetite for locally grown produce, Ruskey is convinced of the viability of his project and would eventually like to become a coffee wholesaler.

He and Gaskell are organizing a Santa Barbara coffee growers association and are recruiting farmers in other parts of California to join them in their research.

Thus far, the northernmost grower to participate in the research farms in Morro Bay, but Ruskey considers thriving citrus and avocadoes to be a good indicator that a particular area could also support coffee plants. If you farm land where these trees thrive and you’d like to become a part of the coffee research trials, Ruskey would love to hear from you.

- CMM

Bean to Cup: Coffee is getting a lot more local {Edible Monterey Bay}

My article about coffee roasting just came out in the Winter 2013 edition of Edible Monterey Bay. Click to read it online: here. It's the DIY column for the issue.

Bean to Cup: Coffee is getting a lot more local

by Camilla M. Mann

Until the late 19th century, people commonly roasted their own coffee beans. But eventually, home roasting was eclipsed by the convenience culture that pervades much of our society.

Given that there are only two elements to transforming raw green coffee beans into ready-to-grind coffee, I’m shocked that until this year I’d never met anyone who roasted his or her own beans at home.

That changed when a tip led me to Seven Bridges Cooperative in Santa Cruz. After witnessing their vast array of green coffee beans, home coffee roasting equipment and coffee books, it became clear that this art is enjoying a revival among local home brewers.

Seven Bridges’ Andrew Whitman offered to give me a coffee roasting lesson, demonstrating the process with a small hot-air roaster that reminded me of a tiny hot-air popcorn popper. Same idea. The two elements for roasting coffee beans: heat and agitation.

I have always gravitated toward a dark roast because that’s what I bought when I started drinking coffee—more to keep me awake than because I truly enjoyed the taste.

But it turns out that a dark roast homogenizes the flavor of the beans, muting their distinct flavors. On the other hand, a light- to-medium roast better retains the flavor profile of a particular bean cultivar.

Because the roast Andrew and I made was uneven, it afforded us the opportunity to taste the same bean, a Nicaraguan Segovia, at different stages of roasting. The lightest bean tasted nutty, like a hazelnut. The medium bean still had some nut, but verged on caramel—the delicate sweetness of a crème brulée. The dark bean tasted how I’ve always described coffee: astringent, potent and burnt.

Roasting is fun and can be as effortless or as complicated as you want to make it. The basic process is simple: take green coffee beans and roast them until they are brown. There are many ways to do it, from using specially designed appliances to simple pan-roasting, to repurposing a hot-air popcorn popper. At home, I went old school and used a skillet, but I’m thinking about requisitioning my son’s hot-air popper for a trial run.

First, you need green coffee beans. Seven Bridges Cooperative offers a multitude of beans that you can buy in bulk for between $7 and $9 per pound. All their beans—ranging from Bolivian Cenaproc to Papua New Guinean Enorga—are high-grade Arabica coffees and are certified fair trade and organic. Certain local, artisanal coffee roasters, like Davenport’s Alta Organic Coffee and Tea, also offer green beans; I purchased some green Guatemalan beans at Acme Coffee Roasting Co. in Seaside for $7 a pound. Good Land Organics of Goleta will also soon start selling its Central Coast-grown beans in green form.

If using a skillet, fill with just enough green beans to cover the bottom of the pan in a single layer—no overlapping. Then, as the pan and beans heat, agitate them, flipping the beans as you would turn roasting potatoes.

Roasting time varies depending on the method. Convection roasting, using a dedicated home coffee roaster, might take 5–15 minutes, depending on your desired roast. Conduction roasting, using a skillet, might take as long as 20 minutes. To decide when your beans are done, Whitman says, use multiple senses. You can look at the color of the beans. You can listen to the beans—you’ll hear a first crack and, if you decide to roast them that long, a second crack. And you can smell them.

The lighter the roast, the less oil that has been released and burned. Also, the lighter the roast, the more caffeine that is retained.

Will I do this again?

Home roasting affords you the ultimate in quality control and freshness. It’s also quick and easy—I only set off the smoke alarm twice.

I will definitely be roasting my own beans from now on since the difference in flavor and freshness is palpable. Cost-wise, it’s also much more affordable than buying pre-roasted beans. (The last bag of beans I purchased at Peet’s cost me twice as much as the green beans I bought for roasting.)

When asked for his favorite method for brewing his home-roast, Whitman says French press. And he’s adamant on how to take it: Black. No milk. No sugar. That way, you can taste the nuances, he says.

He is right. I have never had a better cup of coffee.

Camilla M. Mann is a food writer, photographer, adventurer and passionate cook. She blogs at culinary-adventures-with-cam.blogspot.com and lives in Monterey.

Seven Bridges Cooperative • 325A River St., Santa Cruz 831.454.9665 • www.breworganic.com

DIY: Bee Yourself {Edible Monterey Bay Feature}

I shared my glee at getting my first cover earlier, but here's the accompanying story...in Edible Monterey Bay's Summer 2013 issue.

Bee Yourself

Honey, anarchy, and saving the world, one hive at a time

Story and Photos by Camilla M. Mann 

The do-it-yourself culture is booming, and I don’t just mean making your own invitations or holiday wreaths. I mean DIY in the sense of reskilling. The trend is a revival of skills that were once commonplace, like raising chickens, making clothes and foraging for edible plants. It’s a throwback to a more self-sufficient time by planting gardens, canning vegetables, making jam, brewing beer and keeping bees. While some people are doing these things as a way to combat tough economic times, others are acquiring knowledge to improve their quality of life, preserve the environment—and have fun!

Take backyard beekeeping. It may seem a recent phenomenon but its history began centuries ago. There are rock paintings in both Spain and India from the Mesolithic era (10,000–5,000 BC) that depict hunters who collected honey made by wild bees. Honey is mentioned in both Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform texts.

Eventually, people began to domesticate bees, transferring the wild hives into hollowed out logs, wooden boxes and pottery vessels, and the honey produced by these early beekeepers became a highly prized form of currency or tribute. Sealed pots of honey have been recovered from pharaohs’ tombs, including Tutankhamun’s, for example, and during the 11th century, German peasants paid their feudal lords in honey and beeswax.

The records of ancient Rome and Greece give us a glimpse into the lives of bees and beekeeping. Virgil kept bees. Pliny the Elder extensively documented how Romans crafted hives from cork, oak bark or fennel stems in his Natural History: The Selection. Pliny wrote of ancient observation hives built by the Romans with transparent sides made of thinly sliced, highly polished horn. (Today observation hives have walls made of glass.)

Thanks to a tip from Betty Kasson, a hobbyist beekeeper in Carmel Valley, I attended a gathering of the Anarchist Bee Collective, a beekeepers’ group that meets monthly to share information, opportunities and experiences over breakfast. They aren’t “anarchist” in the militant, politically activist way. Instead, they use the term literally. In Latin, anarchia means “without a ruler,” and that is what they are—beekeepers who get together without bothering with rules or any real structure. One secondary definition of anarchy is to act without instructions or permission, possessing the impulse to do it oneself. In that sense, anarchists are the ultimate DIYers.

At the Saturday morning breakfast gathering I attended, the ABC beekeepers hailed from Prunedale to Pebble Beach. As forks clinked against plates, people chatted about bees. I sat with Denise Gluhan, from Aromas, who characterizes herself as a novice. She maintains three hives and has been keeping bees for about a year. Denise is allergic to bees. “Why would you put yourself in the position of being stung if you could go into anaphylactic shock?!” I asked, incredulous. She assured me that she carries an epinephrine pen, but that she has never had to use it. While she can’t get any of the wax on her or she’ll react adversely, she can—and does— enjoy the honey that her bees produce.

At the other end of the beekeeping spectrum was Peter Eichorn, from Country Flat Farm in Palo Colorado, who has been keeping bees and selling honey since 1965. Peter refers to himself as “The Honey Guy,” stating that he’s in it for the honey, not bee conservation. “He says that,” said a woman who has taken one of Peter’s workshops, “but I’ve seen him cry over losing a queen.” Peter instructed the ABC on how to use yarrow fronds dipped in mineral oil as natural mite abatement.

No matter the experience of the bee-keeper, I found that each one I met was motivated at least in part by a desire to help support the bee population. The idea of bee- keepers saving the world might sound hyperbolic, but our food supply relies on bees and their ability to pollinate plants. Their decimation in numbers by colony collapse disorder (CCD)—which causes adult bees to abruptly abandon their hives, leaving the young to die—is alarming. In recent years many beekeepers around the country have lost about of third of their bees each winter to CCD; this past winter, it was widely reported that losses spiked to as much as 50%. 

This is a far reaching problem, because as much as a third of the food we eat can’t be produced without pollination by bees. A report issued jointly by the United States Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in May noted that revenue from crops that rely on bees for pollination totals $20 to $30 billion annually, making it “imperative” that honey bee survival rates be increased in order “to meet the demands of U.S. agriculture for pollination and thus ensure…food security.”

Here’s one statistic I heard at a workshop led by Ed, a beekeeper from Livermore, who rents his bees to farmers for pollination: Without bees, an acre of almond trees would produce 50 to 60 pounds of almonds. With two bee hives in place in that same orchard, production soars to about 3,000 pounds! At the time of the workshop, Ed’s bees were in the Central Valley—in an almond orchard.

Bees pollinate plants accidentally. While scooping up nectar at the base of flower petals, bees inadvertently rub against flower stamens and pollen sticks to them. As the bees move between blossoms, pollen transfers from one flower to the next. Some pollen returns with the bee to the colony.

A bee colony is considered a superorganism. All of the bees in a hive are part of a highly specialized division of labor, working toward the singular goal of maintaining their hive. To that end, there is one queen whose sole purpose is to lay eggs—up to 3,000 daily. Drones are the only males in the hive and their role is also remarkably simple—to mate with the queen. Worker bees are nonreproducing females who, throughout their brief lifetimes, perform all of the rest of the work required to keep the hive functioning and producing honey.

Ed owns and operates Gerard’Z Honeybees, named for his grandfather, who introduced him to beekeeping when he was 9 years old. At the time, tending the bees was a dreaded chore. Ed admits, “I grudgingly helped my grandfather, but I would rather have been playing baseball.”

Today, Ed not only tends bees, but he also is working to save them. “Bees are in real trouble now, with diseases and colony collapse disorder.” 

The USDA and EPA report issued in May blamed CCD on an interrelated series of factors including parasites, pesticides, disease, loss of genetic diversity and decline a in nutritious, diverse bee forage.

After years of mystery (CCD was first noticed in 2006), so much evidence now points in particular to a relatively new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids—a systemic pesticide that is used to treat seed prior to planting and is absorbed into plants’ vascular systems—that in March, a group of beekeepers and environmental organizations together filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court against the EPA, accusing it of failure to protect pollinators from dangerous pesticides like neonicotinoids. And on April 29, the European Union imposed an emergency two-year ban on the use of neonicotinoids across all of Europe.

The USDA/EPA report stated that pesticides are a “primary” concern but it called for further research and recommended no such immediate bans to protect the bee population in the meantime.

For ordinary citizens like us, Ed says the four basic pillars for saving bees are to grow nectar-rich and pollen-rich flowers for bees, provide them with homes like beehives, avoid using pesticides and spread the word. (See more about what you can do in related story, p. 37.) Ed spreads the word by leading work- shops and encouraging people to keep bees wherever they live. “You don’t have to live out in the country to have a beehive,” he asserts. “An urban environment is perfect. There’s a diversity of plants to forage around in the city. Just look in your yard and your neighbor’s yard.”

And aside from saving the bees, bee-keeping of course also rewards with honey—that delicious “food of the Gods,” as the Greek philosopher Porphyry called it, which is also highly nutritious and medicinal, and adds extended shelf-life and moistness to the foods to which it is added.

Honey starts as the flower nectar that worker bees slurp up and store in their honey stomachs until they return to the hive. A bee will forage between three to four miles from the hive in search of food and might visit 100–1,000 flowers to get her fill.

Once foraging bees return to the hive, they pass the nectar to other worker bees whose digestive enzymes change the com- position of the nectar, breaking down the complex sugars into simple sugars. These bees in turn regurgitate the digested nectar into the honeycombs. At this point the nectar still has fairly high water content, so other worker bees fan the nectar with their wings, producing a draft that evaporates the excess liquid. As the water evaporates, the nectar transforms into the thick, sweet liquid we recognize as honey. Once the honey reaches proper viscosity, the bees cap the cells with wax to store it until needed.

Beekeepers can encourage overproduction of honey within their hives and then harvest the excess without endangering the bees. In the first year, a beekeeper shouldn’t expect any honey from the hive, but in later years, hives can generate from 1⁄2 gallon to 10 gallons.

The color and flavor of honey varies from hive to hive, based on the type of flower nectar collected by the bees. When I visited Betty, she pulled out a collection of honeys to taste. As she travels she chats with beekeepers, frequents local markets and carries her favorite honeys home. We tasted a mahogany-hued honey from Kauai that tasted like coffee, honey reminiscent of molasses from the Fijian mountains and one from the herb garden at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa that looked amber and had a hint of rosemary. We ended with Betty’s own honey, a delicate and delicious variety that reflects the mix of wild and cultivated flowers on which the bees feast.

I never got to the monthly Wednesday night meeting of our region’s other bee- keeping group, the Santa Cruz Beekeepers Guild. But when I called Mountain Feed and Farm Supply in Ben Lomond (our area’s only local source for beekeeping equipment) to inquire about beekeeping gear, Karla DeLong, the guild’s generous and enthusiastic leader, answered the phone—and all of my questions. The guild, like the ABC, is an informal one that revolves around its monthly meetings, but also provides other member services, such as matching veteran beekeeping mentors with newbies like me.

In the realm of do-it-yourself, beekeeping can seem daunting—whether or not you’re allergic to bees. But knowing about local groups like the ABC and the Santa Cruz Beekeepers Guild, as well as the many classes that are taught locally, it’s not hard to see why so many people are embracing it. And that’s good news for our bees.

Camilla M. Mann is a food writer, photographer, adventurer and passionate cook. She blogs at www.culinary-adventures-with-cam.blogspot.com/ and lives in Monterey.