At the Excelsa Cafe in Ocean Beach, San Diego. All images courtesy of Excelsa Coffee Company.
While most specialty coffee shops promote their rarefied high-end arabica coffees, a new coffee business in San Diego called Excelsa Coffee Company is promoting a separate species altogether.
The company just opened the Excelsa Cafe in the heart of Ocean Beach, offering tastes of excelsa coffee, a variety of the liberica coffee species that — unlike arabica or robusta — has not been widely commercialized in the United States.
The cafe is the latest in a series of excelsa awareness initiatives undertaken by the San Diego company. In addition to brewing freshly roasted excelsa, the company is cultivating excelsa plants through its own farm in Nicaragua, while creating a nonprofit global network for excelsa production.
Like the commercialization of excelsa itself, the new coffee bar is being presented as something of a work in progress.
On the one dry-walled area of its stud-bare walls, photos show scenes of excelsa production and processing on coffee farms. From the opposite wall and under exposed wooden rafters, jute coffee sacks hang. In the center of the 350-square-foot room stands the coffee counter, where hot and cold brews are served.
“Think of stepping into a palapa hut in Nicaragua, to be at the very source of something special and original,” Excelsa Coffee Co-Founder Olin Patterson told Daily Coffee News. “The Excelsa Cafe is unfinished because the story of the bean is unfinished, and it is up to the customer to be a part of the story in telling us how to bring the excelsa bean to the world.”
Hot and cold-brewed excelsa coffees are prepared on site with a Ground Control brewing system after roasting in Los Angeles by Ron Dizon, founder of Teofilo Coffee.
“In a side-by-side comparison, generally speaking, we find that excelsa coffee has a very distinct flavor profile,” Patterson told DCN. “It has little to no bitterness. It is likely to have lower caffeine, naturally. It is likely to be naturally harvested and cultivated, and to have a complex flavor profile, including being bright, tart and fruity.”
Excelsa Coffee’s current retail offerings online and at the San Diego shop are sourced from producers in Vietnam and the Philippines. The approximately 1,700 excelsa coffee trees on the company’s own farm in Nicaragua are not yet mature. The company also plans to eventually source coffee from South Sudan.
“Vietnam and Philippines both provide sufficient inventory for us at the moment and we have worked closely with both supplier farms to have a quality of beans that we are confident are worthy of going to market, and the quality will only improve,” Patterson said.
Excelsa (known as Coffea excelsa or Coffea liberica var. dewevre) has shown greater resistance to heat and drought thanks to its relatively strong roots, wide trunk and thick leaves. These attributes make it suitable for growing in areas not suitable for robusta and arabica, which combined represent more than 99% of the world’s commercialized coffee. Excelsa also has proven more resistant to pests and common plant diseases.
The variety grows natively in South Sudan, Central African Republic, Uganda and other African countries, while commercial cultivation occurs mainly in Indonesia, India and Vietnam.
“We found meaningful sources of excelsa in Southeast Asia and Africa, but wanted to see if it could grow successfully in the Americas, both to provide a viable opportunity for farmers and to be able to source coffee closer to the USA market,” said Patterson.
A consumer packaged goods expert who has been involved in ingredients sourcing for a number of specialty foods, Patterson co-founded Excelsa Coffee in 2023 with Michael Mazzotta, a business and real estate professional who first tried excelsa more than a decade ago and was intrigued by its potential as a lower-caffeine and resilient alternative to traditional coffees.
“We formed the company after realizing this bean could provide a viable way for farmers around the world to grow a sustainable crop, and to fill a gap in the consumer market for a lower caffeinated, bitterness-free, bright flavored, full front-to-back palate cup of coffee,” Patterson said. “We began sourcing it together, including launching our own farm in Nicaragua to help provide research and resources for other farmers who wanted to grow excelsa.”
Last year the team launched the International Excelsa Coffee Organization (IECO), a nonprofit for information and resources such as DNA fingerprinting, sensory analysis and research, species validation and farm accreditation.
As the organization grows, general managers will be appointed to oversee membership and observe best practices in each country and then share these insights on the website in support of farmers everywhere, the group said.
“We cannot find established protocols for growing excelsa, so our efforts with the IECO is to establish protocols and guidelines on a grassroots level to support the growth of the excelsa industry,” said Patterson. “We are near breaking ground on new farms with new leadership in other countries like Brazil, USA, Honduras and Ethiopia.”
At the San Diego cafe, Patterson said, success will be measured more by growing awareness and appreciation than in dollars and cents.
“Our cafe is not intended to be an economic driver for our business, but a research and development lab to give us real time feedback from the customer,” Patterson said. “Come visit us, and we will intentionally try to take 40 minutes of your time sharing about the excelsa bean.”
Excelsa Cafe is located at 1855 Sunset Cliffs Blvd. in San Diego. Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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