Coffee grown in San Diego County is no longer a novelty, but coffee that is grown, processed, and roasted here is still rare. The Sunset Grove, a certified organic Escondido coffee farm, is doing all three.
Fabio and Maria took over the property in 2020. It was already a working avocado farm with roughly 1,200 trees, and rather than clear anything out, they started planting coffee throughout the existing orchard and using the avocado canopy as natural shade. Five years later, the first lot has already come off the farm and sold out, with more releases close behind.
I drove up to walk the farm with them, see the trees, and understand how a property at 470 meters above sea level in Escondido is producing coffee with real complexity. Here is what I learned.
The decision not to tear anything out is the whole story of this farm. When Fabio and Maria took over in 2020, the avocado orchard was already established and productive. Coffee went in underneath and between it.
That choice solved a problem most new coffee farms spend years and a lot of money engineering around. Coffee wants shade, especially young coffee, and it wants protection from wind. An avocado canopy provides both. The mature trees filter the light and break the wind coming across the property, so the coffee underneath is never fully exposed.
It also means the farm is never a monoculture. Fabio and Maria are deliberate about what else goes in the ground around the coffee, choosing crops based on what they contribute: soil nutrients, additional shading, or pest control. Nothing is planted just to fill space. The farm is certified organic, so there is no chemical shortcut available when something goes wrong, and the planting plan has to do that work instead.
The question anyone familiar with coffee asks about a San Diego farm is elevation. Most of the coffee we drink comes from 1,400 to 2,000 meters and above, where altitude keeps temperatures mild and creates the day to night swing that slows cherry maturation. Sunset Grove sits at roughly 470 meters, which on paper sounds far too low.
Fabio's explanation is that elevation is a proxy, not the actual mechanism. What coffee needs is a mild climate with a meaningful temperature drop at night, and this part of California delivers that drop without altitude. Days are warm but not punishing, nights cool off hard, and the result mimics conditions you would normally have to climb a mountain in the tropics to find. The cherries take their time, and the complexity follows.
This matches what other California growers have found. It is the same principle behind the farms in FRINJ Coffee's network, several of which sit in North County at even lower elevations. High latitude plus coastal influence is doing the work that altitude does everywhere else.
After five years of growing, the first coffee to go out to the public was a honey processed Gesha. It has already sold out, which tells you something about how much people were waiting for it. It was also a notable place to start. Gesha is the variety that put Panama on the map and remains one of the most sought after and most difficult cultivars to grow well, and honey processing leaves some of the fruit mucilage on the bean during drying to build sweetness and body.
More lots are close behind and should be available to order soon. Catuai is coming, and both natural and washed versions are in the pipeline, which will give drinkers a chance to taste the same farm through different processing lenses. For a new origin, that kind of side by side is genuinely useful. It separates what the land is contributing from what the processing is contributing.
A portion of the first lot is going to two other roasters who will sell it under their own labels. Everything else, Fabio and Maria are roasting and packaging themselves. That is the part that makes this farm unusual even among California growers. Plenty of farms grow cherry and send it elsewhere to be milled and roasted. Here the entire chain, from the tree to the bag, happens on one property in San Diego County.
Growing the coffee is only the first third of the job. What makes Sunset Grove unusual is that the other two thirds happen on the same property. Cherries come off the trees and go straight into fermentation on site, in a setup built around stainless fermenters and food-grade barrels rather than anything industrial. For a farm this size, that is an advantage. Small volumes mean each lot can be watched closely instead of being blended into something larger.
From there the coffee moves to raised drying beds under shade cloth, where it gets spread out and turned by hand. Drying is where honey and natural lots are won or lost. Too fast and the cup goes flat and papery, too slow or too humid and fermentation keeps going until it turns into defect. Doing it by hand on a small number of beds means they can actually control the variable instead of hoping for the best.
Then they roast it, also on site. Most farms anywhere in the world hand the green coffee off at this point and never find out what a roaster does with it. Fabio and Maria make every one of those calls themselves, which means the feedback loop from the tree to the cup closes on a single property in Escondido. When something in the cup is off, they can trace it all the way back.
Growing coffee in Southern California is expensive, and Fabio and Maria are direct about why. Labor and water are the two largest cost drivers, and neither has an obvious path to getting cheaper. California agricultural labor is priced at California rates, and water in San Diego County is both expensive and tightly managed.
That reality shapes what a farm like this can be. Sunset Grove is not going to compete on price with a commodity origin, and it is not trying to. The approach is to make the coffee good enough that the price makes sense, which means being precise about every input: what gets planted, how the shade is managed, when the cherries come off the tree, and how the lots are processed and roasted.
The plan for growth is propagation rather than acquisition. Fabio and Maria intend to propagate more coffee plants from what is already thriving on the property and expand production that way, working within the land they have instead of buying more of it.
San Diego has a strong roasting scene and a growing number of cafes and roasters pouring world class coffee from Ethiopia, Colombia, and Panama. What it has not had much of is coffee that is entirely local, where the people who grew the cherry are the same people who roasted the bean.
Fabio and Maria told me that every year they have seen improvements, and that the goal is to produce some of the best coffee in Southern California. After walking the farm, that reads less like ambition and more like a project plan. The trees are maturing, the processing is getting more refined, and the first lot sold out before most people in San Diego knew it existed.
The honey Gesha is gone, but the next lots should be available to order soon. If you want to taste coffee that was grown, processed, and roasted inside San Diego County, this is the most direct way to do it. Watch thesunsetgrove.com and follow @thesunsetgrove for release announcements, and check their listing in our directory for current details.
For more on where to drink and buy coffee around the county, browse the San Diego coffee map, the best coffee in Escondido, or our guide to the best coffee in San Diego.