$35 for a cup of coffee? But itâs locally grown by Grammy winner Jason Mraz

The release of Mrazâs Geisha varietal, being sold at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, is the first locally grown coffee to be made available to San Diego consumers
Itâs not every day youâd shell out $35 for a cup of coffee â OK, itâs locally grown â nor is it an everyday occasion where youâd sidle up to the coffee bar and your barista is a Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter.
But here it was, Saturday morning, at the La Jolla location of Bird Rock Coffee Roasters where performer and farmer Jason Mraz was executing a precisely timed pour-over of his first commercial release of a coffee varietal grown at the 18-acre Mraz Family Farms in Oceanside.
âWill you be taking this to go?â Mraz, wearing a gray chefâs apron and baseball cap, asked one of his first customers.
âLet it cool a little,â he advised Stephanie Brooks of Bird Rock, who happened to be at the La Jolla store for her weekly Saturday outing with her brother and rescue terrier.
âItâs really smooth,â she responded.
A clearly pleased Mraz responded, âAh, thatâs the goal, with very little aftertaste.â

The occasion for Saturdayâs celebrity pour-over was the retail sale of the first-ever San Diego-grown coffee to local consumers. Mrazâs farm, which has long grown avocados, is now moving more into coffee, with about 8 acres of the land devoted to 15 varietals.
The caffeinated star of the Bird Rock debut was the decades-old Geisha coffee, a rare varietal that commands high prices around the world â even when it isnât grown by a celebrity.
Geisha, also called Gesha, originated in Ethiopia but now is being grown for the first time in San Diego County, with the help of Santa Barbara County-based Frinj Coffee.
Today, most of the worldâs coffee beans are grown on mountains in equatorial countries like Ethiopia, Costa Rica and Colombia.
Bird Rock Coffee Roasters co-owner Jeff Taylor bought 15 pounds of the beans and was selling, in addition to cups of the brewed coffee, 4-ounce containers of the washed beans for $199. On the packages, the flavor notes are described as reminiscent of jasmine tea, key lime pie, elderflower and almond brittle.
The coffee was available Saturday at all six Bird Rock locations. Taylor expected the coffee to sell out by Sunday evening.
âIâve been waiting for this all week,â said Ashley Prevo, a 25-year-old teacher from Pacific Beach who had just invested $199 for the package of Geisha coffee. âItâs the first San Diego-grown coffee and Iâm really into whatâs going on with the climate now, and the regions where coffee is grown are having hard time with the climate so I wanted to invest in keeping coffee alive in a more local, sustainable way.â
Even better was Mrazâs surprise appearance, she conceded.
âI didnât know heâd be here,â she said. âI was like, oh wow, thatâs awesome and now I want to talk to him more about his coffee than his music.â
Also star-struck was Cory Suarez of East County, although a little more by the coffee than Mraz. (âCoffee snob is what my friends call me,â he confessed). As he picked up his just brewed cup of coffee from Mraz, he whispered to him, âWe played one of your songs for the first dance at our wedding.â
Suarez, 37, who already had purchased a package of the Geisha coffee online, saw on Instagram that Mraz was going to be at the La Jolla store and decided to stop by to taste a brew of what he had already purchased.
âItâs pretty rare to find California-grown coffee and I like to support local coffee shops and growers,â said Suarez, a software salesman. âThat flavor profile is a little rare â that elderflower and almond brittle. Or some of that may be the reality of Jason doing the pour-over. Itâs not every day a singer and coffee grower does the pour-over for you. Itâs a special treat.â
Not everyone, though, was rushing to the cash register to purchase the pricey cups. Most were picking up their regular iced coffees and lattes, but Mraz gets that.
âFor the person who usually pays $2.50 a cup, weâre not asking that person to pay this,â said Mraz, who is planning to grow more batches of Geisha coffee. âIâm hoping people are coming in today because they have a relationship with coffee, whether thatâs through the coffee shop culture, which brings us all together to talk about current events or the arts while we sip on this invigorating, refined beverage, or youâre there to do your personal work or youâre here because youâre a climate activist and now youâre finally going to purchase coffee locally.
âCoffeeâs one of the most global acts we do because most of the time weâre drinking coffee grown in a different country thatâs imported to us.â
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