By Susan Payne
A health-conscious coffee shop in Santa Monica is stealing hearts.
More than its Matcha teas, Spanish lattes and breakfast favorites, Urth Caffé Heirloom Organic Coffee has created a legacy of health-conscious coffee and sustainable food favorites spanning three decades with incredible growth: nine locations in California, two in Nevada and two overseas in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
For the third consecutive year, the Santa Monica community has voted Urth Caffé Heirloom Organic Coffee as Santa Monica’s Best Coffee Shop.
Urth coffee is set apart by its exclusively harvested heirloom coffee trees that produce the lowest acid coffee in the world. Heirloom coffee possesses superior sweetness, aroma, less acid, and is easier to digest than coffee from conventional, hybridized trees.
After harvest, the coffee is processed with the finest European techniques including picking only ripe cherries and triple hand sorting to find the finest beans.
In the late 80s, Jilla and Shallom Berkman started doing research on how best to follow their passion for coffee and support a healthier environment while giving back to resources. Through research, the Berkmans met Jorge Cebreros, a leading organic coffee agronomist and pioneer in certified organic, sustainable and fair-trade coffee.
“Jorge at that time was the director of an organic, sustainable and fair-trade coffee estate in Chanchamayo, Peru — one of the first of a few certified organic coffee estates in the world. He explained to us that the key to the best quality coffee — and an essential part of a sustainable and biodynamic program — is to plant heirloom coffee seedlings,” Shallom said.
Heirloom coffee seedings have never been genetically modified and originate from and grow wild in the highest altitudes of remote Ethiopian rainforests. Cebreros imported Typica heirloom coffee seedlings to Peru, where the trees grow 5,000 feet above sea level in the Chanchamayo Mountains, the most perfect setting that preserves rainforest and allows cultivation of the finest, lowest acid coffee in the world.
“Jorge taught us that Typica coffee trees grow up to 20 feet tall, require deep shade from the rainforest canopy, and produce superb coffee with the lowest acid content,” Shallom said.
Inspired by Cebreros, Jill and Shallom Berkman cofounded Urth Caffé to start America’s (and perhaps the world’s) first exclusively heirloom organic coffee company in 1989. But the research didn’t stop there.
In 1994, Jilla and Shallom visited and collaborated with the world’s first certified organic coffee estate “Finca Irlanda” in Tapachula, the Chiapas region of Mexico and brought the second source of heirloom organic coffee to Urth Caffé.
“In our quest to inspire other coffee growers in the most pristine rainforests found in the world’s equatorial belt to produce heirloom organic coffee exclusively for Urth Caffé, we began to visit coffee growers in Central and South America, Indonesia and Africa,” Shallom said.
“We have established many relationships directly with these great coffee farmers establishing the Urth Caffé standards of growing exclusively heirloom organic coffee in a sustainable, biodynamic way with premium pay incentives to farmers,” Shallom said. This is why we always say ‘Urth Caffé heirloom organic coffee is the best coffee in the world and healthier for all.’”
