CUTTING-EDGE AND WILDLY EXPERIMENTAL COFFEES ARE COMING OUT OF THIS SACRAMENTO ROASTERY
If you’re a big-time coffee nerd, you need to taste the cutting edge of what’s possible in the cup, and you’re likely well aware of that fact. But some may not realize that the best place to do that might just be Sacramento, where one roaster rides the edge of what coffee in the United States can look like, showcasing what’s possible before coffee even makes it to this country. Opal Coffee Club, an offshoot of one of the city’s finest specialty roasters Camellia Coffee, is the tip of that spear. Think of it as a buyer’s club within the Camellia business, though technically it’s a separate business entity.
Co-fermenting coffee, meaning introducing other strains of micro-organisms such as Japan’s lovely koji mold, is perhaps the most It Girl coffee-making process in the game right now. There’s a space-age funkiness to, say, a chili co-fermented coffee that could summon David Bowie back to planet Earth. These are black coffees with insane flavors, more than the pleasant (and much-sought after) blueberry notes of a single-origin Ethiopian. They’re coffees that elicit surprise and delight even for longtime specialty fans; Para Llevar’s Nathan Zack once described a watermelon co-ferment espresso at Coffee Movement as a jolly rancher.
Camila Yuan, Camelia’s director of coffee and roasting, is one of the main minds behind Opal and craves these bold, specific coffees. Opal sells micro-lots, sort of like small-batch winemaking, which highlight techniques considered uncommon in the coffee market. All the coffees at this spin-off are way out of the box. “There are so many coffees in the world and so many ways to produce it,” Yuan says. “Families that have been on the ag[riculture] side for generations. Younger generations are really pushing the boundaries on production and processing.”
The club offers rotating coffees from emerging markets, such as a Guatemalan coffee inoculated with pineapple yeast. It’s anaerobic-processed, deprived of oxygen to create crazy chemical reactions and flavors. That pineapple yeast gets added to a batch of coffee, both then get pushed into an oxygen-deprived fermentation tank, and the result is an electrifying black coffee meant for the nerds, the purists. “It’s funky and weird, but it’s still a balanced coffee,” Yuan says. “That’s hard to achieve.”
Opal under the Camelia umbrella is new but may be an inevitable outgrowth of the business’s trajectory. Sacramento coffee veterans Ryan Harden and Robert Watson founded Camelia in 2016, opening a cafe in the WAL building on R Street in downtown in 2022. Yuan started her current role in March 2023 after a decade in the same shops where Harden and Watson workeds, the whole city percolating further and further as a food and drink destination. When Yuan started, she says she could count on one hand how many specialty coffee shops there were to visit. These days, she says it would take both hands — that’s progress. Plus, there are multi-roaster cafes and even more mom-and-pop shops.
They might not be selling the coffees Opal does, but as the city keeps growing and growing it’s folks like Yuan who keep the lantern lit for the scene’s future. As long as the business keeps connecting with farmers who are pushing the boundaries, the roasts should get weirder and more elegant at the same time. That Guatemalan coffee, for instance, is called Concepion Buena Vista, and it’s farmed and produced by Eddie and David Solano. They’re third-generation coffee farmers, but the former is also a researcher and engineer while the latter is a three-time Guatemalan World Champion Barista. “They have young thinking around coffee and what it means for them,” Yuan says. “The coffee scene in Sac is cool. It’s very exciting seeing how it’s developed and where it’s going.”