About Us

We will use our deep experience in coffee to provide you special coffees. Your support means a lot as we find our footing!

Founders of Rumbling Rock Coffee

Rumbling Rock co-founder Dr. Ximena sitting on a research farm

Dr. María Ximena Anleu Gil is a plant biologist in UC Davis where she researches seed plant reproduction. In addition to her scientific work, Ximena serves as the elected vice-president of a union representing 48,000 academic workers at the University of California. Ximena is from Guatemala with coffee trees behind her home. Her grandpa was a coffee farmer. Ximena loves drinking coffee.

A table has 9 sets of 6 cups of coffee for tasting. Peter bends to smell one of the cups.

Dr. Peter Lynagh was a nomadic teenage barista. Peter's expertise exponentially deepened while a master roaster and QC for George Howell. Peter helped develop some of the highest scoring coffees in the world, such as the beans used in winning the World Barista Championship, and other special coffees. Afterwards, Peter improved methods for analyzing plants as a UC Davis Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellow before co-founding Rumbling Rock. Peter continues to work on coffee improvement and sustainability.

(photo from www.nytimes.com)

Sourcing

Great coffee sourcing is challenging. It's about more than price (farmers of our coffees are paid at least 1.5X the Fair Trade minimum, and for many of our coffees we are aiming for much higher). Do we do all of our coffee sourcing ourselves? No, we happily work with collaborators as appropriate. At the time of our grand opening (late 2026) we are laying groundwork for 3 sourcing channels:

Fine Traditional Channels:

1: Collaborators at origin help source, using guidelines such as lack of bias.

2: Experienced importers, who have their own sourcing networks.

Novel channel:

3: Based on evidence, for example signs of regenerative farming, we may approach specific farms ourselves.

Any of these 3 channels can lead to coffees that we taste and decide to offer you.

Locations

We don't have a public facing location... yet.