Fire Tongue Farm started in the winter of 2014 as the convergence of two friends’ ideas. Ryan was working in apple and pear orchards in Watsonville and noticing how much fruit wood was being pruned and burned each year in the fields. Wanting to find a use for all this excess wood, he thought he could grow hot peppers and smoke them with the valuable pear and apple wood from local orchards. Meanwhile, Levon had found 8 acres of fallow farm land that he wanted to cultivate. The two of them were college friends from UC Berkeley where they worked together as food managers for the Berkeley Student Cooperative. After graduating, Ryan studied sustainable agriculture at the UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden while Levon apprenticed at Green String Farm in Petaluma. The two met to catch up and talk about their recent projects and the idea for Fire Tongue Farm was born.


We grow and work with other CA growers to offer a wide variety of the highest quality hot peppers for the Bay Area and Central Coast. We offer fresh and dried peppers, but are obsessed with the art of smoked peppers. We are in constant pursuit of the perfect smoked pepper and refining our techniques to extract rich, smoky, complex flavors from our different pepper varieties through an age old smoking process we have upgraded with a few modern technologies. The key ingredients are always the same though: quality chile peppers harvested at full, red ripeness, cured apple and pear wood smoked at low temperatures, and the hot California sunshine to finish them.