The Road to Origin: Part 1

As a coffee roaster & cafe owner, to say that our origin trip to Colombia has been a dream of mine would be an understatement. When Sarah & I first started talking about starting a coffee shop, years before having a name or even having roasted our first 2 kilo batch of coffee in our garage, we had dreams of visiting faraway lands where coffee was grown. It seemed as though each cup of coffee would take us away to an exotic place on earth in a culture different than our own... but it was just for a moment & only in our dreams. 

When we started Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters, we had plans to build relationships with the people who grew & cared for the coffee we were serving. We would read about how hard it is to grow & harvest exceptional coffee & we believed that the people who grew the product we were using were vital to the coffee loving community we found ourselves in & that we should do the best we could to meet & grow in friendships with those who were providing us with this wonderful product we get to roast & share with our local community. Who knew that it would take so long for us to finally be able to make this dream a reality?!!! 

To give a little background, in March of 2020, Sarah & I were supposed to visit some farms of friends in Central America that we have made over the years since we opened our shops. In fact, we were planning on visiting our friend’s farm in El Salvador as well setting up some experimental processing experiments with barrels out there. Then from there we were going to head to Guatemala to visit our other friends whom we had been buying coffee from since our garage days. We had rushed our passport renewals so we could hit the timing correctly, pulling the trip together after deciding we had enough cash flow & shop stability to finally visit the farms we’d been dreaming of visiting. But the world had different plans at the time. We had just heard about Covid for a little over a week & we decided it probably wouldn’t be wise to leave because it seemed a lot bigger of a situation than we had originally thought. So we decided to delay our trip…& thankfully we had. The day we were supposed to fly from El Salvador to Guatemala is the day the US closed borders for incoming travel from outside the USA. Had we gone, we would’ve been stuck outside of the US for who knows how long, with our kids in the US at their grandparents house & learning about in-home schooling. Our dream has been delayed. 

While our travels to origin had been limited, in May of 2020, we somehow met a farmer from Colombia without leaving our roastery! 

Andrew & I had been working what had become a normal Covid day at Oxnard one weekday. At this time it was mainly Andrew & me who would open & close the cafe alongside of about three other employees during the first four to five months of Covid. When I would finish my bar shift, I would jump into roasting for our shops & the only 2 shops who were still open & using our coffee at this point of covid. This weekday, a man named Pedro approached us and asked if we’d be interested in his friends’ coffee. We said yes, sure, we’d check it out & expected him to just share an email or phone number or maybe a small sample of coffee. To be honest, I was not expecting much as Sarah & I have been asked to taste coffees in the past that were unfortunately not at the level coffee has to be at to be considered specialty coffee, which is what we roast & use at Ragamuffin. 

Pedro invited me outside & said he had them in his trunk. I laughed & said I’d be out there in a moment. It felt surreal, because at this time, we were one of a few places open in the Collection, there was maybe 30-40 people we had seen all day & we hadn’t seen anyone outside of the Annex in quite a while…hours for sure. I had just finished roasting & was bagging coffee, wearing my Covid bandana across my face…& now, here I was walking to a trunk of an SUV of a complete stranger to check out some coffee from a country over 3,000 miles away…who knew what lay in store. 

When I got to the car, I could see that these coffees were going to be worth us sampling. I’d always heard stories of seeming folklore about a roaster meeting some amazing farmer who just happened to stop by the roastery while visiting the city the roaster was in. In this moment, I realized that could be my story. In the trunk sat two bags, each one from a different farm in Colombia. They had great designs on the outside, with markings accurately describing a current crop year & the traceable info showing where the coffee inside came from. Inside the painted burlap was a green bag used by farmers to keep coffee oxidation as low as possible & the green coffee as fresh as possible. This was a clue to me as a roaster to how well this coffee was taken care of.

Inside, the green coffee smelled strong, fresh & the coffee was a bright green with no visible defects; definitely signs that this crop was current, well-harvested & processed. Pedro told me to take what we needed to sample & then he said, would you like to talk to the farmer, his business partner, because he had been texting him & he wanted to meet me. So I said sure, thinking he would give me his number. Instead, I found myself on a What’s App video call with Andres from A Coffee Family for the first time. Little did I know that I was meeting someone who would greatly influence my life as a business owner, coffee roaster, coffee professional & someone who would become one of my truly great friends over the next four years.

Around the same time as I had met Andres via What’s App, Sarah & I had begun working with Lisa Sorey from Rancho Filoso in Santa Paula on the east side of Ventura County. We had begun to work with Lisa at her family farm because they were one of the first three farmers to plant coffee in the Continental United States, & it was right here in Ventura County. As we got to know Lisa, we learned how her passion for growing healthy fruit & our passion for coffee could intersect and make some very exciting coffee to share with the world. So that’s how our new shared business endeavor called California Coffee Collective began…but we’ll save that whole story for another day. It was during this time in joining pioneers like Lisa & Rancho Filoso in learning how to grow, harvest, and process rare coffee from California that we realized we could really use some advice from people who were coffee farmers that we knew & trusted. It was in these times of experimenting with anaerobic fermentations on our super rare CA geisha that I really got to know Andres as he became somewhat of a guide to me as we tried different processing methods or talked about the type of equipment we really needed to treat these CA coffees with the respect they deserved. We would share different stories about growing, harvesting, crops, yields, temps, experimental processing methods we were trying in Ventura County & what Andres’ team was trying & doing in Colombia.  It was super exciting to hear his stories about how he was growing rare coffees at his family farm in Salamina & how much care he was taking in making an exceptional product. He would always be willing to give me advice over the phone about green coffee & what they were learning as he grew his company A Coffee Family. He was growing the family each year, bringing on more farmers who shared a passion for growing & processing a great product that would be some of the best coffees in the world. It was an amazing help to us, both as coffee processors & as coffee roasters.

We would share photos over what’s app of the farms we were working with, our coffee shops, the roastery, their coffee lab, pretty much anything related to our coffee adventures. As we got to know each other, Andres would invite us to Colombia, so we could see the lab & the farms in what he called “Paradise”. I knew it was something we wanted to do, but it never seemed to be good timing, whether it was a lack of funds to leave on a trip or what was often the case, just being too busy with the cafes & roastery. But I knew one day, one day we would make it out there to visit A Coffee Family.

To be continued......