A Note From the Founder
Before there was MAMU, there was a camera in my hand or on my shoulder.
I spent three decades working my way up through the camera department on major film productions all over the world. Coffee wasn't the plan — it found me through my dad.
In 2014, two years after we bought a small avocado farm in Carpinteria, CA, my dad met Jay Ruskey at a farmers market in Santa Barbara. Jay told him about a wild idea he'd been chasing: growing coffee in California, from Goleta down to San Diego. My dad decided to jump in, and together we planted Rancho Delfino — about 500 Geisha trees alongside Caturra, Bourbon, and Laurina, tucked into a small farm in Carpinteria. The coffee trees were nestled between avocado trees, cherimoya trees, passion fruit, dragon fruit, and a handful of Meyer lemon trees.
I was still shooting movies, but between jobs I'd travel home and disappear up to the farm. We told ourselves that if we were going to grow coffee, we owed it to the plant to understand it completely — seed to cup. So I taught myself to roast, first on a Behmor, then an Aillio Bullet, moving into San Franciscan roasters and onward. My dad and I dug into post-harvest processing together: washed coffees, naturals, honeys, experimental fermentations we had no business attempting but tried anyway. We tried to waste as little of that tree as we possibly could — steeping tea from the blossoms once they'd pollinated and from the leaves themselves, turning the cascara and cherry pulp from our washed lots into jams and preserves. When COVID shut down film production, farming stopped being the side project and became the main one.
In 2021, I enrolled at Boot Coffee with friends from Frinj — the company Jay Ruskey had started back in 2017 — to chase a Q Grader certification. I had no idea what I was walking into — day one was a gut check I still think about — but I passed, and became a Certified Arabica Q Grader. That was just the beginning of my education with Willem Boot and Valerian Hrala up at Boot — I've since logged countless hours training with those two amazing mentors and friends.
In 2023, during the Hollywood writers' strike, I stepped in as Head Roaster at Frinj Coffee in Goleta, roasting California-grown coffee full time. That same year, Onyx Coffee Lab brought a blend of our Rancho Delfino and Good Land Organics Geisha to the SCA Brewers Cup in Portland — and rode it all the way to the finals. Watching California-grown coffee, coffee I'd helped farm and process, compete on that stage is something I'll never forget.
Film kept shrinking. First COVID, then the strike. So in 2024, I started MAMU Coffee — half side hustle, half experiment. But somewhere in those years of building something alongside my dad — hands in the soil, hands in the fermentation barrels, up every four hours through the night for three straight days turning cherries on the drying beds so a natural-process lot wouldn't mold — I found a kind of satisfaction I'd never quite felt on a film set. Handing someone a cup of coffee and watching their face light up gave me something to give, not just a job to do. It didn't stay a side hustle for long. This was the thing I actually wanted to be doing.
Growing coffee before I ever roasted a bean changed the way I buy green coffee today. I look for small, family-run farms the way ours was — and because I've lived the post-harvest process myself, I can ask sharper questions about farming and processing practices than most roasters ever get to. That background shapes every relationship MAMU has with an importer. MAMU is a small, deliberately exclusive coffee roastery, and it turns out that finding the right importer required the same standard: not one of the giants moving thousands of farms through a spreadsheet, but somebody small enough to know each farmer by name and treat that relationship the way a mother would — protective, personal, invested in more than the transaction. Importers like that pay growers more than the commodity market would, not because it's good marketing, but because coffee farming is brutally hard work that deserves it. It took time to find importers who had both exceptional coffee and real relationships with the people growing it. That combination is rare, and it's non-negotiable for us.
Understanding a coffee from seed to cup — how a variety with a longer maturation period on the tree, like a Geisha, calls for a completely different roast profile than a faster-ripening variety like Typica or Caturra, how a bean's density and moisture content change the way it takes heat, how a natural, washed, or honey process asks for a different charge temperature on the roaster — is what lets us pull out the flavors a farmer worked a full season to grow. It's the kind of detail most roasters never get the chance to learn firsthand, because most roasters never farm the coffee themselves. That's the whole point of MAMU: farmers first, always, and a genuine effort to help people understand why their coffee tastes the way it does.
Jozo Zovko joined MAMU in 2025, and he brought something we didn't have: an obsessive, joyful precision behind the brew bar. Jozo also spent years in the film industry — and like me, coffee was always the real passion running underneath it. On location in any city in the world, the first thing Jozo did was hunt down every coffee shop within reach and taste his way through the neighborhood.
If my work is the alchemy of heat and beans — dialing in a roast to unlock what's already inside the coffee — Jozo's is everything that happens after. Water temperature, grind size, agitation, extraction time, method after method after method. That obsession with the brewing side is exactly where the "Labs" in MAMU Coffee Labs comes from, and it's the reason we're building out a brew guide on our site where Jozo walks through his methods in detail.
At the end of the day, MAMU is a small, direct-trade specialty coffee roastery based in El Segundo, California, built by two people who can't stop talking about coffee — the farming, the processing, the roasting, the brewing, all of it. What makes this worth doing is simple: handing someone a cup, watching them taste it, and seeing them smile. That's the whole business, really. We just want to share something we love with the people drinking it.
— Richard Masino, Founder & Head Roaster
