Farm Talk Podcast: Bonito Coffee Roaster- Ojai's Farm to Cup Coffee

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Paul Ward

Hi everyone. It’s Paul Ward here and welcome to another addition of Farm Talk. We’re out here in Ojai, California. Our guest today is a true artisan and a coffee roaster, Carlos Ramirez. Welcome to the show. 

Carlos Ramirez

Thank you. 

Paul Ward 

And you own a company called Bonito Coffee.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. It’s Bonito Coffee Roaster. And the name came about because Bonito is very generalized in Spanish, so it’s like you use it for moments. So, “ Bonito Moments” are where it’s like beautiful moments. And I feel like that’s what a coffee cup can bring. You know, In Nicaragua, what we do is we gather around and we drink coffee. I think maybe in the United States it is like when you drink beer here. It’s like that in Nicaragua. The equivalent is to drink coffee with someone you really appreciate. And, um, friends and I mean, you just get to talking and before, you know it, you’ve had, you know two, three cups of coffee, any time of the day

Paul Ward

You grew up in Nicaragua.

Carlos Ramirez

I grew up in Nicaragua. I moved to the United States in 2005; at the end of 2005. I moved to LA, I lived 10 years in LA, got married; we had two kids and the traffic and putting kids in a car seat got a little bit too much for us. My wife was like, “Why don’t we move to a smaller town?” That meant that I had to quit my job at Dole. And cuz I was traveling a lot and you know, most of the flights come out of LAX and I was like, you know, I’m willing to let go of this corporate job. I didn’t know what to do at first. But when I came to the states, I came with the plan to save up money and to go back to Nicaragua and buy a coffee farm.

I grew up in a coffee town where most of the mountains are filled with jungle and coffee. And most of the people that I went to school with had a coffee estate or a coffee farm, similar to wine. They’re really hard to get. Coffee is very sought after. So if you didn’t inherit the farm or didn’t have enough money to buy a farm, it’s still a hard business to get into. Some farmers are already established and I went to school with all of them and their parents would send them to work in the summers and I would go with them. As a five year old, my grandfather was a coffee mechanic in the town. So what he’d do is he fixed coffee processing machines. He’d kind of romanticized going to these farms. He’d be like, “Vamos a las montanas,” which means, “Let’s go to the mountains.”  And I was like, where is this place? And as a five year old, everything’s big! You know, everything seems huge. So if I take you there now and with the size that we are and you know, I’m 43. It doesn’t seem like it’s a big place. But as a five year old, it seemed like this mystical beautiful place. 

The word beautiful kept coming up. So that’s why I named it Bonito Coffee Roaster and the name took off. I also wanted a word that everybody can pronounce in English too. So bonito, bonito, bonito, my wife can pronounce it. She’s from Denver. That’s how it came about.

Paul Ward

You started roasting in a shed, is that correct?

Carlos Ramirez

So when we moved to Ojai, um, all I would do is grab my bike and bike around town or take my kids to the park and then come right back. And, there was this connection that kind of started to happen where I started seeing a parallel with my town in Nicaragua. 

Paul Ward

Hmm. Between here and there.

Carlos Ramirez

Between here and there. Prior to this, I was in LA where it’s like, go, go, go. You get in your car, you get stuff done. You get like five errands done in a matter of two hours in LA. Here in Ojai, it is a slower pace. Everybody says, “Hi.” After a couple months, you know, I was probably just saying hi to people. People all knew me as the guy on the bicycle with his kids. So, I told my wife, I was like, see that little shed. That’s like dilapidated and falling down. That’s gonna be my coffee roaster. It was really run down. It looked all ugly. I tore off the roof and kind of just did like a little Nicaraguan roof where there’s like no engineering to it. It’s just like a lot of planks. 

I started roasting in a five kilo roaster. I’m sorry, a one kilo roaster and uh, giving my coffee away.

Paul Ward

Giving it away for free?

Carlos Ramirez

Giving it for free. To see what people thought. And my goal was to get my grandmother’s recipe. That was my goal.

Paul Ward

And was she still around?

Carlos Ramirez

My grandma is still around, she still lives in the town that I grew up in Nicaragua. She’s 88. Now when I left Nicaragua in 2005, she was still roasting.

Paul Ward

And she has a reputation there that people well know her as the “Coffee Roaster?”

Carlos Ramirez

The thing is in Nicaragua. It’s like, there is no coffee roaster, everybody roasts their own coffee. 

Paul Ward

Oh really? Interesting.

Carlos Ramirez

People go to the market, you buy coffee. Like you would buy lettuce here at a farmer’s market. You have three different vendors, three different choices. You smell it to see if it has an aroma. Maybe to see if you can come up with a variety of the coffee, you take it home and you roast it on a pan with a wood paddle and you just roast and roast and roast. And that smell, you smell it in different houses. You can say, “Oh, such and such is roasting today; Oh. Such and such is roasting today.: So yeah. So it’s part of the community. It’s kind of like the tapestry there, but there is no coffee roaster.

Paul Ward

Interesting.

Carlos Ramirez

There’s coffee farmers. And um, and that’s how you get your different varieties of coffee, but there’s no coffee roaster.

Paul Ward

Interesting. And how do you, well, you roast and then you sell fresh, right? I mean, the beans that you’re selling are just recently roasted, right? They’re not, they’re not stale or a month old or two months old. You just roasted them like the day before.

Carlos Ramirez

Right. So part of the recipe, uh, my grandma’s roast; and why I feel like the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had is a cup of coffee from my grandmother. She goes to the market, she buys it, she roasts it and then she brews it. And even the way she brews it has a specialty to it. All that was in my blood. And I think a big part of the equation is to roast fresh. Um, a lot of people roast, but because of the system of the food here in the United States, it has to go through a factory, a roaster, another distribution center, travel a bit and then get to the supermarket. So if you eliminate all that, you get fresh coffee.

Paul Ward

I don’t know if I’ve ever had it honestly.

Carlos Ramirez

Fresh coffee?

Paul Ward

If I think about it, I mean, cuz it probably wasn’t roasted yesterday.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. I think like most Americans- I mean, I don’t have a number, but most Americans have not had fresh coffee. They’ve had old coffee.

Paul Ward

Sure. It was freeze dried. Right. And then in a sealed bag.

Carlos Ramirez

In a sealed bag and all that. But there is something that I’ve learned through roasting is that when you’re roasting, you’re opening the pores of the coffee bean and what comes out of it, which is the CO2; gives the aroma, the fragrance. After a month it’s like that diminishing return, like you are going to reach a peak of freshness and of deliciousness. And then after that, it’s not that coffee is not gonna taste like coffee, but all those complexities, the nuances of the flavors will go away. They’ll just dissipate in the air because they’re just all gone. And then all you have is caffeine. 

Paul Ward

Which is the addiction piece probably, right?

Carlos Ramirez

Which is the addiction. Exactly. Yeah. Which is why I feel like people should not feel bad for feeling addicted to caffeine. I know there’s a thing about, “Coffee is a drug.” And I feel like coffee is like a gratitude plant, just like tea, where it can become ceremonial; where it’s ritual, at least that’s how people that farm it take it. When you talk about every farmer starts their day with a cup of coffee, that’s what they’re looking for; it’s to start that day. I think, yeah, it could be looked upon as an addiction. Like if I had to eliminate something in caffeine it would be the quantity and the sizes that we drink in the United States because you’re doing those big, huge amounts of coffee when the body doesn’t need that. 

Paul Ward

Right. You can still get the gratification from a smaller amount.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. And then you’ll see that then you can probably have a cup of coffee in the afternoon and it won’t affect you. You’ll still go, go to sleep, you know? At least that’s my case because when I drink coffee, I drink coffee for the taste, not for the caffeine. That’s why I’m always looking for that freshness, super fresh coffee is the coffee that makes my heart sing. The only secret is that I have a connection in my town and I can say, “Oh, this farmer’s doing a really good job with this coffee.” And it’s this type of a Arabica variety, Pacamara, Catuai or Bourbon. Those are three of the ones that I carry. Um, there’s a lot more to them and each plant will taste different. So I’m always chasing the plant.

Paul Ward

Interesting. And speaking of that, where do you get your, where do you get your beans?

Carlos Ramirez

I get, ’em 90% of my beans come from my town in Nicaragua. That’s what I’m trying to build the tincture, um, to know the farmer. So I know where that coffee comes from. Literally. I’ve walked the farms, I’ve gone up the hill because I don’t buy coffee from conglomerates. 

Paul Ward

Sure. You’re buying from the farmer.

Carlos Ramirez

Farmer. Yeah. And it might be a privilege. It might be a privilege that I have to do that. I get to do that because most coffee companies, what they buy is a contract. And because it’s bulk, it’s huge. They are  a huge amount. I mean the United States consumes an enormous amount of coffee. I am boutiquey, but I have the faith and the plan ahead that this can become something big. If I grow it slowly enough so that everybody can have a fresh cup of coffee.

Paul Ward

So the beans are grown in Nicaragua and then either flown or shipped here and you get them direct; I mean, they’re shipped to you.

Carlos Ramirez

They’re shipped directly to Ojai. My friend is in charge of all that. So he has a processing plant and an exporter’s license. So he puts it on the ship. Coffee is harvested once a year. The harvest starts in December and it ends right about the end of February. From there, it gets picked. We have a process called the “Specialty coffee process,” where we eliminate all the defects. That coffee picking can be because coffee is handpicked. So it’s not computerized, which is the other thing that’s so mind boggling to me because it’s a person that’s picking every single little bean.

Paul Ward

It’s a lot of labor.

Carlos Ramirez

It’s a lot of labor. After that, it gets to the processing plant and then there are other people picking one by one. Making sure that all the coffee is the same size, same color and has no defects. So when I get it here as a roaster, I have to give it that respect. I have to give it as much respect as that campesino lady, which is like the steward of the land. That’s worked there, generations, her great-grandmother, whoever has worked there and her kid is gonna work in that farm. And they’re gonna pick that ripe cherry. That’s just, that’s the right beam so that I can get it here in the United States and do the same.

Paul Ward

It sounds like there’s a tremendous amount of love in your work

Carlos Ramirez

Oh yeah. I was talking to you earlier about the flow. And I think that I’ve found that in coffee, I didn’t know that was like a full circle for me, um, that my grandfather taking me to coffee farms while he was going and working on a coffee machine was going to be part of my life purpose. Not that I don’t have any other purposes, you know, I’ve got my family, I’ve got my kids and I’ve got other things that I love; my friends and the Ojai community, which has given me so much. Like I said, it’s very parallel with my town in Nicaragua, the connection through coffee and the connection to community through coffee is just incredible. So if I can put enough love to that roasting part, then that love just continues to spread throughout the community.

Paul Ward

Right.

Carlos Ramirez

Which is what has happened in the five years. I started in the shed for three years and for a full year I gave my coffee away. I remember and I don’t know if you guys know Eric and the Animals? I didn’t know who he really was, either. Um, but he approached me. He lived here. He was big in the Beatles era; a British guy that used to live here and he had a concert at, uh, Libbey Bowl. He said, “I have a song called the House of the Rising Run.” And I was like, I’ve heard that song and he’s like, “Well my coffee’s gonna be called the House of the Rising Sun. It makes total sense with coffee, right? Like it’s a little sun, it’s the rising sun. It’s in the morning when you have coffee..” I was like, oh, this is a great idea! I’ll do a sticker for you, I’ll co-roast it. He’s like, “I only need a hundred pounds. It’s for all my VIPs that are coming to see me.” I roasted that and I remember that, you know, like everything, very serendipitous. Me meeting Eric was very serendipitous from me moving from that shed to having the guts, to say, “I am going to go get a warehouse and a bigger roaster” because in the one kilo machine, it took me all night to roast a hundred pounds and pack it to get it to Eric for his concert. I wanted him to have it fresh. So it was like, okay, there’s gonna be someone else that’s gonna want a hundred pounds. Right. And I can’t spend nights… That’s the other thing, since I was raised on a farm, I go to sleep early and I wake up early. So me staying up at night till three, four o’clock in the morning roasting was not good. So I fastly found out that I can finance the bigger roaster. I went to the Ojai Hall to get my business license and they’re like, “Well, you can’t roast there.” And I was like, “But wait, Ojai Roasting Company is roasting right on the avenue.” they’re like, “They’re grandfathered in and people have said they don’t like the smell.” I was like, “Who doesn’t like the smell of roasting coffee?”

Paul Ward

So city zoning ordinances were kind of getting in your way.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah, but I didn’t give up. So I went and I was like, “Well then where do you want me to roast? Because gonna roast.” and (they said), “Well, we want you in the business section manufacturing.” Which now we’ve called Bryant Circle. That part. I went over and I knocked on everybody’s door. And I was like, do you know of anything for rent, do you know anything? Raw Food was where I’m at right now. And the owner was there. And he’s like, “You know what? We’re moving to Oxnard cuz we found space that’s uh, cheaper for square footage and it makes total sense for operation because we’re growing.” And I was like, “Can I put down my name for when this place comes to be?” 

Paul Ward

Just knocking on doors?  

Carlos Ramirez

Just knocking on doors and then it happened. And then my knees were buckling because I had to sign a contract saying a three year lease, uh, you know, that I was gonna pay X amount for this rental and that it was gonna increase 3% every year. And I was like, oh my God, me making that much money? Can I make that much money selling coffee? I don’t, I don’t think so. But I signed it anyway. After that, what ended up happening was I paid six months without even having a roaster there. I was still roasting in the shed as I grabbed, took more clients and took more clients. And um, one thing that I was really watchful for; A: was that freshness was there and that it made it simple for people to understand coffee because coffee can sometimes become very boujee and coffee shouldn’t be like that.

Coffee is like the most, like what you said, it’s like, what farmers start with. Is it the most simple thing, it’s like, I always push for going back to simplicity, having less, minimizing so that I am not stressed out. And I think that’s coffee for me; knowing that, I think where it goes, where it starts to get like coffee’s unattainable, like the good coffee like what I’m talking about is because people withhold knowledge, but this is knowledge that people have been roasting for millennia. 

Paul Ward

Right.

Carlos Ramirez

My great-grandfather planted his own coffee trees, harvested them, roasted them and drank them forever. So in the ranch that my grandma has, there’s about a hundred trees. And I asked my grandma, I was like, “Where are these trees coming from?” Oh one day Papa, who is her dad, said, “I’m gonna stop buying coffee, I can plant it myself.” And he planted it himself. He grew it. But my grandfather was a cowboy and his business was to rent his land for people to bring in their cow and the cow would get fat. And then after the cow would get fat, he’d give it back. And then he’d get money for renting that piece of land. But coffee wasn’t his business. Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that coffee’s very simple. It’s not complex or difficult. Yeah. The flavor is complex, but not how it got to that flavor.

Paul Ward

And you grow many different flavors; you roast different flavors or create different flavors?

Carlos Ramirez

Right. So yeah, but not to be mistaken with flavored coffee because there is flavored coffee, which I don’t know where that came from. It’s artificial.

Paul Ward

Artificially flavored.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. Like coffee that tastes like hazelnut and coffee that tastes like whatever, you know? That’s not what we do. Um, so coffee in Nicaragua is like wine, you know, so there’s an estate, right? And let’s say your neighbor has an estate. And he decided that he was gonna grab a subspecies of Arabica that he brought from Panama or from El Salvador or on his coffee trip to Brazil because he has the money to go to fly to Brazil. He brought back a hundred plants of this variety of coffee. So let’s say he brings one of my favorite varieties, Caturra. He brings Caturra from Brazil and plants it in Nicaragua. The soil in Brazil is different from the soil in Nicaragua. The amount of rain that Brazil gets is different from the amount of rain than the one they get in Nicaragua. And also what if the farm in Brazil is close to the ocean and the farm in Nicaragua is closer to the inlands. So that plant they brought from Brazil, it’s gonna taste way different…

Paul Ward

Then in Brazil?

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. So once it’s planted in Nicaragua, because the soil is different, the microclimate is different. That plant takes a whole other life. That’s what I’m interested in as an agricultural geek, because I studied agriculture. I love that part of coffee. It’s an Arabica plant, but it’s a subspecies of it. Like, let me tell you a cool story that I heard. I don’t know if it’s true, but they say that the king of France was in Africa or something, and one of his trips brought back a coffee plant and put it in his greenhouse in France. He liked the plant so much that he said, “I’m gonna make an estate of this. Like I want more of these plants.” So he took it to an island called “Bourbon island”, which is off of Madagascar in Africa. So what ends up happening is that he created a variety called Bourbon. But it’s from an Arabic plant that might have come from the Arabian peninsula in Yemen or from Ethiopia where the coffee is born but he changed the plant.

Paul Ward

Tastes different.

Carlos Ramirez

It tastes different. And then he was able to probably even give it to friends and then it got propagated to the point that it got to Brazil. From Brazil, it gets to central America, which is where I’m from. So, you know, that coffee is grown in Peru, but the biggest player of all these is Brazil. So you got Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador. 

Paul Ward

Are they the more corporate kind of growers that are gonna ship to the big…

Carlos Ramirez

They’re huge. Yeah. In some ways they have a lot of say in what the coffee price is, because coffee is a commodity like oil or like gold. So it gets exchanged and it gets traded. That’s a whole other different story and why farmers are suffering because of that concept. Going back to the variety, that plant propagated through Latin America, to the point that then we have Bourbon in El Salvador or Bourbon in Guatemala or Bourbon in Honduras and Nicaragua, each plant tastes different. And that’s where my favorites come in. That’s what I wanted to showcase with my coffee. I was like, have your coffee black, because it tastes delicious. If you give it a chance, they say, ‘Okay, this is a Pacamara and it’s a Pacamara from Nicaragua. And it was grown from Ojai. That guy has a Pacamara that just tastes like citrus, caramel and cane sugar.”

Then you have my friend Sid, which is a very cool name. He has a Bourbon. What happened with Sid was he inherited the farm with his father and they lived here in the United States; they had to get out of El Salvador. They didn’t know what they had but then pests came through and took down all the Bourbon plants. So everybody else has started planting something different that was more resistant to this pest. They didn’t touch it. And now they have this old plant where they only have a garden and Sid gave it to me. He’s like, “What do you think about this coffee?” And I was like, “This coffee is delicious. You can’t get this coffee anymore.”

Like that old world coffee that tastes like chocolate. And Marzipan, you can’t get that anymore. All the newer coffees are tasting a little bit more fruitier and more fruitier and more year because that’s where coffee is going. Coffee is going to where, like I think, and this is just my opinion. I feel like people think like I want a natural from Ethiopia because it tastes like blueberries. I like how that coffee doesn’t taste like coffee. I’ve gotta be careful with saying, “coffee tastes like coffee,” because coffee is very subjective. Someone once told me, “The best coffee is the coffee you like, not the coffee someone says is the best.” My coffee doesn’t have flavors because I add flavors to it. My coffee has flavors because each coffee is a different plant.

Paul Ward

Interesting. Now, are your flavors changing based on what you’re getting, what you’re receiving or are you kind of at the point where you kind of know that you’re gonna get so much Bourbon delivered?

Carlos Ramirez

Very good question. So I have to be very careful with that because the Bourbon from last year’s crop will probably not taste like this other year’s crop because it probably didn’t have enough rain.

Paul Ward

So it’s just like wine, like you said.

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. It’s like wine. It probably won’t have enough rain. So that plant, as it matures, it’ll start tasting different. And it’s my job to cup it and to say subjectively, with other people, “I taste this, do you taste that.” And they’re like, “Yeah, I taste that but I also taste this other thing.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s in the back end of what I tasted,” because everybody’s palettes are different too. 

Paul Ward

Right.

Carlos Ramirez

So I have to get calibrated with other people as well, so that it’s kind of like a shot in the dark. But once two or three people taste what you’re chasing. You’re like, okay, we’ve got something here and we’re gonna run with this.

Paul Ward

So now that you have a reputation, how are you distributing locally?

Carlos Ramirez

I started distributing on my bike, you know, cause when we were very little, yeah, we’ve started on our bike. Now I get an email or a text and it’s like, “Hey Carlos, we need coffee.”

Paul Ward

Restaurants and shops?

Carlos Ramirez

Restaurants and hotels. So we’re at Love Cafe with our dark roast. We’re at The Dutchees. We’re at all three of the hotels here in Oja, we’re in Montecito in a coffee shop called Merci, which is super delicious. So yeah, we’re just growing that way. I have a personal connection with all the business owners, all the business owners kind of jive with me and so I’ve done business kind of that way. Um, and now it’s my job to kind of hand it over so that it can expand and I can concentrate more on things like the farmer, the roast, the taste. That’s basically what we do. We deliver locally every Friday.

Paul Ward

To local stores or to farmer’s markets or..?

Carlos Ramirez

No, like house to house. 

Paul Ward

Oh really? 

Carlos Ramirez

I kind of thought about this kind of like, you used to get your milk at your house. Right. And then you get your coffee at your house, like your weekly consumption.

Paul Ward

So is it already brewed and hot or is it… 

Carlos Ramirez

It’s for you to brew. It’s a 12 ounce bag that you go online and you just hit local delivery and we do that. 

Paul Ward

Very cool. So what are you finding that are the favorite flavors right now?

Carlos Ramirez

The favorite flavor right now, the one that we sell the most is if we go by that, I think it’s the Pacamara, it’s my grandma’s recipe pretty much.

Paul Ward

So your grandma had it right. All the all along.

Carlos Ramirez

I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Ward

That’s very cool!

Carlos Ramirez

Yeah. So yeah, the Pacamara is the one that we sell the most. Yeah.

Paul Ward

So how would people find you? What’s your  website? What’s the best way to reach out to you and find out more about Bonito Coffee?

Carlos Ramirez

It’s bonitocoffee.com. Just go to the website and it’s really easy to order either on your phone or on the web. On the computer. Yeah. And we also have a subscription.

Paul Ward

Yeah, so people can order coffee wherever they’re located

Carlos Ramirez

Wherever they’re located, we ship all over the United States. 

Paul Ward

So Carlos Ramirez, I want to thank you for being our guest on this edition of Farm Talk. Thank you so much.

Carlos Ramirez

Thank you very much.

Paul Ward

And of course we wanna thank our sponsors, The Escrow Hub and The Money Store, and be sure to check out our next episode of Farm Talk.