Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters

Better Day, Night Hike, Campfire Stories

Ragamuffin names its coffees like a hiking log, and the list is the quickest way into the roastery. Better Day Espresso and Velvet Sunshine Espresso are the two house espressos. Dawn Patrol covers the medium roast, Night Hike the dark, Campfire Stories the decaf. Behind those sit the single origins: Colombia La Playita, El Salvador Unicorn, Colombia La Telaraña and Ethiopia Kayon Mountain. It is a proper roaster's line-up, blends and origins and a decaf that has been thought about, rather than a café menu with beans bolted onto it.

A barrel-aged release and a 120-hour ferment

Two coffees show how far the roasting goes. Colombia La Telaraña is processed as a 120-hour anaerobic natural, which is the one to ask about if fermentation is your interest. Strawberry Heist is the other: a barrel-aged coffee made over a year in collaboration with Ventura Spirits, tasting of brandy, sweet strawberry, black tea and oak.

The rest of the operation extends the same coffee outward. Retail bags and subscriptions take it home, bottled espresso and cold brew cans take it out of the shop, and there are brewing tools on the shelf for anyone who wants to reproduce the counter's results. Brewing in the shop is hand-poured and small-batch, so the cup in front of you is made one at a time.

A Ventura County room built to gather in

The company line is coffee worth gathering for, and the shops are pitched as rooted in community and brewed with purpose. That reads as marketing until you see the format: a relaxed neighbourhood room in Newbury Park, on the Thousand Oaks side of Ventura County, with a sister shop in Oxnard and none of the polish of a chain. From Newbury Park to Oxnard is how the business puts it, and two rooms is the whole of it.

Ragamuffin started as a small local roastery and grew outward from there, which is why the emphasis stays on the beans rather than the room. If the visit is coffee-led, start with Better Day Espresso or Velvet Sunshine, then work along the roast levels, then pick a single origin. Take a cold brew can, a bottled espresso or a bag of La Telaraña with you on the way out.