Our venture into coffee, like so many good things, was a slow process.  We started as baristas, spending years refining our craft and fine-tuning our palate.  We made bold leaps to open up Maru in Los Feliz, inspired by our desire to share our favorite coffees, inflected by our varied backgrounds, our personal aesthetics, and shared philosophy around a cup of well-made coffee.  Maru in Arts District opened soon after in spring of 2018, giving us space to grow and expand our vision.  For us, the natural next step was roasting, an ambition we’ve been hoping to manifest from the very beginning.  

 

When we opened our Arts District location we had it in mind that we needed a facility that could accommodate a specialty roasting operation.  We grew our cafe around our coffee roaster so that our customers could daily see their coffee being made at every stage.  Our intention is to highlight process, to make it an ingredient in every cup of coffee.  

Jacob Park & Isaac Mason head our roasting team. The two have been working together for 6 years and are largely responsible for creating the range of flavor profiles that have become associated with Maru Coffee.  Jacob acts as the executive chef, able to build flavors and aromas in his mind from memory. Isaac acts as the sous-chef, able to actualize the flavor profiles through a vigilant tweaking process.  They’re both lab partners and cooks, daily experimenting and refining.  

 

We source our green beans seasonally, acquiring specialty varieties in small batches so that every bag of Maru Coffee is, in actuality, limited edition.  Like wine, coffee is inspired just as much by mood and nostalgia as it is actual flavor. No one wants to drink the same glass of wine with every meal. Coffee is much the same.  At Maru, we want to offer a rotating selection of beans to reflect a spectrum of flavors rather than settling with a generic standard. 

All our coffee is roasted in small batches, packaged, and shipped in-house by our dedicated team.  No part of our process is outsourced and every bean is roasted with care and intention. Good coffee is expressive and changeable and freshly roasted beans develop in flavor with time, reaching their peak between 4-14 days. Roasting in-house allows us to maximize this time of peak flavor by minimizing the time between roasting and brewing. Our hope is that when someone drinks a cup of Maru coffee at home, they’re learning to love the entire range of coffee with us.