About us – Mariposa Coffee Company

Where

We Are

We’re located on the historic 49er Trading Post, just outside of beautiful Yosemite National Park. We’ve kept the rustic, gold-miner charm, and while you might not find gold nuggets anymore, you’ll strike it rich with one of our gold-standard brews!

When

We Started

We founded our company in the fall of 1991, after moving our family from the Bay Area to the rural, mountain community of Mariposa County. It wasn’t an easy start. We pieced together our roaster (AKA Frankenroaster), which we still use to this day, and began the long, grueling process of learning to roast the perfect batch of coffee. We knew we wanted to do things differently: to capture the health benefits of coffee and showcase its plentiful flavor offerings, without distorting the brew with bitterness. Before YouTube and Siri, we learned from encyclopedias and trial and error. With lots of hard work, ingenuity and good old-fashioned perseverance, we created the unparalleled process we use today.

Our
Story

What We
Stand For

Quality & Health

From start to finish, we hand-craft each of our roasts to ensure the highest-quality, purest cup of coffee possible. To us, the taste should be unsurpassed, but so should the health benefits.

Coffee contains a wealth of antioxidants and cancer-fighting properties. When roasted properly, a cup of coffee can deliver a powerful health kick, along with the invigorating and savory flavor notes we all enjoy. However, there can be a “darker” side to coffee, if not handled correctly. When a coffee bean is over-roasted, or burned, the blackened, oily bean contains cancer-causing carcinogens. Thus, the coffee is transformed from an agent of health to one of harm. When roasting our beans, we pay special attention to temperature, careful to not allow even a bold, dark roast to reach the burning point. Over the years, this attention to quality has earned us the catch phrase, “So smooth, you can drink it black.”

However, while correct temperature is of utmost priority, the clean roasting process doesn’t begin there. From the start, when we siphon the green beans into the roaster, the cleaning process has begun by separating the beans from any particulate matter (such as fibers, insects and even feces) that have traveled with the beans in the burlap sacks. The chaff (outer shell of the bean) is also separated from the beans in the roasting process.

Our pure process doesn’t end there. Coffee beans are also susceptible to mold, which affects flavor as well as your health. To combat this effect, we “sweat” our beans after they’re roasted to remove excess water content.

Each step of our process has been carefully thought out and implemented to produce a cup of coffee that not only tastes good, but that you can feel good about.

Community & Ethical Production

Coffee has been bringing people together for centuries. And as a family business in a tight-knit, mountain community, we’ve experienced the power of people looking out for one another. That’s why it’s important for us as a company to look out for more than our bottom line. From working with coffee growers following fair trade practices, to partnering with local vendors for our supply needs, we strive to make people a priority. Coffee is our passion, but it’s our community who has made us who we are today. As a company, and even more so as a family, we are thankful.

Sustainability

Coffee goes through many stages before it reaches your home brewer, which is why it’s important to ensure the steps along the way are carried out with sustainability in mind. The process starts with sustainable growing and harvesting practices. Once the beans reach our hands, we work to limit waste. While the beans are sent straight to your cup, the chaff makes great compost and the burlap sacks are used for everything from gardening, to crafting, to animal enrichment at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo! Coffee is an incredible blessing grown on this earth and it’s important that we treat the earth kindly in return.

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