The idea behind Majik Moka began long before it had a name.
It started in 1980, when our founder, Rhett Madden, was just a Boy Scout earning his wilderness survival merit badge. During a sweltering weekend in the forest, he learned how to make herbal teas from arrowhead roots, wildflowers, and berries. The experience stayed with him—there was something elemental about transforming raw, unprocessed ingredients into something warm and nourishing.
Twenty years later, that memory would spark everything.
The Question That Changed Everything
Summer, 2000.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Rhett was now a coffee shop owner and roaster when he received the largest shipment of his career: a 20-foot container holding 50 bags of green coffee beans—7,500 pounds in total—sent from his uncle’s coffee exporting company in Guatemala with one instruction: sell them fast.
The beans arrived in the middle of a brutal heat wave. As they sat untouched on the second floor of his shop that first night, a simple question surfaced:
Was roasting really the only way coffee was meant to be used?
His mind returned to that Boy Scout weekend. The herbal teas. The wild ingredients.
What if green coffee could be brewed like tea?
Years of Trial and Error
What followed were years of experimentation—brewing green coffee beans like loose-leaf tea. Most attempts failed. But through persistence, curiosity, and a few happy accidents, Rhett finally created something truly palatable in 2003: a drink he called Mocha Tea.
He served it over ice at his shop, The Crimson Café, during scorching Alabama summers—selling it like sweet tea to University of Alabama students looking for an alternative to hot roasted coffee and bitter cold brew.
They loved it.
But Rhett knew something was still missing.
The Secret in the Rainforest
During Christmas break in 2005, while visiting one of his uncle’s farms in Cobán, Guatemala, Rhett met the local workers—descendants of the ancient Maya who had cultivated cacao and coffee in those cloud forests for generations.
He shared his Mocha Tea and asked how the flavor could be improved.
They told him about a traditional ripening technique the ancient Maya used with cacao—a process believed to enhance flavor while preserving cacao’s sacred and medicinal qualities. Before roasting, cacao was naturally ripened, allowing it to be finished with very low heat—around 200°F—rather than the extreme temperatures common today.
Applied to coffee, this insight revealed something extraordinary.
Modern coffee roasting relies on intense heat—often 370–400°F—which destroys delicate compounds and subtle flavors. The ancient ripening process, by contrast, preserves what roasting burns away, unlocking flavors hidden deep within the green bean.
That conversation changed everything.
Today
Over the next two decades, Rhett refined this ancient wisdom into a proprietary process—one that transforms sustainably sourced Guatemalan green coffee into something the modern world has nearly forgotten.
Coffee that drinks like ceremonial tea.
Energy that’s smooth, focused, and free from jitters.
A ritual that honors traditions nearly lost to time.
Today, every small batch of Majik Moka is still crafted by hand, guided by the same spirit of discovery that began around a Scout campfire in 1980.