Roaming Bean Coffee is a family-run café at the Berkeley Marina in California, with a mobile espresso bar that serves events throughout the Bay Area. They recently upgraded their marina café to a Linea PB so their fleet of Linea Minis could more easily reach events on busy weekends. We spoke with the owner and barista, Jasraj Sangha, to learn more about their journey.
How did Roaming Bean Coffee start?
We are an outdoorsy family; biking, running, and spending mornings by the water. And every time we wanted a genuinely great cup of coffee, we had to drive back into the city for it. That felt backward. The best part of the day was already happening outside. We had been home baristas for years, but we had also watched cafés turn transactional, more grab-and-go than the kind of place you actually want to linger.
So in July 2023, we set out to bring a truly great cup and a real conversation to people right where they already wanted to be. We started small on purpose: a tent, a cart, and a single Linea Mini, run for nearly two years with no outside employees, just family and friends. Four generations of us crowded around one little cart on some mornings. That slow start is where the whole identity of Roaming Bean Coffee was built, not in a business plan, but in the early light at the Berkeley waterfront, one cup at a time.
Your Berkeley Marina location is very unique. How did you decide to open there?
The Marina chose us as much as we chose it. I went to UC Berkeley, and this was the place I came to breathe when the semester got heavy. Families, open water, the kind of energy that has nothing to prove. When we knew we wanted something outdoors, there was never really a competition.
Operating here is not easy, and we knew that going in. On the operation side, it tests you in ways a four-wall café never would. You dial in your espresso while the weather shifts all morning. You pull shots in wind strong enough that your scale will not tare to zero. You lose a latte art pour to a gust of wind at the worst possible moment. We went through five tents before the container arrived.
After everything it took to get here, we do not take a single morning in that space for granted. The view, sailboats on the bay, swimmers in the water, the Berkeley hills catching the morning light, is a barista view you rarely find anywhere. We never wanted to be one more errand on someone’s commute. We wanted to be the reason they stop and stay a little longer.
What were your initial goals, and why did you select the Linea Mini for your Berkeley Marina location?
Honestly, it started as an experiment. We wanted to find out if anyone else craved what we did: a real cup of coffee in nature, no rush, a genuine conversation alongside it. We gave it six to nine months, and the fallback, only half joking, was that if it did not work out, we would at least have a world-class espresso machine for the house.
The Linea Mini is how we chose to hold ourselves to a standard from day one. We do not compromise on our ingredients: organic Straus Barista milk, house-made syrups from real ingredients, and carefully chosen roasting partners. The equipment had to match that same level of intention. The Linea Mini is La Marzocco’s most compact machine, but it delivers true commercial-quality espresso, precise, reliable, and consistent, even in a setting that punishes gear.
It also gave us freedom. It fits on a cart with enough clearance to stay fully present with the person in front of you. It is quiet. It warms up quickly and breaks down just as fast. It holds temperature through back-to-back shots as the morning rush builds. It set the bar, and every machine we have brought in since has had to live up to it.
What is your day-to-day coffee service like at the Berkeley Marina?
Mornings start quietly, just the sunrise over the Berkeley hills, the sailboats, and the first walkers coming through. Then it builds: regulars we know by name, cyclists off the Bay Trail, families, swimmers crossing the water, wing foilers rigging up in the distance. It is a barista’s view that you rarely find at any café.
The coffee is a Cardamom Latte kind of place. That drink, house-made cardamom syrup, organic Straus milk, a clean double shot, is the one people keep coming back for. The syrup is cardamom, brown sugar, and water. No artificial flavors, no bottled concentrate. It is a drink with deep South Asian roots that found a home on a California waterfront, and somehow it belongs in both places.
A lot of what we do here is really just conversation with a coffee attached. People settle in, take their cup down to a bench, and stay a while. Our Linea PB now anchors the bar, holding steady through the rush so we can keep our heads up and stay present with whoever is in front of us. The coffee has to be excellent; that is the baseline. But the few minutes someone spends with us matter just as much as what is in the cup.
When did you start adding catering services and mobile coffee experiences?
Early, because the need was obvious. There is almost always a moment at a wedding or corporate gathering when people are quietly craving a great cup of coffee, and it is often the one thing no one planned for. We saw that gap and realized we could fill it in a way that felt like us: not a vendor who shows up, pours, and disappears, but a presence that becomes part of the occasion.
Today the mobile side is a significant part of who Roaming Bean Coffee is. We bring a full espresso bar, professional baristas, and as many Linea Minis as the event calls for. The setup turns heads on its own, guests drift over and admire the machine before a single drink is poured, and from there it becomes the warmest corner of the room. Same coffee we make at the Marina, just on the move.
We serve weddings, corporate gatherings, private parties, and cultural celebrations of every kind across the Bay Area and Northern California. The espresso bar is consistent wherever we go. So is the conversation.
At what point did you realize you needed an upgrade for the café?
It came from a good problem. The community at the Marina kept growing, and the events side took off right alongside it. But our events run on the same Linea Minis we use at the café, so on a busy weekend, a Mini might be out at a wedding while the waterfront is buzzing. We were always splitting machines, always trying to be in two places at once.
That was the signal. The café deserved one machine built to carry it on its own, from morning to close, which would free the Minis to do what they do best out at events.
What drew you to the Linea PB?
A lot of research and a lot of honest conversations. We called baristas and owners who run these machines hard. We spent real time talking with La Marzocco directly about our world out here, the wind, the salt air, the way no two mornings are the same at a waterfront location. They helped us think it through rather than just sell us something. That approach matched ours.
The Linea PB checked every box: two groups for the morning rush, rock-solid consistency so the busiest shot of the day tastes like the first one, built-in scales so every drink is dialed in the same way every time, and the cool-touch steam wand that I love working with on a long service day. Two groups also means one of us can be steaming while the other is pulling, and the whole flow opens up in a way a single-group machine simply cannot.
But the deepest reason was the simplest. We already knew La Marzocco in our bones from years on the Minis. The Linea PB was not a leap into something unfamiliar. It was staying with the family we already believed in.
What does the future look like for Roaming Bean Coffee?
More of the same heart, reaching a little further.
For nearly the first two and a half years, this was run entirely by family and friends, four generations crowding around a cart at sunrise. Everything here was built on care long before it was built on scale.
From here, we want to deepen our roots at the Marina, grow the events side, and find a second location when the right one comes along. But the mission does not change. Every cup we serve is the last stop in a journey that started in a field somewhere far from here, and passed through dozens of hands before it reached ours. Our job is to honor that journey and use this cup to connect people to each other and to something larger than a transaction.
That is the whole thing. Family. Nature. Coffee.
Where does the name Roaming Bean Coffee come from?
Two levels, and the deeper one is the one I carry with me.
The simple answer: we roam. We take the cart across California so the coffee travels to where people already are. But the name runs deeper than that.
When I was in Uganda with the Peace Corps, I watched what happens before the coffee ever reaches a café. Farmers, pickers, processors, roasters, so many people pour their work into a bean before a barista ever touches it. We are the very last step in a long journey, and we tend to get most of the credit for a cup that hundreds of hands made possible. The name Roaming Bean Coffee is our way of honoring the whole path the bean roams to get here. It is a reminder we carry every morning.
Have any events or moments stood out along the way?
Some of the most defining ones were the quietest, at least from the outside.
Getting to the Berkeley Marina at all was its own chapter. Because we were the first food-and-beverage operation ever permitted at this outdoor waterfront location, there was no playbook. We worked through multiple city departments, tracked city council sessions, sat outside offices, and followed up persistently over more than a year before a single permit came through. Each department had its own process, its own timeline, its own set of questions no one had answered before for a spot like ours. Those months of careful, considered work, doing it right so we could bring something genuinely good to our community, shaped how we think about everything we do.
On the events side, the moments that stay with me are not always the biggest. Serving 700 guests on two Linea Minis at a large corporate event is one I am proud of. What made it meaningful was not just the volume but the consistency, back-to-back cappuccinos and lattes, no downtime, the same quality from the first drink to the last, with long lines that never felt like a wait because the conversation never stopped.
But just as memorable are the weddings where the cart quietly becomes the heart of the celebration, where the line turns into its own little gathering, where someone tells us it was their favorite part of the day. That is when it clicks. We are not there to hand off drinks and disappear. We are there to be part of someone’s biggest day and to honor, in some small way, every person whose work made that cup possible before it ever reached our hands.
Roaming Bean Coffee is located at the Berkeley Waterfront. Visit roamingbeancoffee.com or follow @roamingbeancoffee on Instagram.
