Kaffa, Ethiopia.
Families have farmed here for generations.
The word coffee comes from here. Kaffa. A highland forest in southwest Ethiopia where wild coffee trees still grow between the planted ones, at altitude, in the shade of canopy that has been there longer than anyone remembers.
The families who tend these farms learned from their parents, who learned from theirs. The knowledge is older than any written record of it.
By the time coffee reaches your kitchen, everything about this place has been erased. The altitude. The forest. The name.
The beans you found in that envelope were picked in a forest like this one.
Before roasting. Before grinding. Before anything you recognise as coffee.
They looked like nothing you expected. That is what coffee looks like before a label replaces everything you just held.
You held that gap. Most people never do.
We stood in a farm in Vietnam's Central Highlands and someone asked us a question we couldn't answer.
Do you know the hands that picked your coffee?
We didn't. So we went looking. We went to Vietnam. We went to Kaffa. We met the families who have farmed these forests for generations. We are still going.
We are Alice and Nick. We started Band of Beans because we couldn't let the question go.
We will send each story as it unfolds. From Vietnam, Ethiopia, and wherever curiosity takes us next.
When we have something worth sending. Not on a schedule.
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You're in. The first story is on its way.
Welcome to the adventure.