We thought we were the conscious ones.
We bought what we thought was the "good" coffee. We read the labels.
We cared about where things came from, or so we believed.
Then Linh asked us a question as naturally as you might ask a guest if they knew where their water came from.
"Do you know the hands that picked your coffee?"
He wasn't making a point. He wasn't challenging us.
In his world, of course you'd know. It would be strange not to.
We were the strange ones.
We just hadn't realised it yet.
Standing on Linh's farm, we began to see what we'd walked into.
Coffee plants grew alongside avocados, cocoa trees, vegetables—a tangle of life his grandfather had planted decades earlier.
Three generations of knowledge about which plants protect each other, which seasons demand what, which cherries to pick and which to leave.
None of this was special to Linh. This was simply how things were done.
His children would know it too.
He spoke about mornings spent sorting cherries by hand.
About neighbours who share harvests and techniques.
About his grandfather's belief that "knowledge passes person to person, it cannot live in books."
We nodded along, but something was quietly coming loose inside us.
It wasn't guilt. It was confusion.
How had we never thought to ask?
We'd drunk coffee every day for twenty years. We'd bought bags with maps on them, origin names, altitude numbers.
We thought that was knowing.
But we didn't know a single name.
Not one hand.
Not one story.
And here was Linh, quietly puzzled that this was even a question—
because in his world, the disconnect we'd accepted as normal simply didn't exist.
We flew home.
The question came with us.
We started pulling at the thread.
At first, just out of curiosity. We found ourselves in libraries, down research rabbit holes, following threads we hadn't known existed.
The more we looked, the clearer it became: the gap we'd stumbled into hadn't appeared by chance.
Vietnam was only one chapter in a much longer story. No matter where we looked, the threads led us back to the same place.
Ethiopia. Coffee's birthplace. The forests where it still grows wild. A culture that had been drinking it for centuries before anyone else knew it existed.
We knew we had to go.
This is the adventure we're now on.
We're heading to Ethiopia this October. The story continues.
In the meantime, we've partnered with roasters who share our values—so you can drink exceptional coffee now while we build something more connected.
If Linh's question unsettled something in you too—we'll send you each story as it unfolds. No spam. No noise. Just the adventure, as it happens.
You're reading Part 2 of our story.
The next chapter lands soon.