Today is Sunday, our day off. we got up later than usual at 6:30 a.m. A lazy morning, we took our time brewing the fresh coffee we slaved over yesterday of de-shelling, roasting and grinding by hand. It was super strong and fresh to taste. And because we put so much work into de-shelling every single bean it was much more enjoyable.

Yesterday after a half morning of weeding our third plot of land for sowing, one of the other volunteers asked Gabriel if we could get coffee. Up until that morning we had just a little, just enough for two days. And we had yet to figure out how to brew it on the less-than-reliable indoor gas stove, bio-digester. So those two days worth quickly disappeared after two failed experiments.

At our request, Gabriel, the farm’s caretaker, disappeared over the hill to the food-stores shed. He came back after 15 minutes with a wooden box about two feet in length and one foot in width. The box was funnel-shaped with a thick piece of wood at its base. Closely following him was his son, Jonaton, with a small grocery bag full of sun-dried coffee beans still in their shells and some still in the husk. Gabriel set down the box on the floor of our patio, poured the beans inside it and quickly demonstrated how to pound the beans with a heavy wooden staff that reached to my shoulders. By pounding the staff into the center of the funnel, the shells would crack and be easier to de-shell. At that point he left us to it. The whole process took us the rest of the day. We started around 11:30 a.m. and finished around 4 p.m. After four hours of de-shelling the grey beans, I whispered to Alex, “Gabriel is probably like, ‘You want coffee? Make it yourself.’”

Nothing comes free here, it’s true. The work made me appreciate the instantaneous decision of getting coffee on Bainbridge and Seattle, the coffee capital of the U.S. And it made me appreciate the backbreaking work coffee workers put into our Starbucks cups…