 So when I was up in the middle of the night, I was just strolling around through Craigslist. And yeah, so the ad was an obvious eye grabber. So it was in all capital letters. Hawaiian coffee farm. And I was like, oh hell yeah, call on that. Specialty coffee is really a combination of not just environmental factors, it's not just one varietal of coffee, but it's how that coffee is treated all the way from cultivation to harvest processing, roasting, and also brewing as well. My name is Brandon Domitz, and I am a coffee farmer. I've been a coffee farmer for about six years now, coming from Portland with a strong coffee culture. I had an appreciation for it, but I wasn't a daily coffee drinker. We didn't know much of anything about coffee, Brandon especially, because he didn't drink coffee. Shortly after graduating, I got this farm internship opportunity. And so I did that for two years, and that was an incredible life changing experience, but I wanted to do more than just make a living. So about eight years ago, we were living in the city, and we were looking to purchase a farm probably somewhere in Portland. This was obviously right at the peak of the financial crisis. So banks did not feel like giving out money. I didn't give up because I couldn't deny the power of the sensation that I needed to get out of the city. It was that urgent and pressing for me that I needed a change. Brandon said, hey, so I found this farm on Craigslist, it's in Hawaii. Our farm and the land here in the Puna district is really unique in that we're on an active volcano that's constantly spewing out more and more fresh earth. When we first moved here, it was a total mess, and we didn't see any of that at that time. So it took a couple of years to clean it out. You know, I'd never grown coffee, I'd never grown an orchard crop, but I had confidence that I could figure it out. Our farm is really small. We only have three acres in total, and only two of that is planted to coffee. So yeah, relative to the rest of the world, our farm is very small. And definitely so. So we just started with the very basics. In the beginning, we were just trying to make our coffee taste good to us. We spent years learning about roasting and processing and farming coffee, and we're still learning. We have multiple varietals of coffee, and that would be the red coutura, yellow coutura, and red catawaii. The landscape folds into the flavors. So our farm and the land here is really unique in that it's mostly lava flow, Pohoiwe lava flow, that's about 500 years old. On top of that is just volcanic rock, and so that is what our coffee trees grow in. They just grow in rocks, so almost hydroponically. By far, the biggest challenges for us are all environmental. This is one of the wettest places in the world. We get on average about 200 inches of rain per year, and so uneven ripening is one of our big challenges because of the weather. The other huge challenge is the amount of fungus spores, the amount of mold in the air. If you have a bucket full of moldy cherries, it's gonna taste terrible. Coffee is just like a fruit, and you determine ripeness based on the color of the cherry. So what we go for is just nice, rich, deep color. Once the coffee is harvested, I can go straight from the harvest buckets into the pulper. Essentially, all it does is it separates the seed from the inside, from the skin on the outside, and then you basically just rinse the hell out of it. From the fermentation tanks, we go straight to the drying racks, and it's there that it will sit and get raked daily until it's dried down to 10 to 12% moisture. We put them in burlap bags lined with plastic bags that are really sturdy and have a very strong vapor barrier to them so that no moisture can get in, and then it just kind of sits. So after curing, we'll take it to the dry miller. You can certainly roast it right from there if you would like, but we like to do a little bit more post-harvest processing, and so we use a machine called a coffee grater, and that basically just separates the beans out by size. The higher grade of coffee will have the largest size and the fewest amount of defects. In 2013, we submitted our first coffee to coffee review, and it got a 93, which is a really good score. Borobone is the coffee that we won the statewide championship with. When we began getting recognized, it felt so gratifying. Coffee is most certainly equal parts discovery and creation. When somebody gets a bag of coffee, they are part of the experience that they create for themselves. I am just one link in the causal chain of making a really beautiful sensory experience, but what's great is the personalization of the ritual. That's just a very magnetic draw for humans. Kelly and I undoubtedly feed off of each other and we inspire and motivate each other. We both recognize how risky this was, and we've got plans in the future where we're taking risks that are almost as big and we have more confidence in it. Let's do this. Let's just go explore and see what happens and let's go on this adventure together. I mean, at the worst, we fail and we lose everything, but we still have each other, and so I think if you feel really called to something, you almost have a duty or an obligation to yourself to fulfill that calling.