Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast.
A great episode lined up for you today. A perfect story of Bitcoin coming into the lives of two
gentlemen and changing the way they think and changing absolutely everything about their
careers well in the case of harry at least harry was in germany for many years in like the creative
kind of media space uh born in stoke in england originally locked down back in england and then
got across to mexico and ended up buying a coffee farm like you do in el salvador for bitcoin
and Simon who fell down the coffee rabbit hole in Northern Ireland and just became absolutely
obsessed with coffee the the whole process of coffee has his own roaster over there in Belfast
and these two have come together to produce something to work together in the Bitcoin ethos
to try and rescue or revivify a coffee farm in El Salvador
in the best way that they possibly can.
The interview takes place at the coffee farm.
The lads were there and sat there right in front of the bushes,
right up there in the jungle, and explaining the story.
So I hope you like this one.
I hope it inspires you as well.
If you are at that point of trying to figure out what's your next step,
maybe you've stacked for a cycle or two and you are ready for a life change i hope you find
inspiration from this story reach out to myself or harry or simon i'll get you in touch with the
guys uh if you're in or visiting belfast anytime soon go and visit simon the name of his coffee
shop is root and branch coffee roasters and of course you can go and spend some sats there and
support him as well. You can support Harry with La Cruz Coffee over on Geyser or even more fun if
you're into your football. Harry is trying his best there to help the local football team. He's
got the lads kitted out with the shirts and the boots and that's all happened via Geyser and
donations from people around the world who are just trying to help those that they see engaging
in worthy projects. So get over to Geyser and find Harry's project over there. Before we start,
a quick shout out for the show sponsors. As always, thank you very much for the support
and for the tools and services that you have built and continue to improve. First up, Relay.
R-E-L-A-I.CH forward slash bitum. Download the Relay app today and start stacking sats. Relay
can service you across Europe and you can start exchanging that fiat currency that you've been
forced into using as a medium of exchange and exchange it for Bitcoin. R-E-L-A-I dot C-H
forward slash Bitten. Bitbox is the place for you to go and start self-custodying your Bitcoin.
If you've not taken self-custody of your Bitcoin yet, make this your goal in 2026. Take this very,
very seriously never ever take a screenshot of your passphrase because that screenshot then gets
logged on to some kind of server it could be google drive it could be an apple equivalent
could be a microsoft equivalent whatever you're learning but as soon as you take a screenshot
of that passphrase it's logged on a server somewhere if you ever get hacked somebody gets
your email address or somebody gets into your drive in some way shape or form all they've got
to do is search screenshots, find those words, input those words in their own wallet and sweep
your Bitcoin. It's that simple for people to find your C phrase if you are taking a screenshot of it.
Stop doing it. Please use a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper. Wow, what a fundamentally
life-changing technology that you're not using right so get serious bitbox.swiss forward slash
bitum get your passphrases secured get your backup secured be the only person that has access to the
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get hacked and that bitcoin can be gone so you have to be in control of it get yourself a bit
box bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten use the code bitten for five percent off paywithflash.com
is the best place for you to go to start accepting bitcoin for your goods and services as i keep
saying should you accept bitcoin for your goods and services hell no you should demand it what
are you doing otherwise? And finally, get over to Club Orange. Go find 19,500 Bitcoiners there
to hang out with. And please enjoy this interview with Harry and Simon.
All right, we're recording. Harry and Simon, great to have you on the show.
Hello. Thank you for having us.
Yeah, good to be here. Thank you.
Well, Lauren, what's your first question for the boy?
Why did he start a coffee business?
okay uh why did i start the business i well i finished my last uh project in the uk and it
happened around the same time as me discovering bitcoin so i wanted to continue well i wanted to
work in bitcoin and i vaguely decided similar to simon i think that i wanted to do something
coffee related i was trying to make the two work uh because coffee as a business felt like something
that i could incorporate bitcoin into quite well and coffee is also something i'm very passionate
about um so i knew vaguely that i wanted to work in coffee but i didn't know really how to approach
and that's when this opportunity came up to buy this farm and i thought what a good way to start
so that's about it really for me how about you what got me into call i mean i've i'm a little
bit older than harry i know it's hard to tell over the camera but i uh i uh my mom was a chef
and she when when i was a kid we had a french press or a cafetiere which 40 years ago was largely
unheard of nobody really knew what it was and she used to go out of her way to get these beans
called Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee which I'm sure you've you've heard you certainly you've
heard of it Daniel not nowadays you probably wouldn't cross the street in the world of
specialty coffee but back then it was um it was desirable and reasonably hard to get
so when I was at university in Aberdeen everybody used to come to descend on my apartment
for uh for their coffee and I invariably just started making coffee for a lot of people so
always had a bit of an interest in it drank it as a kid my nine-year-old and six-year-olds drink it
amazingly knew the difference between a naturally processed and washed processed coffee
and when i kind of looked into the coffee world i discovered that actually it's been pretty rapacious
historically coffee farmers have done very poorly out of it because the person that really made the
money was the person on the floor of the commodity exchange and frequently the somebody selling us
chicken yeah the chicken salesman is coming past excuse the uh frequently the the cost of
of production was higher than what it sold for so nobody was making any money out of it and uh
and so root and branch the coffee company that i started was was really as the name would suggest
we wanted to create root and branch change within an industry that was pretty significantly unjust
and uh and and so that's that's it was a mix of wanting to know the chemistry about roasting coffee
and then the commercial aspect of trying to create change in a in a fairly uh
or ethically horrible industry business hope that answers your question it does thank you
so just for the listeners uh chicken salesman uh did we've got a british and a scottish accent on
the line here uh alfast northern irish oh damn it he tricked me by having me threw aberdeen in
there i'm like okay i got that now but uh yeah right okay uh northern irish my apologies she's
got salvadorian accent oh look little kid little kitten right okay so where are you guys because
people are probably thinking what are they talking about chicken salesman we are in uzulutan
El Salvador on my coffee farm
and then we got guys selling
chicken in the street down there
Was it live chicken that they were
coming around?
No, it would be ready to eat
Fried chicken
But you don't have live chickens
running around the coffee farm?
We have that as well, yeah
In fact, the first thing we did when Simon arrived
was slaughter three chickens
Yeah, it's three less now
But a good meal nonetheless
it was fantastic actually yeah it was a great day yeah we did a big cook out and uh it was a fun evening yeah so el salvador how on earth do you end up like so you said you harry you finished a project
in the uk uh what was that project and how on earth did you end up finding that there was
a coffee farm for sale in el salvador well the the project in it was in my hometown in stoke i'd
been living in germany before that and i left uh just as the pandemic started um and went back to
the uk to do a building project uh because i just wanted to i wanted to take the time to learn more
practical skills because i've been working a lot in the creative industry and i'd kind of
i felt a little bit like you know pathetic that i couldn't do xyz inside of a house uh especially
given my dad's career is construction so it seemed like the great opportunity especially covid kind
of played into our hands a little bit because we could both work together on this project so i did
that for a few years but before that i was living in germany um so at the end of that project i was
quite quite quite free you know i was quite open i could have gone i had nothing to tie me down at
all i'd finished everything i'd sold up everything in germany i'd come back to stoke i never wanted
to stay in stoke i just wanted really to be there for short term i started doing bitcoin meetups
whilst i was there uh one because i was lonely two because i was obsessed with bitcoin so i started
doing meetups uh so regularly regularly that it was basically once every every week at some point
even though it was just two of us um and and through the meetup one of the guys one of the
regular meetup attendees was working at a company called zebedee which is a bitcoin focused gaming
company um christian working for him was a guy called prem so i don't know you know prem okay
uh so it was it was prem who he all he knew maybe we'd spoken about it because he's coffee
enthusiast as well he knew that i wanted to work in coffee because uh just after the project after
after I sold the house, finished the project,
I moved to Mexico to learn about coffee.
I went to a coffee farm,
did an intense course in coffee farming,
did some barista training, some roastery training.
And whilst I was there,
I got a message from Prem saying,
do you want to buy a coffee farm in El Salvador?
That's all he said.
He's a very direct, you know, Prem,
he's a very direct kind of guy.
Yeah.
And honestly, I saw the message and I thought,
that sounds like a good idea.
But I hadn't been to El Salvador.
I didn't, obviously I'm a Bitcoinist, so you kind of want to get there, right?
Because of what everyone says about it, Bitcoin country, X, Y, Z.
And I was in Mexico, it's two hour flights away.
I just thought, well, why not go and have a look?
I was so free, I was so open.
I mean, at least it was an excuse to go and visit El Salvador, right?
That was my excuse to finally say, right, let's go there, see what it's all about, spend
a bit of Bitcoin, and then probably don't buy the farm, because obviously you're not
going to buy a coffee farm in El Salvador.
I sent it to my dad.
he was like showing it to all the guys i work with they say you'd be mad don't touch it with a
barge pole um that's probably what inspired me to buy it in the end to be honest with you
um but yeah i came and just fell in love with it i fell in love with the place and i saw a lot of
opportunity here so i just went for it and now it's about two years down the line and now we have
we have a little bit of infrastructure here it's a little bit more comfortable than it was when i
first got here so yeah onwards in the woods so where simon where are you coming to the story here
I had heard Harry on a podcast talking about it,
and two of the great loves in my life are kind of,
aside from my wife and kids, are Bitcoin and coffee.
So it seemed like we had quite a lot in common from the get-go.
So I just reached out to him and said,
look, I have a coffee company, specialty coffee company in Northern Ireland,
a roastery, we had cafes.
You know, we just connected,
and then Harry came over and hung out with me over at my place at the end of the summer.
And we agreed that I would come out and spend a week or so here,
just checking out what's going on and getting a bit of a tour around El Salvador
from Harry and meeting some of his accomplices on this project.
So that's kind of how that happened.
And it's been a great few days.
Arrived on Friday. I leave on Friday.
It's been great to see the farm.
it's even since harry was over at my house it's come on a lot so it's moving at pace and uh it's
exciting you know i'm really i'm going to watch this space over the next few years to see how it
just evolves and flourishes and develops as i've no doubt it will so is this the first time you've
been out to the farm this is the first time i've been in el salvador never mind at the farm right
so being obviously sourcing coffee in other countries but i haven't yet been to el salvador
So, and again, it was, you know, being into Bitcoin, everybody's, I mean, even people that aren't into Bitcoin are talking about El Salvador. So it was sort of, I feel like it was imperative that I got out here to get boots on the ground as it were and see what actually is really going on because you see different perspectives and people that are a bit more into the politics and some of the sideshows associated with that.
But one of the things I've really discovered here is people like Harry,
they're less into the politics and more interested in just building
and doing things, which is a far cry from back home
because everybody, maybe unavoidably, is into politics at the minute
because things are so bad out here.
It's just optimism and hope and camaraderie.
It's refreshing.
Cool.
Lauren, do you have any further questions before we carry on?
Get geeky and stuff.
Yeah, I have a question.
I'm not sure if you do know, but you said you guys are really interested in coffee.
So is there any health benefits behind coffee?
Yeah.
I mean, it makes you work harder.
That's good for your health.
What about anything sort of?
I mean, from a physiological perspective, Lauren, definitely.
um it's known to be um anti-hypertensive um i mean it's got a lot of kind of positive side effects
from drinking it so there's you know i used to it's anti-inflammatory it's anti-hypertensive it's
uh you know but all things in moderation it's you know you drink too much of it then
you can cause problems for yourself but uh i mean i work in it so i have to drink it a lot
I can equally go away for a week and not drink it.
So you just want to be careful with the doses, I suppose.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much for answering my questions.
Pleasure.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Lauren.
Nice to meet you.
Bye.
Nice to meet you.
So I guess we should get some origin stories out of the way,
i.e. how you found Bitcoin, what it brought you to Bitcoin.
What resources and what was resonating with you?
Because I think these stories always resonate with a certain subset of listeners.
They're like, what?
Oh, my God.
They were going through the same kind of stuff that I was going through.
Harry, you said already that you were lonely.
That's one of the biggest things that people talk about.
Shout out for Club Orange at this point, because Club Orange has fixed being lonely.
You can now join Club Orange and find Bitcoiners all over the world.
There's almost 20,000 people there now that you can just directly DM and even voice message and even FaceTime style call now.
So, you know, if you're not on board already, make sure you get on board and connect with people.
Because, yeah, like you said, being lonely sucks.
And if you're the only Bitcoiner in your town, what was it, Little Britain?
You know, the only gay in the village, right?
so how did you did you come across it then when when you were still in germany i mean how many
like share whatever you're willing to share and uh what you the audience might be interested in
in knowing well i was very dismissive actually at first i i discovered bitcoin
quite a while ago uh never took the time to look into look deeply into it uh i think most people
when they discover it, they don't immediately go into the weeds.
And then living in Berlin, Germany, around – so Brexit happened in 2016.
COVID happened 2020, 2019, 2020.
In that period, Berlin changed a lot, and it became very techie.
They went full on crypto, blockchain, you name it.
Like the sort of the scammy end of the crypto spectrum, let's say.
So a lot of the people I was working with,
there's a lot of digital nomads,
a lot of people working, building apps,
a lot of people there working on blockchain technology.
People kept talking about Ethereum.
It was perhaps the most major city
for that kind of stuff in Europe at the time, I think.
So I was around it and people kept talking about it
And I was really dismissive because I was there.
I was working in the creative industry.
So I was surrounded by artists, DJs, photographers, fashion designers, that kind of thing.
So, you know, there's not much talk about hard money in that world, as you can imagine.
And then the guys that were talking about it in the techie world, I was just like, you know, I'm just not interested.
It sounds really boring to me.
and then it really was during COVID,
similarly with a lot of people,
I had the time, I suppose,
I had the time and it was just that moment
where we had the spare time to do the research but also the money printers were going so fast that everyone had time to invest as well right so there was this sort of you know everyone just got obsessed
with like where to invest like my friends were just talking about the next um what was it that
was there was um before i discovered bitcoin there was um what's that stock that that went
really high and there was like loads of shorts on it they made a film game stop yeah all of that
caught my attention that was really exciting i thought uh because they were bankrupting hedge
funds and i thought that was fantastic so it was kind of like looking at all of that and seeing all
the energy and also like what a community can do right in in the face of the establishment let's say
and through all of that you know i found bitcoin i found crypto that sort of quickly figured out
that a lot of that is a scam and then settled on on bitcoin after doing a hell of a lot of research
and then when i got to the point of understanding it and like loving it kind of being obsessed with
it uh there was no one to talk to about it all my friends were definitely not interested in fact
my best friend i remember i remind him about this all the time he said you'll never be able to buy
a coffee with bitcoin well look where we are um so i started doing meetups in stoke on trends
and it was great because people came not many people the first one we had about ace and then
we sort of whittled it down so there was about three or four of us i was always doing it organizing
it and usually there was two or three of us and it was weekly so uh from from that as you know
the the big networking uh if you want to call it that in bitcoin happens real real fast because
you're all on the same page at least in one regard and just by starting that meetup that
it just sort of triggered a chain reaction which ultimately led to me having this opportunity
and then well now yeah i feel i feel very well connected in the bitcoin world i've met a lot of
great people in in different countries even um and yeah yeah that's that's that's basically how i
got into this position and the meetups were were instrumental in that for sure.
Simon?
I mean pretty pretty much similar time to Harry I got involved in it I mean it had been
pitched to me years before that but I was building a house that didn't have any excess
money to put into whatever this newfangled idea was. I knew much to the pity but I
I think I found myself in 2020 with a company where we had money on our balance sheet.
And my background was genetic engineering.
So I've been quite alive to what was going on during COVID and following that quite closely and not necessarily buying much of it.
And it was after that I started thinking more deeply about finance and money.
and hang on a second, if this much money is being printed,
where are we going to be in a year or two years' time?
I'd actually been in correspondence with our first minister at the time
in Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, her name is.
And they were handing out these £100 cards to every household.
So after writing to her about COVID and what I was seeing,
which she was largely agreeing with until one weekend,
she did a complete bold face and somebody leaned on her.
I just said, look, I understand the motivation to give every household £100, but the inflationary
effects of this will be significant. Of course, there was a whole section and it was posted on
social media and it was a bit of a witch hunt for me because I was trying to deprive people of
getting free money. But when you understand the mechanics of money and where this all leads to,
so for me, it was a case of, well, I want to save and preserve my company. So I'm going to take some
of the money that's on our balance sheet and put it into Bitcoin. And then continue to do that at
quite a rapid pace, too rapid a pace for my accountant to be comfortable. And so we've been
running the Bitcoin treasury play for five years. And then all the team, their pensions are all paid
in Bitcoin. And we accept Bitcoin on our espresso bar and also with wholesale, but very few of our
wholesale clients pay in it. So that's kind of my backstory in it. And then set up the NI Bitcoin
meetups which initially we had about 50 people coming to that were you know pretty um very
educational like we do an evening on the you know the bank of international settlements an evening
on running node and stuff like i've since backed away from that but uh so that's kind of my backstory
with it daniel right so did you buy the farm with bitcoin or with fiat bitcoin
that's such a chad move
oh okay so
how who i mean this story like you know is so classic like prem just sends you a text yo do
you want to buy a coffee farm in upsell you jump on a flight you're like yeah i do and
like uh where do i send the bitcoin let me he just found he found me at the exact right moment
in my life you know it was just one of those one of those fortuitous things because it
I would have said no at any other point in my life, obviously.
I just happened to be in Mexico, happened to be obviously a Bitcoiner, and happened to be looking to work in coffee.
So it was just the perfect timing.
And I had time as well.
I just finished this project in the UK.
I was learning Spanish.
I was learning about coffee.
But I was just sort of pottering about.
And I really wanted to sink my teeth into a new project.
Something big and adventurous I wanted.
and that's what this provided for me.
So paint us the picture.
Like you turn up, you're in, I mean,
so you obviously land into San Salvador.
How far away is the coffee plantation?
I mean, was it in a good state?
How long has this been established?
So it's next to Berlin,
which is the foremost Bitcoin circle economy in El Salvador.
and I think the world, one of, 160 merchants accept Bitcoin here.
And that's just what's recorded.
There's plenty of people that accept it.
If you say, will you accept it, they'll get the app and they'll accept it.
So you can just do everything with Bitcoin here.
It's about three hours from San Salvador, a couple of hours from the airport.
so that's not too bad but the roads are pretty hairy i mean you know you've got a you've got to
be a courageous kind of driver and and and uh you're going to be quite brave on those roads
getting from a to b it's yeah it's not like back home where you can just flick a podcast or an
audiobook on and just chill out and use that as your downtime between work and home it's you're
with like harry harry does a lot of driving i've noticed and you've got to be on it all the time so
it's pretty pretty tiring it's tiring yeah it's it's what what i like to call active driving like
you you have to be constantly checking you know because you've got bikes there's bikes everywhere
a lot of people have bikes and they come in and out so you've got to always have your wits about
you and if you ever want to get into the traffic no one will let you in until you really force your
way in and a couple of weeks ago i tried it on a big lorry and he just crashed into me you know
and i was just like i i because i got you see if you make eye contact and you put your hand up it's
like that's your cue to go in and he was just like nope so i was like okay fine um when i got here
basically it was an abandoned coffee farm so it used to be a coffee farm so there are coffee plants
here from when it was productive but it had been abandoned by the time i came here for about
10 years um and this this is sort of the third iteration of the farm i think it was it was a
a productive farm back in the day i don't know let's talk 30 40 years ago something like that
um and then it and then and then i think it changed hands or the owner left el salvador to
live in the usa a lot of landowners here moved to the usa because of the violence because of the war
the the civil war uh and then the gang involvement and then i think about 10 years ago from the usa
he planted more plants and tried to manage it remotely and just it didn't work out so just
abandoned it basically so there's no facilities no no infrastructure no roads uh very overgrown
the coffee plants weren't producing because there's just so many weeds and vines and trees
that were growing all over it there's no water source no electricity source obviously no internet
it nothing so i just turned up and slept in my truck and just went from there then i got a tent
well i had a hammock after that and then tent spent six months in a tent whilst i was building this
which is guest houses but i'm going to be what i'm going to build another house and these will
be my guest houses but right now i'm here in sort of interim period uh with my neighbor alias who's
over there making a fire he was here when i bought it so we just kind of just kind of hang out now
it's so classic how did you build it like you're just alone or you get some help in
no there was thankfully so prem found when prem was here visiting he was living in an airbnb
that was managed by miguel um who knows this area really well and by pam was talking about
buying this coffee farm la cruz by the uh some in san francisco and miguel was like well i know
this area really well.
And he started to ask more questions
and Prem found out that he'd just lost a job
and his skillset is basically managing coffee farms So he was looking for work and we were looking for obviously someone to manage the coffee farm So straight away just got him involved
And he's been around ever since.
So at the beginning, everything was sort of going through Miguel.
You know, I didn't have any contacts.
I didn't know anybody in the whole country when I first came.
So Miguel was very instrumental in helping to find work for us,
helping to guide the project as well,
because despite having done some, you know,
having been to a briefly studying coffee agriculture,
it's still obviously growing coffee.
You're going to five, ten years, you're still not going to know everything.
So I was leaning on him a lot for advice.
And as I slowly got to know more people in the country,
it's a very small country, so you can whiz about,
you can get to know a lot of people.
And I was traveling to farms constantly, meeting new people,
trying to build up more knowledge asking for advice on this on that getting interesting thing
as well about coffee growing is that like people who've been in the business for many years will
give you contrasting advice you know there's many different ways to do it so i'm getting all this
advice from different areas and just trying to find my own path you know and miguel was a big
part of that um especially to begin with so yeah that's that's how it all got started really and
And now, having started with, well, just me and then Miguel
and the workers that Miguel brought here,
and Elias, who's still here building a fire.
Now we have two people living on the farm, working full-time.
There's a builder here as well from Newcastle, also a Bitcoin.
He's living in a tent that I used to live in.
He's now also working here full-time.
Simon's here.
Simon's been also basically working here full time since he got here.
So it's quite a lively place, you know, after a year of, well, yeah,
kind of being kind of on my own here really.
Now it's got a lot of energy to it.
So what are the geeky, you know, Bitcoiners,
we love getting down to the details of anything, growing coffee.
where do you even begin
it's not surely it can't just be as easy
as right let's hack all these weeds back
and just let the plants flourish
and we'll be quids in
well in year one yes
that's literally all we did
because there was no production
because of the coverage
of weeds
so just
taking all that down just allowed the coffee to produce
so we got the coffee
going forward it is very complex there's a lot to take into consideration because every farm
is totally different and has totally different requirements so you can't just
you have to become obviously intimately you have to become very you have to understand your farm
very well and what you're dealing with so that involves obviously soil what is what what kind of
soil do you have how does it need to be treated what nutrients are you lacking what you need to
introduce how do you do that how organic do you want to be uh we're organic we're we're maintaining
we're trying to maintain that status and you know the life cycle of a coffee plant as well
you have to you have to keep replenishing it so every coffee farm has its own nursery
where you grow from seed and that's a whole science in of itself you know how do you select
your seeds then where do you plant what type of varietal there's different types of coffee plants
some are more suited to higher altitudes some lower altitudes there's different qualities you've
got to sort of find that sweet spot of quality but also that's not going to be too delicate
um you know what's the water what's the water source how do you have water in the dry season
basically here we've got two seasons it's dry and it's wet the wet season is very wet the dry season
is very dry so there's not a shortage of water the water there's there's plenty of water and
it's all locked in you know even after six months of no rain the place looks lush because it's just
inside the plants it's everywhere but it doesn't there's no rainfall so you need to find a way a
system of making sure that you can keep that water from the rainy season to last year all the way
through the dry season that's something that i've not quite achieved yet but that's in process
um what else yeah i mean there's like a million things and the more i learn it seems that more
the more i have to learn and then the roasting process how to roast coffee you know that's a
whole other world in itself as well uh which is not my bag that's simon's bag that kind of you
know that's the that's the sort of division you know i sort of figure out all the point up until
the green coffee and then you hand it over to the roaster to get it ready to consume essentially
so what are you looking for simon in good green coffee
I mean prior to answering that I suppose for
the British viewers it might be easier
to put it in the context of whiskey
and I think where
Harry has to be applauded for what he's done
is this is you know there's plenty of people it seems to me come into El Salvador
with ideas and they don't last very long because they can't get them to generate
anything beyond you know theories in their heads and i've already come across that um whereas harry
has taken something that's very physical and very tangible and it's it's going to take a while there's
not there's not immediate cash flow with this it's a very long-term vision it's like you know if you
start a distillery in in scotland unless you're secundar singh who owns the whiskey exchange and
you can build it for 10 years and you have enough cash flow to just let it sit there until the liquid
matures you're not going to make any profit and harry's not going to turn profit on this for
for a while so it's just batting the hatches down dig the heels in and prepare it and deliver the
best coffee that you can do over a period of time so it's a it's a it's a massive massive process
um and he did inherit something that had basically it was derelict so um so it is it's it's pretty
incredible what in terms of what i want out of it i think what we're both keen to do is the history
of specialty coffee it was sort of in the uk you had a couple of kiwi guys who started a place
called the espresso rooms in london and in the 90s they went out to origin because they too were
somewhat discontented and dismayed at the fact that so many people in the in the world of coffee
just couldn't even make a living.
So they thought, let's bypass the exchanges altogether
and the importers and exporters,
and let's go direct to origin and pay farmers
and promise to continue to pay them
over a five or 10 year period,
providing the coffee as of a particular standard
on the basis that every year we come back,
we want to see that money that we've paid you
invested in better farm facilities,
could be fermentation tanks,
It could be parts of a mill. It could be a school for local kids because a lot of the laborers come up from the valleys to pick coffee during the harvest season and their kids are at a loss for something to do.
So why not educate them while that's happening? And then that's a weight off the parents' mind and you're helping educate, you know, that particular region.
So I think after that direct trade, that's called, specialty coffee has kind of got a little bit stuck and it's been more focused on aesthetics than it has about actually creating systemic change within the industry.
I think because we're Bitcoiners, we'd like to try and pioneer a different approach to paying for it.
Because as a roaster, I'm always converting out of pounds into dollars into Ethiopian bear or whatever the local currency is.
a year ago paid an Ethiopian farmer in Burr.
And over the weekend, the IMF debased the Ethiopian currency by 60%.
You know, whereas if you can pay a farmer directly in Bitcoin,
and that farmer like Harry is then able to use, for example,
a facility like Lightning Bits, LM Bits,
to then split the payments to all his farm workers who might have,
all of a phone, like every coffee producing country,
generally has better cellular access than we do in the UK.
So everybody's got a phone.
So to be able to use these sorts of facilities
and bypass the fiat rails altogether
would be the first time that I know of where this has happened.
So it'd be a fun thing to explore.
So when you...
Let's get the kind of flow going here.
The beans are grown.
what do you do with um after harvest harry let you people come and help you out
what happens to the beans after that well so we harvest we harvest the cherries it's like a red
cherry um it's a bit blue you can't they're right here behind me right and then the there's a process
of essentially uh removing the fruit from around the the bean that you know as coffee is inside
the cherry and so the process of removing the fruit is what comes next and that what we're doing
that here on the farm it takes a while it takes about a month after harvest and there's many
different ways of doing it there's natural process where you just leave it in the sun and the sun
just dries it and it ferments oh yeah so here right okay there you go this is the this is the
this is a branch this is the cherry and that's what it's called a coffee berry cherry like
yeah we call it cherry right they call it here which is like grape and then this is the this is
the bean you can't really you see that up a little bit oh there you go yes yeah yeah so you got to get
it and this also has like a what's it called parchment around it which needs to be removed as
well and then you have the green cherry inside but it takes a while you've got to remove all the
moisture there's also a lot of moisture inside
you've got to get it down to about 10 11 moisture content and there's just many different ways of
doing it and each of them creates a slightly different flavor that to a specialist um or an
aficionado like those those sort of nuances of flavor is where where the interest lies in the
in the industry probably um most people who drink coffee probably wouldn't notice that much
difference probably i certainly wouldn't i'm definitely i think if it was pointed out to you
you would if you did a cup in second like we did a few days ago yeah what you would you would notice
like a bit more sweetness like if it's done naturally i'm the worst at wine taste wine
tasting you know oh you can taste the uh the under notes of raspberry and i'm like
anyway whatever so like you know if if you do natural process the fruit is left on the cherry
for for several weeks and that imparts obviously a bit of a fruity flavor onto the
onto the onto the bean a bit more a bit more a bit more sweet a bit more fruity
um but anyway there's many different ways of doing it this is my the first harvest we did
that was that started literally as i arrived the day after i landed here on the farm we started
harvesting and obviously i didn't really have much or any experience so we did it in the most
rudimentary way possible and that would have been the coffee that you tasted um now i have a team
i have an expert that lives on the farm that we work very closely with he's only 25 years old but
he's very precocious and we're experimenting a lot we're going to we're processing a lot on the farm
but also there's a we're surrounded by it's a real um formerly rich coffee region um that lost
its way let's say uh so there's a lot you can notice around there's a lot of remnants of sort
of the the wealthy coffee coffee years so to speak so there's big processing plants uh not far from
here quite a few so we're going to all of them trying different types of processing seeing how
we can work with them uh building relationships seeing who we work with best seeing which processes
work best tasting them all we're going to have probably off this one harvest about 100 different
flavor profiles that we're going to go through and figure out which one works best and then
eventually narrow it down um so yeah this year is essentially a year of experimentation for us
all it's very exciting how many tons will you get how many tons how does it how much does it work
car. 60 bags, 60 quintalis.
How many tons is that?
It's less than...
So...
Or kilos, whatever.
100 pounds.
What's a pint?
Speak to me in metric.
Two and a half kilos, isn't it?
I wasn't a ton.
Oh my God, we need Dominic Frisbee on here.
He's the guru of
metric and imperial.
I mean, he's probably going to produce about...
It's probably going to be about five tons, huh?
let's just say yes
about five times
I mean
it's
how does that compare to the other farms
around you? Are you very
small in comparison?
Well, yes
because most farmers
they'll have several
farms or like yeah
they're all sort of separate
so I know say for example one
other farmer that I know quite well
around here uh he has a farm opposite me here where he also has farms dotted around and he'll
harvest everything um not wanting to sell it to the speciality market so there's two basically two
types of coffee in terms of quality commodity and speciality commodity is what most people do here
and that means that you don't you don't have to mess about with like selecting the perfect cherry
because on one branch this is not a good example but on one branch sometimes you'll find overripe
well here's one that's overripe with perfectly ripe with underripe so for speciality the flavors
will be very different if you pick them at the wrong time even within a few weeks you're going
to miss out on the peak flavor so to be able to sort of sell to someone like simon you've got to
be really careful you'll be very disciplined with the way that you harvest around here it's this
this eastern part of the country is the poor half of the country the big wealthy uh coffee
farms are in mostly in the west and they'll be doing more specialty here it's more commodity
so the farmers they'll just like strip all of them all the leaves real quick get in your bag you get
paid per pound so the workers are incentivized to work fast just strip the branches you want you
don't at the end of the harvest you don't want to have any cherries left on the branch everything's
probably better otherwise bugs will start uh living in them and then you have problems um so
yeah the farms around me they'll be typically the harvesting for for commodity and they'll be doing
it at scale to be able to uh you know turn a profit whereas i'm doing mostly speciality
but also some commodity as well because every farm even the top farms will have all qualities
you will still have poor quality coffee on the floor and you have to find a way of selling that
as well so everything gets sold obviously speciality goes to specialty commodity goes
you know to you know what like markets that don't require such a high quality of coffee which is
majority of you can so i mean how how would the the lay person because you know in the town that
we live there's a few micro roasteries that they would call themselves uh how would i know that
they're not just shilling on commodity coffee as specialty coffee.
Is there any way to know?
Is this a problem?
For the layman, not really.
I mean, you can generally tell by the sort of equipment
and the cleanliness of it on their bar
and how they present themselves.
Certainly don't go to what we call second wave coffee chains
because they're typically using a lot of Robusta coffee,
which is, you know, there's two main genetic species.
There's a rapica and there's Robusta.
Robusta is very highly caffeinated
and grown at very low altitudes
and it's very inexpensive
Everywhere here, every high street is a Costa
or a Niro
They're all lining their blends with Robusta
because it's cheap and they get more margin
and when you roast it really dark, you just get that black
coffee flavour off it, so most people
don't really discern anything different
So I would say to
your viewers or listeners
seek out your local specialty coffee shop
and support that, I mean 70% of the world drinks
commodity coffee
people armors can't survive on it which is why a lot of kids growing up in places like this i mean
you drive around and you see so many farms and the the the plants are just the coffee trees are
just dense with fruit nobody's picking them because i mean we've met already met one person
who's just not interested in taking over their family farm i mean the shrewd ones are going to
university and they're doing biochemistry and then they're coming back to the farm and saying
right folks we've watched you just like work yourselves practically to the bone for nothing
we're going to take over the farm so you sit down and then they're going to do what Maurizio is
doing with with Harry who's coming at it from a much more scientific point of view and playing
with different processes and and really trying to elevate the quality of it so that people like me
then pay more for it because the only way to survive but consequently it's making it quite an
exciting industry but for for your local guys just find your local specialty coffee shop and support
them and buy your coffee there because what harry didn't say is that for every cup of coffee of this
caliber as it's becoming it's been through about 20 to 25 pairs of hands so when you think about
that pipeline and that everybody
along that pipeline has to be paid
all of a sudden
£3.50 or £3.75
for a flat white isn't
such a bad price. I mean
it's too cheap. The espresso
room guys in London that started it and set
the reference point came
in too cheap. It should have even back in the 90s
should have been the price it is today
and then we could have worked our way on.
Wow.
All right.
So
espresso are you an espresso maximalist or do you dabble with the uh the milk is that kind of uh
not the thing to do depends on the time of day i i my favorite way to drink it is a
it's a double espresso and but but if i've i've had a couple of those i might take like a macchiato
or a flat white so i'm not i'm not uh fascist when it comes to putting milk in it yeah but i don't
like a lot of milk because it's it's a bit like taking i've said to somebody yesterday i think
it's a bit like taking like a 2000 and 2007 bordeaux and in eastern europe they put coke in
in their red wine yeah you know why why would you why would you do that if you're work if you're
drinking a you know a really nice washed ethiopian hunkute uh why would you put milk in it because
you want to taste all of the characteristics that you know the jasmine and the bergamot and
all the things that make that such a wonderful coffee harry uh probably less so uh because
my my lifestyle here doesn't really allow for too much you know expectations regarding quality
of anything really i just have this big i just turned it off now actually because it was overheating
i've just got this big coffee maker there's a lot of people right very early on in this project
especially when i was living by the tent people would come like the guy that delivers the water or
the builders and then the staff here and then alias the my neighbor uh everybody wants a coffee
you know so i have to i have to i have to provide for them so i just do a big filter canister of it
and then just out yeah big batch yeah so that's what i've got used to and i like it you've not
got the espresso machine hooked up.
No, I have a roaster now.
Since a few days, I have a roaster.
So I looking forward to getting working on that I think when you project like this Daniel you got to get your ducks in a row in terms of equipment And so an espresso machine is quite far down the line
Yesterday, Harry took delivery of a new sample roaster
called the Bullet Roaster,
which is going to be a big game changer
in terms of them being able to roast small lots of coffee
from the farm to taste what it might end up like
and refine and tweak different things.
And then probably they need a moisture meter,
which is a thousand dollars and so a really fancy italian espresso machine is not the order of the
day really is it not yet give it a couple of years and it all cycles and then you'll be flying uh so
harvest wise what does that look like yeah you know they just literally strip the beans you don't
prune back the plants the pruning comes after because as i said there's a rainy season and
a dry season and the rainy season starts in about may and um that dictates the the the schedule of
the farm so you finish uh the harvest probably in about february and it gives you a few months to
start preparing for the rainy season because it's it rains so heavily you can't really do much in
that period so the pruning will happen then we're gonna have to do a lot of pruning this year it's
some old plants that just need to come down there's some plants that just need removing
replacing and we have about 6 000 small plants in the nursery and they're all going to be planted
as well just before the rainy season just before as well because obviously you need the you need the
rain comes quite regularly usually at about the same time every day in the night time so you can
usually get stuff done in the daytime and then deluge you know afternoon evening but the harvesting
itself yeah like i said you're going to be picking most of the time one by one just the
just the perfect cherries you know it's very labor intensive to get high quality coffee
very hard work yeah so
i we we obviously i swapped a book for a bag of coffee that's how i got my hands on some of your
coffee how far away are you from getting it out can people buy from you yet in bitcoin what what's
what's the kind of business model going forward next two to four years next two to four years
well immediately um i have coffee for sale in el salvador um not yet from the recent current harvest
for the uk and europe we're going to be talking probably when like may yeah may june time hopefully
yeah and that'll be when the brand properly launches in europe in the uk so then and what's
the brand name la cruz la cruz right i remember now yes i remember the label yeah
and then that will be that will be then uh available to order online with bitcoin and bear in mind
every aspect every part of the supply chain that could be denominating bitcoin has been
all the way from the builders merchant that we were at this morning they accept bitcoin so i
can buy my building materials with bitcoin my staff i pay with bitcoin and then my staff when
they go and buy something they can buy something and if it's in bitcoin they just send me the bill
and i'll pay it back so we have this great little system going here that's working really well
and some of the folks they they're not even bitcoiners it's still not really bitcoiners
but they're loving using it they don't really know and they don't they're not talking about
like you know hard money or any of that sort of ideological stuff it's just like oh this is great
this is really handy so i can just go and buy my food i can just go and do this um so that's a
really exciting part of the project and you'll know when you buy the coffee over there that that's
that bitcoin is going to go straight back into that circular economy and it's just going to keep
sort of feeding itself going forward and that's you know that's one of the really exciting things
about this project because that's that's that is new you know on an international level and what
i've been doing also recently i work very closely with the local community there's a football club
that i play with simon scored actually at the weekend his debut we just i just brought everybody
down there was about four of us gringos there playing towering header at the far post simon
was that the order of nobody was the target man i was just like trying to play off him
um and they've got a young lads team and they really just don't have they don't have the
equipment you know they'll have games cancelled at the last minute because the opposition's
uh vehicle broke down and it's it's they need support so i've sponsored them i've got them
strips i've got them boots and uh most of that has come from fundraising with the geyser platform
and obviously all of that has been bitcoin uh so that this this sort of in like moving
donating internationally because a lot of those donations came when i was back in the uk
uh coming back to the farm going to the football club when i sell the coffee the sign was saying
we're going to work with lm bits to to implement the split payments some of that can go to the
football club as well some of that to the farm some of that to other parts of the supply chain
so that for me is a really interesting part of this project and especially from the perspective
obviously of a Bitcoiner probably the most interesting aspect for a Bitcoin I would say
the coffee aspect is fascinating as well for me but for a Bitcoiner maybe that the payment rails
is what would sort of catch their attention for sure and hopefully Josias is listening
maybe you've met Josias Carbon he runs the Bitcoin Ballers in the UK at Bedford I met him
Yeah, he'd love to hear that football story.
I'd love to hear about that for sure, yeah.
Yeah, he'd love to get involved and support in some way
or perhaps even assemble a team and get them out there
and have a friendly, international friendly against your local club.
How good would that be? Yeah.
That'd be amazing.
How good would that be?
So are you going to launch then to BTC Prague officially?
Well, no, that's not decided at all.
Well, that's in June.
that's your timeline well you know who knows who knows possibly possibly it'll be around that time
i know that much and obviously being british um uh well i've lived in germany but uk is going to be
the focus to start with um but you know working with simon what that does as well is it opens up
the European market because Belfast doesn't have the trade barriers.
So we have the two markets and they're sort of, you know, available to us.
There's a bit of, there's a, there's a, you know,
we talked earlier about the sort of volumes that LaCruz is going to be able
to commit to, which is not really enough to economically justify
sending a container from here to us.
so the hope would be to have it launched by june but what we'll probably try and do is consolidate
a container so harry has a lot of contacts with other farmers here now and if if they're of a
similar quality and a high enough quality then we'll look to pull in and some of them are bitcoiners
as well down in santa anna there's a there's a norwegian guy's bought a coffee farm doesn't know
anything about coffee bought it more for a site to build a house on but harry's potentially going
be looking after his coffee so if we consolidate a container and get it afloat by sort of march
april then there's no reason why why you know june couldn't be a target window that would be
i tell you what i hope people are listening that are into uh especially shadrach who's building out
the um like the the the pleb infrastructure for shipping uh the need originally came from all the
artwork the the artists were finding it very very difficult to ship their art from conference to
conference uh reliably and uh they were getting charged uh ridiculous fees at point of uh you
know receivership hidden costs that they weren't expecting which was a real pain in the ass so
yeah if you listen to shadr i'll send it across to him because um he's he's building out like the
idea of this mesh to dell that uh there will be a service and he's building it that bitcoiners can
lean into and he started with art and i know he's uh shipped other things uh i don't know exactly
what for sure i think might be starting to ship wine as well soon and um yeah i'm sure i'd love
to hear about what you guys are doing and if you then can lean into that bitcoin circle economy
like the shipping area and bypass the usual customs headaches
and whatever else and all of that cost and the insurance
and everything that goes with it as well.
Just shipping a container of coffee is not a simple thing, right?
You've got many moving parts in that.
Yeah, and if it doesn't leave the port on time
and it's sitting in this kind of temperature,
you know it has to be nine to twelve percent moisture content by the time it reaches our
roastery in belfast too high moisture content you're going to get fungus on it it's not going
to taste good too low you can't roast it so there's a lot of you know moving pieces
that have to work just right for for the coffee to be in the right state for whenever it reaches
reaches us so yeah and we're you know we're going to be working on all of that and uh
so the idea is like the coffee is going to get to you and you're going to take over from that point
uh with the roasting and yeah it's really you know it's collaborative in the sense that
harry's looking after the origin side of things and uh producing them the coffee and then our job
as roasters is really i mean ultimately i've always kind of preached that all the glory should
go to farmers as roasters our job is simply to highlight what is already in the bean we can add anything or subtract we can subtract from it we can we can make a mess of roasting it but our job is just to elevate the the produce that the farmers created so
um and that's what we'll we'll we'll attempt to do and and i think also we're realistic enough to
say that this is not going to be you know a panama geisha which is a you know which is a very very
very pedigree varietal that fetches hundreds of dollars per pound to the Chinese for example this
is a work in progress and so I guess it would be a case of just inviting people to every year taste
the new harvest and they will see that it's getting better and it's getting better and it's getting
better and it's even though it's significantly better than the cups that I see on every bitcoin
podcaster's desk which is generally dunkin donuts or starbucks or pratt or something like that i mean
the bitcoin community particularly the influencers definitely need to educate they need to spend less
time reading hayek and more time studying coffee love it uh yes um right okay so how would you make
a mess of the roasting process so obviously you've got the beautiful roaster uh in in your premises
there uh talk us through that process well it's like cooking it's like cooking meat
it's uh which i know will resonate with your listeners uh it's uh you know anytime you cook
food there's a process called caramelization that takes place so when you're roasting coffee
generally there are three there are three phases to it that are kind of critical that you get right
and the first phase is just what's called the drying phase so you're just you're just driving
the water and the moisture out of the coffee to some degree so that's when it goes from green to
to yellow and that might last five minutes so it's quite a long part of the process
and then you kick into the next phase and where they start to go from yellow to brown which is
called the maillard phase maillard is named after a french french uh scientist who um who really
unlocked what was going on during the during the cooking process and uh where sugars are created
and then it creates a cascade process where a new chemical compound is is kind of created out of what
just happened which then reacts with another one and it's just like a snowball going down a hill
so you've got to use telemetry different probes in the roaster at different parts of it to try
and figure out how to manage that with airflow and with heat and then the last phase when you
put a lot of heat into a coffee bean it's um it's endothermic so it absorbs all of the heat that you
can throw at it and then it gets to a point where it can't contain it any longer and it explodes
which is what we call first crack so you're kind of listening for first crack
and it generally explodes out the little seam in the in the coffee bean and it's quite it's quite
it's quite audible you can generally you can't hear it in our roaster because of how it's designed
but you can see it on the chart on the telemetry and then after that is the is really the development
phase where you figure out how much development you want to give the bean we roast really light
because we buy the best quality green coffee in the world.
So we want people to taste the intrinsic characteristics
of that particular coffee.
If you roast dark, then you could be drinking anything.
It's not really our bag.
So those are the three phases of coffee roasting.
And you manipulate it either way.
One thing that I've learned that your listeners might find interesting,
especially because Bitcoin is typically quite health conscious.
And as Simon pointed out,
that doesn't translate to their coffee drinking habits at all, it seems.
like I said all farms have all qualities you're going to have some which have insects have been
living in it and it's going to have like a bitter flavor or there's going to be some that have too
much sugar not enough sugar all kinds of issues still coffee you can still drink it the worst
coffee we get from here I'll just have it in the morning get up have a coffee it's still so much
better than like the typical coffee that i've had throughout my life in various cafes so it makes me
wonder what the hell is going on with those coffees and you know i don't i don't know i don't know how
the coffee can can be that bad but the the coffees that you generally drink from like starbucks and
dunkin donuts we're gonna there's gonna be a lot of unhealthy things probably going in there and
We're talking a lot of chemicals, probably damage to the local environment,
all kinds of environmental impacts that I think the Bitcoiners
would be keen to educate themselves on.
So I think this is perhaps something which they should –
oh, sorry, the cats just come on the screen –
which they might want to – another rabbit hole potentially
for the Bitcoiners to look at going down.
there is coffee chain on Nostra. Do you see that?
Possibly. Yeah. Yeah.
There's a few coffee Nostra profiles that I'm in contact with.
What's that one?
There's just like the coffee chain is take a picture of your morning coffee,
espresso, wherever you are.
Oh, like a hashtag.
Hashtag coffee chain. Yeah. Good morning. Hashtag coffee chain.
And yeah. So there are some out there, but yeah.
The other thing that really irks me with those big coffees that you'll see,
just the plastic shitty waxy paper that is lining the cups so whenever we do go out for coffee you
know i'll insist that i'm only going to drink coffee from uh a china cup and uh you want to
see at least the cups being warmed on top of the machine as well you know like and i i'm no geek
about this stuff but there are certain lines that i uh you know have drawn in the sand and and they
are well find your local specialty coffee house and make sure that they're going to serve that to
you in a china cup otherwise i'm not buying i'm not interested yeah yeah well if you've time daniel
you should come over to our roastery in belfast because we use derrick wilson ceramics and he's
the one of ireland's best ceramicists and so you'll get your you'll get your coffee out of
a pretty pocket cup if you come over well let's shill uh where is your business so if anybody can
get across and uh east belfast uh so root and branch coffee roasters we did have other cafes but
wound those down during covid so we've just got the espresso bar at the roastery now but
you know we get a fair amount of bitcoiners coming through which is which is always good
so uh it's a beautiful location it's really worth a visit you're on uh you're on btc maps i hope
uh yeah we are yeah excellent so if nathan's listening he'll be happy to hear that
And you can list as well as a merchant on Club Orange and people can reach out and find you there.
Yeah, because.
2026, this has to be the year of, you know, spedding, right?
That's let's get Bitcoin moving through, you know, people's hands so they can see how easy it is to interact with it.
You know, 2025.
That's what I really enjoy here, Daniel.
sorry to interrupt is that it's very difficult to spend it at home yeah but here like everywhere
and it's actually really it's like laughing with harry it's you know it's it's so counter the
hodl mindset but actually it's more pleasurable spending it than it is even just accumulating it
because uh you know you're you're making a difference in people's lives like a while ago
I said to my there's a guy I was using as a PT who was a European champion kickboxer and I said
to him look I'll buy 10 sessions from you on the condition that I pay you in Bitcoin this was this
was three years ago um and I said in like a few years this will be the most expensive training
session anyone's ever paid for from you and sure enough like it's it's like six x'd and uh and when
you're doing that with local people here you just it's it feels good you know and we should be doing
more of this back up yeah no more paper bitcoin no more it's only a store of value and let's you
know just use it to issue stable coins on the back of it like let's just start using the fucking stuff
and you know making it a medium of exchange because that's the only way that we we do move
away from the fiat rails like it's and I don't believe in the the narrative of building the
bridge between the fiat system and the bitcoin it's like no there's no bridge like we're over
here doing our thing and this is a better thing and it's better for everybody involved and it's
going to lift up your community and your society so yeah what you're doing is is amazing and
And so had the guy that you bought the farm from,
was he just down to accept Bitcoin?
You had to have a conversation or he's like...
No, it went through an intermediary.
So he wasn't actually a Bitcoiner.
He wasn't actually a Bitcoiner, but he's, yeah.
But we made it happen.
Right.
Well, good for you.
Yeah.
Good for you because it's just too easy to say,
yeah, okay, then yeah, we'll just settle in fiat.
but that's one thing a lot of people in the uk are worried about right that they want to use
the the proceeds to now buy a house and well it'd be a lot easier if you could just buy your house
with bitcoin yeah well we're not there yet really in europe are we no we're near maybe one day
yeah all right lads well we'll start winding it down but i always finish with the same question
if you had one last orange pill
to give to somebody who would you give it to
and why
who would I give the orange pill to
and why
I don't know what do you think Simon
living
person it would be someone
as influential as possible I suppose
yeah let just say Donald Trump just because he influential because he clearly not orange bill no or he just stacking as much as he can for himself
who who would i who would i give it to i think um
i mean i don't know it'd be great to see change in the uk like somebody that was influential in
the UK that could actually lean on the powers that be to open it up and take it out of the hands of
our absolutely awful regulators like the FCA and so I mean do you give it to Keir Starmer is he
going to be in there long enough oh hi I go to the king like does he have any real power anyway
because it's the civil service to give it to King Charles well if he carks it in a few weeks that
was a waste of an orange pill maybe maybe better give it to William so I'm at a bit of a loss there
yeah sorry can't be of any more help
the next person that walks in your coffee shop how about that
oh no they get it anyway Daniel
so what's
is there an ask here of the listeners are you guys looking for help in any way
if somebody's listening and they've been inspired and has got a certain skill set
that might be able to help you out
what are you looking for
I am
I need a lot of help
there's a lot of opportunities here
anybody who's
involved in coffee
and is a Bitcoiner, reach out
even if it's just
for a chat
help with regards to
my Geyser fund
for the Lads football team
we've raised $1300 in 6 months
we bought them football boots
we bought them kit
that's going to be a relationship that continues
as long as this project continues
and the next step is keeping the wild horses off the pitch
so we need to build
some fencing down there
and it needs a lot of work so essentially any help with that would be fantastic
we're just promoting it, that would be great
well and Harry's being altruistic
thereby because none of that
directly affects him and that's the kind of
integrity that he's got um apart from probably makes him feel better when he's helping all of
these guys out um but i would say i mean i would say help what harry's doing his this morning
mauricio who's his main coffee guy and i were around the town putting posters up trying to
attract pickers to come and pick the coffee um and it's really difficult to get them so if somebody
at home is 18 19 20 21 22 years of age or whatever age wants to come over and say right well next
next february or next december to february i'm going to go and live in a tent like harry did and
i'm just going to pick coffee every day or donate money to buy power tools because it's really
difficult to run a farm without without power tools and all of this will just speed things up
and and he is making a big difference in in people's lives here so you can rest easy knowing
that every sat like harry and his team here are maxing it out so it's it's it's brilliant
if you can visit visit but if you can't fling a few sats in the direction of the farm to just
expedite things so harry if there's a bunch of guys out there want to come and experience it
work away holiday um shield the idea where would they stay nearby and they could still have a bit
of fun a few beers in the evening get out and coffee picking and helping the project during
the day it's a it's it's it's good crack it was good crack from day one if i'm honest um
especially especially alias you see him over there it's a bit blurry
he is a constant source of entertainment
honestly and he's there every day
we have
rudimentary accommodation
Mauricio is, we call it the scorpion shed
because we did find
scorpions in there to start with
but they now realise that
they should stay away
we've got the tents, we've got these two
we're going to expand the on-site accommodation
so that for the next harvest
we can have people living here and just harvesting
food
we have
it's
yeah we've got
Berlin just up the road, you can get everything you need
there, it's a good
experience. Are there any
B&Bs in Berlin? Yeah there's
all of that as well
so people could literally like go and
hang out in Berlin and then come
during the day, help you out
do the coffee picking, go back
to the Airbnb. Absolutely
that's also an option
but essentially
anyone who
like me is in Europe.
I know it's quite cold over there right now.
Here we've got beautiful weather.
Maybe next winter, even if you're not a coffee person,
even if you're not a big corner,
you might just want the experience
because you're going to learn Spanish here real quick
because most of the people that I'm working with here
don't speak any English.
So my Spanish, you know, my background is languages.
I've learned German at university.
I've learned Spanish so quickly
because I'm just having to use it all the time.
Constantly problem solving, you know.
um every day there's a new there's a new uh there's a new problem to solve it really sharpens
you it's really i've like i've grown in this last year more than i think i can i have in any other
year that i can remember in my life uh in in so many different ways and the opportunity is there
you know for other people too uh and beyond that as well people who want to do something similar
and take control of a project start their own project i can help you know specifically in
in El Salvador because here really is Bitcoin country. You can use it every day. You can pay
your staff with it. No one's going to laugh at you when you suggest if you can pay for something
in Bitcoin. Anywhere in the country. You go anywhere and you say, would you accept Bitcoin?
They know what you're talking about and they consider it. They don't just laugh in your face
like they would do in Europe. So anyone who's a Bitcoiner, for sure, you have to get out here
and see what opportunities might be there for you. And if not, just have a great time because
you've got beautiful weather. The surf's great down there at the beach. We're up in the mountains
now it's a nice temperature it's not too hot a bit further down you've got more tropical hot weather
um and it's a bit of a rough diamond you know it's just recently opened up so there's just a
lot of opportunity and i recommend people giving it a giving it some thought excellent so where can
people reach out to you both and then i'll point them your direction reach out to me i suppose your
audience is uh going to be an uh sort of on primal or not primal sorry on nosta or or x uh lacrus
coffee my account is lacruz boss uh also on instagram most of my content goes on instagram
i'm documenting it i'm doing a documentary as well the pilot is on instagram it's also on x
follow me there also youtube will be started soon for the continuation of that documentary
and my website lacruzcoffee.com and you can find me in any of those really excellent simon
uh root and branch dot coffee r-o-o-t-a-n-d-b-r-a-n-c-h um for anybody who wants to sign
up for a really good coffee subscription um and uh and i'm on x and nostra as well
cy johnston is my my handle on those um and then we have our own social medias with root and branch
i don't look after those but i'm sure people can find them excellent all right well i hope people
reach out and will we see you at any of the conferences around europe or are you sticking
to well you will i'm i'm i plan things late but you'll see me there some of them i don't know
which one yet we'll we'll we'll definitely do some some when the coffees when the collab comes out
we'll uh we'll we'll do we'll do i mean we may do something at the london coffee festival
as well you know not not exclusively just bitcoin stuff because you know they're preaching bitcoin
to bitcoiners is uh is not as fun as preaching bitcoin yeah interestingly here obviously i'm
traveling around a lot of country around the country a lot i'm meeting a lot of farmers
there's a lot of interest in bitcoin here from farmers you know and we're talking about people
with a lot of coffee that sell a lot of coffee all the time and always looking for new ways to get
new to access new markets to find new customers bitcoin is very interesting to people here
because they can see how it's used they can see how when they have it how they can spend it right
it's not just it's not it's not it's not something that's like abstract in the way that perhaps some
business owner in the uk might see it so um using it the way that we plan to use it and then showing
it to the the coffee world is a good opportunity to show to sort to sort of pioneer a new way of
of doing coffee that might appeal to somebody who doesn't care about uh inflation or the typical
thing that bitcoin might care about they might just care about transparency and we've got that
you know charities you want to give your money to to oxfam and let them you know pay how many other
people before it reaches the person you want it to reach or do you want to do a split payment where
you can see the wallet of my farmer and the football club receive it immediately it's verifiable and
it's transparent and i'm really hoping that people are going to see that and try and uh and come to
me and say look how do i do it i want in from a slightly different angle it's a sort of a different
orange pill you know that's how i see it i mean you're rug pulling the existing coffee chain
brilliant with this insofar as if it if it's the trader on the exchange it doesn't actually
contribute anything to the product itself but siphons a lot of the value off if it's the if
it's the currency trader because we're all moving in and out of fiat currencies to pay for this stuff
again what are they actually providing to the end product they're providing nothing so really the only
people that should be benefiting from this are the people that are handling the coffee so what this is doing is it's
it's disintermediating all the non-value providers to the supply chain,
which is significant.
So farmers and laborers and baristas are going to end up getting paid
significantly more via Bitcoin than they are through,
through Fiat, which is, you know,
which besides the fact that it tastes really good and much better should mean
that most of us just automatically go, well,
I'm not going to buy any other coffee from this point.
If I can buy a Bitcoin orientated coffee.
inevitable
fingers crossed
Simon would we be able to
tempt you south of the border to
Bitcoin Island in Dublin
I was down I did
something out of it a couple of years ago Daniel
and I haven't been back since
but if I'm free
sure I'll
Lawrence and Dinny they run
I think it'll be the fourth year and there's going to be a
three or four day event this year in Dublin
yeah yeah yeah
Yeah. Hook up with them and see if you can get down there and give a talk about what you're both trying to achieve here, because he would love to have that story on stage, I'm sure.
Yeah. Great. All right, Daniel. Thanks for the tip off.
No problem. Right, lads, I'll leave you to it.
I'm sure you've got some coffee to go and harvest and some cats and chickens to run after from what I've been watching.
So catch you later. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, Daniel. See you. Nice to meet you.
Bye bye. See you guys.
well there you go thank you so much for listening thank you to harry and simon for coming on and
sharing your experiences absolutely inspiring uplifting i hope everybody's got a lot of
inspiration and value from this episode you can just do things you can just buy coffee farms for
bitcoin in other far countries that i mean that where we at right now and here is the proof And from there you can start thinking about building out completely new supply chains based around Bitcoin and sell your product in Belfast in a coffee shop that is accepting Bitcoin trying to stack Bitcoin onto the balance sheet trying to educate people about Bitcoin
The whole system that they're building around their shared love of coffee is incredible.
And I know for sure there's someone now listening to this episode and perhaps not this rant or ramble afterwards.
You might just turn it off at that point.
But something has been said here that's inspired you to start thinking about your own life and what you want to be doing over the next five to 20 years.
building something completely new this is the thing that bitcoin gives you it affords you to
become your true self it affords you to be able to start following your instincts and following your
interests and turning perhaps what is a a passionate hobby into a lifestyle into a business
you know that there are if you if you if you are thinking in this way and you've you might have the
means uh you you're probably at that point of making excuses in your own mind that you'll be
hitting some barriers uh you might still be trapped in a fiat job where you've got
restricted stock units or something hanging over your head believe me i know i've been there
I had to walk away from all of that and fear those demons.
This is why I wrote my book, Choose Life.
If you want to go and check that out, please head over to bitcoinbook.shop
and grab yourself a copy It available in English and Spanish And it about how my wife and I escaped the fiat lifestyle before we found Bitcoin It was after we escaped that I had the time and energy and interest and
need to find Bitcoin and that's how I found it. But I had to get myself out of those chains first
and thank goodness I did. But it's not easy. It's not easy. You have so many circumstances
surrounding you, your social construct, that career that you've painted yourself into a corner to,
and these commitments that you might have that honestly, once you take a closer look at your
fears, they start melting away once you start taking more of an active control and taking more
of the reins over your life and the trajectory of what you're trying to achieve. And Bitcoin
changes you it changes everybody it changes your ability to just do things and that is the magic of
it and that's what I love exploring on this podcast with these stories from just two perfectly normal
gents that were going around their business until Bitcoin come up and tapped them on the shoulder
and changed everything it will happen to you if you keep stacking but please take self-custody
like I said at the beginning, do not fall into the trap of being lazy there. There is nothing more
important than taking self-custody of your Bitcoin. You have to be the only one with the ability to
access and move that Bitcoin. And the only way you can do that is with a hardware wallet. So go and
do your own research. But if you want to trust me, Bitbox has been around for a long, long time,
a long time and you know they've they've done brilliant brilliant work in the space
educational work as well get over to the website bitbox forward slash bitten read through their blogs have a look at their offering look at the bitbox o2 all the bitbox nova they both bitcoin only and then just go for it just order
a bitbox and start playing around with it and set up your your self-custody
solution like i said at the beginning as well
Relay are there for you to stack sats, R-E-L-A-I dot C-H forward slash Bitten.
And you can start stacking sats with Relay today.
If you want to set your business up, they're there to help you.
If you need white glove service, they're there to help you.
There's a private team.
If you are high net worth individual or orange pilling, high net worth individuals, it's all there for you.
They have got you.
Paywithflash.com is the best place for you to go to start and accepting your Bitcoin for your goods and services.
i'm out of music last thing i'll say is club orange going from strength to strength almost
at 20 000 users that's bitcoiners around the world ready to connect with you and if you are
the lonely bitcoiner if you're the only bitcoiner in the village get on orange pill app i guarantee
you you're going to find someone within 15 to 50 miles of you that you can go and have a coffee with
and break out of the normie noise and go and have a one-to-one head-to-head conversation with
somebody that sees the world at least at least in one area money real money that sees the world the
same as you it's a life-changing and uh you've got to break out we were at our meetup last night
our local meetup there were 10 people five of them were aged 18 or below so it's just great to
see that the youngsters are coming out and getting involved as well anyway i've banged on far too much
thank you so much for listening hope you enjoyed the show catch you on the next one