Blessings happen
In this one, I would like to highlight blessings that will come along your way, don’t block them. Thankfully in my case, I blocked it initially when a monk I knew offered me his monastery’s industrial grinder that they no longer used, since I had previously mentioned wanting to start a coffee company. At that time I said no, feeling guilty about taking it for free. Shortly after that a friend who was a nun in France for 12 years, told me I should’ve accepted it, that if they weren’t using it, that I should take it, since it was probably given to them in the same manner.
As life went on from this moment in July of 2017, to visiting Vietnam in October of 2017, and roasting the beans I was given, I began to regret my denial of accepting the grinder. I reached out to my friend and I asked him if he could still offer me the grinder as a gift since I was now encountering growth issues in my development. Finally later in my travels, I stopped by and picked it up, which now planted a seed of the importance of good industrial equipment, which saves time for other things through efficiency.
The next phase I was inspired to pursue, was purchasing more traditional instruments (as seen in the opening picture) for making coffee. As I found them for more reasonable prices, I would purchase them, knowing I could serve larger amounts of people in the future. My spending habits were starting to grow into the hundreds, but I remained conservative with how much I would spend each month never going over much more than a couple hundred dollars so I could pay it off each month on my credit card. In addition I began to buy a variety of beans beyond Vietnamese and Ethiopian to expand my cultural experience. Currently I am around 20 different countries. At this point as the 2018 year ended, I had now had a grinder, 50 lbs of coffee beans, several different coffee instruments (Turkish, Ethiopian, Moki pots, Vietnamese filters and a pour over). I was ready to take a leap of faith, that this would be my future, I decided to invest $2600 into my next big purchase after some healthy amount of research.
The 45 lb of coffee I was gifted, in addition the 2 lbs I bought from a small shop in Saigon, that I found on a great YouTube channel called “Best Food Review Show".”