Oak City Coffee Roasters: Fueling Body and Soul

In a little garage in Raleigh NC, Bill Landahl is roasting coffee with a special ingredient--love. From the farms to your morning cup, every step of this process has heart.

Oak City’s eight varieties of coffee are hand picked and processed in small communities across the world. Favorite varieties like Kabum! from Uganda or Valiente from El Salvador foster a direct relationship from farmer to consumer. Bill pays these coffee farmers two to three dollars above the market value of coffee. Bill says, "If you care, that is the difference."





Roasting is the chemical process of bringing out light, medium, and dark flavors to suit our tastes. Bill roasts his coffee beans in a vintage machine that fills the space and near-by noses with deep comforting aromas.  Through his business, Bill is also including adults with autism in the operations. These special adults are employed to apply all the labels on the finished product.

The warm brew in your hands is more than a product or purchase. It is a compassionate investment in the cultivation of community.

Oak City Roasters is a leader in creating sustainable global coffee systems.

Bill explains, when you grow, and the path you started on no longer fits, you don't give up on your dreams, you live them.

            

Get your bag of roasted beans at Red Hill General Store in Raleigh, North Carolina! and visit the oak city website.  

Creating an Abundant Life: Buffalo Mountain Kombucha Tea

There is much to learn at the Buffalo Mountain Kombuchery.

"in the life abundant and enough honest wealth to help make it so--for others as well as myself;" of the 4th paragraph in the National FFA Creed.

This is a business and a product of land and cultural legacy. What's more?
The wisdom of making Kombucha tea brings health to the spirit and our living bodies.

meet Cassie & Scott, artists, farmers, story tellers and tea makers -

When I asked Cassie "why kombucha?" she responded with warm simplicity, "to create abundance in our lives."

Learn about kombucha tea (and fermentation) and their kombuchery on their awesome website here. It does a wonderful job explaining #kombuchaflow

Inside the walk-in fridge Cassie let me photo the "mothers" (have you ever had apple cider vinegar with 'the mother'?).

My favorite part?
There are mantras on every brew. Here are some photos of the tea before it is bottled.

Buffalo Mountain Kombucha Tea has been commercially inspected by VDAC for three years. 

I asked Cassie if she had any advice for young people trying to incorporate sustainable design for creating universally conscious and responsible business ethics? Because, let's be serious, we live here AND we all like environmental well-being, economical well-being and having happy friends that are people. 

Cassie explained, 

Don't make rash decisions. Do what makes you happy. It has everything to do with your INTENTION. Awareness doesn't come easy. Beware of the ego mind and let go of the fear that is created within it.  

The world would do well to listen to more businesses like this one. 

Cheers to another product that is good for the planet, the economy and human society. 

Want to try fermentation? We have objective info and fermentation crock selection on our website.  

The three flavors of Kombucha tea will be available in our stores early next week. 

GET EXCITED. We will post a deal to our facebook page. 

Reasons to support local businesses & how you're helping us build community

Image from the Institute for local self reliance. 

While I’m not really one for re-posting images with neat little sayings on them, this one happened to catch my eye and stand out to me. I saw the post below on facebook recently and thought it had some piratical advice. If we all work together - maybe we can create communities that make our families happy and healthy. At Red Hill General Store in Hillsville & Raleigh we're already working on some of these very things that businesses with a shopkeepers bell - those businesses that are locally owned and operated - should all be doing.

  

We try to promote those things that make leaving your house worth-while. I’m guilty of not doing this enough.  I keep making excuses as to why I can’t… mostly the lack of money… but I start getting restless with cabin feaver when I haven’t left the house in awhile.  To me, home starts to feel like a prison and I start feeling like a caged animal. I even get on my own nerves.  Sure even mundane things like trips to the grocery store are better than sitting and staring at the same ceiling and walls. But we've got free drive-in movies - schedule below! - and that's a pretty good excuse.

Selling flowers to be planted in gardens or buckets across the community is beautiful work. They’re nice to look at, they smell pretty good and there’s something to be said about working with dirt and seeds.  There’s a kind of satisfaction in planting a seed and watching it grow into something beautiful…  Also, flowers attract bees… and we need bees… or we die.

Put up a swing - Because who doesn't enjoy the feeling of weightless flying?

Then preserve the food you grew in your own garden with your canner. There’s nothing like popping open a jar of homemade jam on a blustery winter day, as our grandmothers knew all too well. Once maligned as unnecessary and labor-intensive, home canning has undergone a renaissance. A new generation is discovering that there’s something uniquely satisfying about preserving the season’s best produce.

Start a tradition - and we believe in starting meaningful traditions like the 18 mile Hillsville flea market, our summer movies, and going to see our wind-turbine provide clean energy in the Appalachian mountains. It's pretty small at only 100 feet and powers just one farm in Fancy Gap- but it's all this local business could afford. Tom Largen was quoted when we celebrated the powered-by-free-fuel machine beginning, "It's about doing everything you can - with what you have - every change you get."

We hire neighborhood young people for odd jobs like building our home-grown wind-turbine, setting up our drive-in movie screen, or taking pictures of cowbell for our website. The sense of entitlement some young people have today is flabbergasting, but on the other hand, kids shouldn't be treated as slave labor either. They need that common-sense work ethic we've been passing along in the Red Hill family since we stated.

We need a more humane and sustainable definition of success that includes well-being, wisdom, wonder, empathy, and the ability to give back. There is a big conference on this - and article "Beyond Money and Power (and Stress and Burnout): In Search of a New Definition of Success." This challenge - just like seeking to understand - requires participation individually and collectively. We can no longer go throughout our days unaware and uncaring. We must be mindful, present in our experiences, and determined to figure our the best ways to do things and how we can create them.

Subscribe to our blog (using the menu on the right)! We'll talk about wind's economic viability in Carroll County and how it might save our farms and heritage from housing development. You won't want to miss this.

Happiness Is Homegrown

Are you busy right now? Already behind on what you wanted to accomplish today? this week? this year? We are obsessed with time. We have a fear that if we don’t to cram as much as possible into our day, we might miss out on something fun, or important, or special.

Blue Ridge Landscape by Orpha Largen

Researchers have given this feeling a name: “time famine.” Feeling like you’re experiencing a time famine has very real consequences, including increased stress and diminished satisfaction with life. Alternatively, one can enjoy “time affluence,” the feeling of having enough time. This surplus-of-time-feeling can be more powerfully uplifting than material wealth, improving not just personal happiness but also physical health and civic involvement. (is is weird I discovered this concept on a blog about chickens?)

Not too long ago the measure of life’s worth was not in how many tasks could efficiently be accomplished in a day. Back when normal folk grew food, worked with their hands, stayed up past sunset in the light of an oil lantern, and held farm corn-shucking where the whole community gathered were once  the things that contributed to a good living, or living well.

Everything we do - projects, work, hobbies, relationships - should begin in delight and end in wisdom. That’s what I learned on the family farm, at least. The wisdom – and the work – comes later. My grandma Orpha Largen was a artist. She found joy in drawing those things that were beautiful in her life. The drawings of the Blue Ridge Landscape and spring flowers below shows her joy and the patient work that comes from a life of raising your own food.

Slow living and slow thinking can help us discover the re-creation of good work: working with care and patience, working with family and friends, and working toward excellence and joy.

When we slow down our work has more meaning.  Is our goal not to be thoughtful, attentive, and mindful as time moves us through our days?

We can escape from our time famine. We have some say. We can turn off our smart phones. We can start using our hands. 

My first suggestion seems too simple and obvious to mention, but it is not. I'm talking about the one step so many people never get around to taking: Begin. By just beginning to act - taking any step - to do something to improve the situation around you, you separate yourself from all the people who are endlessly talking about what needs to be done, or what someone else ought to do.

By deciding to do what has real meaning happiness grows and this set an example others want to follow. It matters how many people decide homegrown happiness is greater than  efficient time-dictated rational labor of the inescapable "iron cage".  

Rediscovering how to grow our collective happiness not just a technical challenge, it's a moral challenge. We - individually and collectively - can create a world of sustainable communities that is the forgotten American Tradition. 

So... Begin. Begin - anyway you can - to grow real happiness. Next, ensure that good happiness will spread - choose to support only those who do so too. 

That's real meaning. That's real power.