The Morning We Almost Burned a Century of Coffee Roots
We were clearing old coffee trees to make room for a patio and a bodega. The fire was already planned. Then I asked a question.
The trees had been standing since before anyone alive on the finca was born. We were about to give them one afternoon of smoke.
Summary
- Old coffee trees were being cleared from part of the finca to make room for a new patio and a bodega.
- The standard plan was to burn the heavy trunks and roots near where they were dug up.
- Choosing to haul them out instead is how Finca Three Roots began.
Key takeaways
- A hundred-year-old coffee tree leaves behind wood that almost no one has ever worked.
- The default on most fincas is to burn it, because it is too heavy to move.
- Asking "what else could this be" is sometimes the whole business plan.
It started as a clearing job, nothing more. Part of our finca needed to be opened up. We were preparing ground for a new patio and a new bodega, and some of the old coffee trees stood exactly where the concrete had to go. These were not ordinary trees. Several of them were close to a hundred years old, which in coffee terms is nearly a geological age.
I walked up to watch the first ones come out. The crew had loosened the soil around the base and the tractor was straining against a trunk that simply did not want to leave. What came out of the ground was not what I expected. The trunks were enormous, thick as a barrel in places, knotted and twisted, with root balls the size of a small table.
A fire already waiting
I asked Marvin, our farm manager, what we normally did with wood like this. He answered the way anyone on a working farm would. "They are too heavy, Mr. Josh. We burn them close to where we dig them up."
It was a reasonable answer. It is what almost every finca does. A hundred years of growth is dense, awkward, and expensive to move, and a farm has a thousand other jobs. Burning is fast. A pile of roots can disappear in an afternoon, and the land is clear again by dinner.
I looked at the root ball sitting in the dirt, and something in me refused. The grain on the cut surface was pale and creamy, shot through with dark mineral streaks I had never seen in any wood. It looked more like marble than timber.
"No," I said. "Don't burn them. Let's get the tractor and load them up."
Where they went
I knew someone in town with an artisan's shop and a lathe, a person who made things from wood for a living. I did not yet know what we would make. I only knew that something this old should not end as smoke over a field, so we loaded the trunks and drove them down the mountain.
That one decision is the whole origin of what you see on this site. No grand plan, no investor deck. A farmer asked a farm manager what happens to the trees, got an answer he did not like, and changed it.
What it taught us
Looking back, the lesson is less about wood and more about defaults. Every industry has a default way of disposing of what it does not understand. On our finca, the default was a fire. It took one stubborn question to turn waste into the raw material for something we are still learning how to make.
We have written the rest of this journal to tell that story properly: the trees, the turner, the first failures, and the pieces that came out of them.
Common questions
Why were the coffee trees being removed?
Part of the finca was being prepared for a new patio and a new bodega, and coffee trees also need renewing. Replacing old trees with a new generation is a normal part of running a coffee farm.
Are all of your pieces made from trees that would have been burned?
Our pieces come from root balls of old coffee trees that were being cleared. The idea is simple: use what would otherwise be burned, and treat it with the patience it deserves.
Every piece is one of one.
Browse the specimen archive and acquire the piece that speaks to you. Each is catalogued once and sold once.