Hey everyone and welcome to our new podcast called Coffee &. I'm Philip Klayman and I'm one of the co-founders of Three Tree Coffee and I'm gonna be the host of the Coffee & podcast. And we just wanna take a minute to just share with you why we're starting this podcast. And to do that I need to share a little bit about the history of Three Tree as well. A lot of people think about, uh, when we first started Three Tree, uh, maybe they think about when we first opened our coffee shop in Statesboro in 2015. Maybe people think about when we first started roasting coffee in 2014. Uh, but for me, this journey actually goes back before all that. It goes back to the summer of 2013 when my wife and I were in Indonesia and we met Michelle. Uh, Michelle was a victim of human trafficking and we met her in a coffee shop and we got to hear her story and learn about her struggles.
And what's interesting is that up until this point, I had heard a lot of statistics about human trafficking, but for some reason it never really caused me to action. Pushed me to action. And it was in that moment in Indonesia, in that coffee shop of meeting Michelle, when me and my wife's world turned upside down and we said, this is not okay. This isn't okay. We didn't sleep that night. The next day it was all we could talk about was why are things like this happening in the world to people like Michelle? What if that was one of our family members? Even if it's not one of our family members, these are people we're talking about and this sort of activity, human trafficking is just not okay. And so we left Indonesia saying, no matter what we do in life, we're against that. We're gonna try and end human trafficking.
And it just so happens to be coffee <laugh>. A year later we started roasting coffee in our backyard, kind of more as a hobby, more for fun. And we wanted to use that as our platform. Let's just sell one bag of coffee at a time and see what we can do to start ending human trafficking. And well, things have changed a lot. We now have multiple coffee shops, we have a coffee trolley, we do roasting for lots of other businesses. And the journey has been awesome. But something we've been learning along this journey and something we've been asking ourselves over and over is, what is our role when we're trying to end human trafficking? And something that's becoming more and more clear is that we think our space is to mobilize and educate. We think coffee does a really good job of getting people's attention.
A lot of people like coffee, right? People drink it all over the world. It's a cool concept. People want to feel cool and know all the terms and things like that. And we love that too. We really love specialty coffee, quality coffee, craft coffee. It's so fun for us and it's fun for others, and it draws people in. And so we want to use that platform and use coffee as the medium to start mobilizing our communities to get engaged with anti-trafficking work. And that's why we're starting this podcast. We're naming this coffee podcast 'Coffee &' because to us coffee means so more and it's about so much more than just coffee. Coffee &. So that's why we're starting this podcast. We hope that as you join us in this podcast, two things happen. One, we hope you learn more about coffee, right? We wanna take you further on your coffee journey.
You'll learn more about coffee and different terms with coffee, how it's grown, the specialty coffee industry, different processing methods, different terminologies for different drinks. We have a lot of really fun, uh, education that we wanna bring you to teach you more about coffee and take you further on your coffee journey. But we don't wanna stop there. We also want to help you brainstorm of ways that you can get involved when it comes to anti-trafficking work. And so that's why we're starting this podcast. Uh, there's gonna be three different types of episodes that we do for this podcast. The first one is gonna be called 'Coffee & _____.' And those are gonna be episodes where we are interviewing other organizations that are ending human trafficking. And so maybe it'll be called 'Coffee & Tharros Place', or 'Coffee & Out of Darkness'. So we're gonna be learning from some of these other organizations that are ending human trafficking all over a cup of coffee.
I do wanna give a warning to you that those op episodes titled 'Coffee & _____' will be more sensitive. They'll have more sensitive subjects and topics. Um, this is some, uh, dark and difficult things we're talking about. And so if that's not something you're looking for, we completely understand and we encourage viewer discretion. Another type of episode that you'll see is, uh, a little different. It's called the 3x3x3. It's meant to be a very fun, quick episode just to taste different coffees and hear from a guest about why coffee means more to them. And then lastly, we plan just to do basic coffee education. What is specialty coffee? Um, what is cold brew and why is everyone suddenly loving this cold brew craze? Right? We wanna just start tackling some of these topics and help you learn more about these things. So that's it, that's why we're starting this podcast. We are super excited. We think this is gonna be a really fun platform, but even more importantly, a really fun journey for us to learn more and for you to learn more about coffee and anti-trafficking work. So we hope you join us for the journey, and stay tuned for the next episode coming out soon.
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