The Balinese Word for What We're Already Trying to Do

Years before I ever roasted a bean or wrote a word of the GiaNina Charter, I read about a Balinese idea called Tri Hita Karana — three causes of well-being. It names the harmony between people and other people, between people and nature, and between people and the divine. Farmers on that island have built their entire way of growing food around it for centuries, and coffee is no exception.

Bali's coffee grows high on volcanic slopes, often in the same terraced hillsides that carry water down to the rice paddies through a communal irrigation system called subak. No single farmer owns the water. It's shared, scheduled, and tended together, because everyone downstream depends on everyone upstream doing their part with care. The coffee trees are frequently planted in the shade of larger canopy trees, alongside cacao or citrus, in small family plots rather than sprawling single-crop farms. It's slower. It's more work. And it produces something that tastes like it was grown by people who were paying attention to more than just yield.

I think about that a lot when I'm cupping Velvet Tide, our single origin from that island. It's medium-dark, low in acidity, with a body that sits heavier on the tongue than our other single origins — almost syrupy, with notes of dark chocolate and a faint mineral edge that I've come to associate with volcanic soil. But what I love most isn't just how it tastes. It's what had to be true about the people who grew it for it to taste that way. Patience. Cooperation. A willingness to let the land rest and recover instead of pushing it for one more harvest.

Harmony between people, nature, and something larger than yourself isn't a concept I came up with — it's one I borrowed, gladly, from farmers I'll likely never meet. But it lines up so closely with what Gia and I have tried to build here that I can't separate the two anymore. We believe every person carries inherent worth, whether or not the world around them has gotten around to recognizing it yet. We believe hospitality is love expressed through action, not just a warm feeling you keep to yourself. Somewhere on a hillside in Bali, farmers have been living that out in the way they share a single water source without anyone going without.

There's a version of this that could stay abstract — a nice idea to nod along to. But I'd rather it show up in something you can actually hold. A cup of something slow-grown, shade-grown, shared-grown, sitting in your hands on a Monday morning that didn't ask your permission to be busy. That's the whole intention behind this cup. Not to lecture you about harmony. Just to hand you something that was made with it, so you can taste, in some small way, what it's like when people decide to take care of each other and the ground beneath them at the same time.

GiaNina has always been a shared thing — Gia's hand is in every part of this, even from a distance, and I feel that most on mornings like this one, writing about a harvest built entirely on people looking out for each other. Maybe that's why this particular origin story keeps finding its way back into my mind.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective