Help us rebuild from a wildfire in San Marcos, TX

Misha & Tosca of Springtown Roasters desperately need your support and contributions to help us rebuild our business, home, and property which was ravaged by a wildfire on August 5th, 2023. We started our women-owned craft coffee roasting business in 2017. We roast small batch, specialty-grade coffee at a beautiful roastery that was built on our 5.5 acres of property in the Texas Hill Country outside of San Marcos. Our goal of living sustainably on our land in harmony with our surroundings, striving to use only what we need, with a small footprint has always been in the forefront for the past 20 years. To work from home and provide a product that supports our community, we built our business from the ground up. We decided to offer unique coffees from around the world, focusing on women-producer coffee, Fair Trade Organic coffee, and coffees you don't see every day. One of the most important business goals that we prioritized from the beginning was donating part of our proceeds to local non-profit organizations doing valuable social and environmental work for the community.

For 7 years everything was going great until a wildfire ripped through our property on Saturday, August 5th at 3pm while we were getting ready for the Sunday Buda Farmers Market. Misha went outside to let the dogs out and smelled something burning but saw no evidence of anything. She went back inside to tell Tosca, who within minutes noticed a very strange orange color in the view outside our sliding glass doors. When we walked outside, we saw a huge black plume of smoke billowing over the roastery. Looking up towards our home, we then saw a wall of fire, the sound of whirling flames crackling up to the house porch 200ft away from us. With the quickly advancing firestorm heading directly at us, we only had time to think about getting our phones, grabbing our purses, and throwing the dogs in the van. With the intense heat from the fire and the burning smoke choking our throats, we fled for our lives. While we were escaping, burning embers were already falling on the path between the house and the roastery. As we were driving away into safety and back to San Marcos, the smoke plumes grew bigger and bigger in our rearview mirror. We thought for sure that our dreams, livelihood, and future were part of that enormous cloud of smoke. Thanks to the multiple units of first responders and the firefighters who worked endlessly to get the raging 400-acre fire under control, they saved not only our home and business but also all but one home in the path of the fire.

Our property now looks like a war zone, with our once luscious forest and peaceful views decimated. While we are grateful that we are safe and most of our structures are intact, we still lost a lot. We need your help to replace our melted rainwater tanks that provide our water as we have no well, tools and building supplies that burned, and our storage facility that housed all of our coffee supplies. Our land restoration needs some serious funding to clean the land, install fencing and gates, and create an additional escape route so we have another way off our property in case of an emergency. Anything you can donate will help us tremendously with our efforts to rebuild our dream and get back to what we love, roasting delicious coffee just for you.