Marks Blog

Coffee Cherry, it’s a Berry, Pop ‘Em Inna Bag

Already. It’s barely mid-August, and people are picking cherry already. What a year 2008 is turning out to be! A fair number of processors are already calling for coffee cherry, which means they’re making per-pound offers to the smaller coffee farmers for their picked cherry. Coffee cherry, as you no doubt remember from previous posts is the fruit of the coffee tree that contains within it a single coffee bean two smaller beans. Or in the case of Peaberry, a single coffee bean.

When the cherry is sold to one of these buyers, it is processed along with the other farms’ beans the processor buys, and ends up as a one of two kinds of coffee. If all the coffee comes from farms within the official Kona Coffee District, it can be sold as a blended 100% Kona Coffee. Or the green bean can be sold to bigger companies here, or in Honolulu, or in Honduras, and thrown together with coffee from anyplace in the world, of any quality, and sold as the infamous cheat of the coffee industry, so-called Kona Blend, which can be as little as 10% real Kona Coffee.

Imagine buying a hamburger, and finding out it’s made from 10% of good cuts of exceptional, healthy beef, and 90%… anything else they could find. I, myself, would not expect that hamburger to taste like the little bit of good meat they put into it. Far from it.

Kona Mountain does not buy coffee anywhere. We grow our own, taking it from the seed to the beautiful coffee inside your coffee cup in the morning with that incredible aroma wafting around your kitchen telling you that this… this… is 100% Kona Coffee.

But that’s just us. We can’t help it. We’re… okay, to be honest, I’m… driven to create for you the best coffee in the universe. It’s in my blood.

To be fair, some of the 100% Kona Coffees that are blended aren’t bad at all. It’s just that you don’t know from year to year what they’re going to be like, because the beans they use are from different farms that are of different quality, and the proportions are always different. If you find one that you like this year, rest assured, it will be different next year.

All that said, I wanted to let you into one of the BehindTheCoffee.com insiders secrets, and let you know that the prices that the processors are paying for coffee cherry is starting low this year. As low as $1.00 per pound, picked and put into 100 lb. bags. Often times, the processor will pick it up for free. In November of 2007, the price hovered around $1.60 a pound. It is normal for the price to go up week by week as the picking progresses, so it would be reasonable to think that November prices will be about the same this year.

But not necessarily. There is a lot of good quality coffee in Kona this year, primarily because of the effects of the volcanic particles causing extra cloud cover, extra rain, and extra nutrients that get washed off the leaves into the soil that feeds the roots of the coffee trees. Or at least so I believe, and a lot of other people in the community believe the same thing. It just makes sense.

As I also mentioned before, even though there is a lot of coffee, and the buy price looks so low, do not be fooled into thinking the price of retail Kona Coffee will be low this year. The reasons why Kona Coffee has a premium price tag is detailed in my previous posts, and they are all especially operative this year. As you know yourself, the cost of everything is way up this year, and the closer you get to oil, the higher the prices are. Absolutely everything depends on transportation here in Hawaii, and that means our costs increases are some of the highest in the nation.

The good news is that Kona Coffee with probably be exceptionally fine this year, and it will probably be about the same price as last year. That’s as good as we can do, under the circumstances. And I think that makes Kona Coffee an exceptional buy for a touch of class that soothes and melts away the strains of the day.

Let’s see… about $28 a pound, free shipping from Kona Mountain Coffee when you buy three pounds, 2 ounces makes 10 cups…that’s… 35 cents a cup. Just 35 cents. You know, I’m always amazed when I figure that out, no matter how many times I do it. 35 cents to fill your senses with luxury, to smell that incredible smell again. No wonder doing this makes me so happy! What a lot of joy to give someone for 35 cents!

Excuse me… I’m going to go have a guilt-free, affordable cup of contentment right now. Close the door and put my feet up on Bill’s desk. Nobody bother me for a while, okay? Thanks….

Peaberry Kona Coffee

The mystique of Peaberry Kona Coffee is one of the most interesting parts of Kona Coffee lore. It’s a great name, and people respond to it with an expectation of delight. Once they hear about Peaberry, they call us and see if we have any. They say, we know Peaberry is a special bean, the very best coffee. It must be, because it costs more.

But Peaberry was originally known as a ‘neighborhood’ coffee bean, for local consumption only, because of the smaller size and irregular shape of the bean. It is more expensive only because it’s a rarity. It is not the highest quality, to my standards, but it is the rarest of the Kona Coffees, so it does cost more.

However, it is milder in caffeine and acidity, so it does have a special kind of taste that many people enjoy. Some are a little fanatical about it. For instance, Pat’s older daughter will drink only Peaberry, because of it’s decreased acidity.

Peaberry is a separate grade of coffee. It does not fit into any of the standard coffee grades of Extra Fancy, Fancy, Number One, and Prime, because it is actually a mutation. A natural mutation. No GMO (don’t worry, John) no funny business of any kind. Coffee just does that on its own. It always has, and I suppose it always will, as long as people don’t go messing around with things too much.

A normal coffee cherry has a two beans inside the pulp. A peaberry cherry has a single, smaller bean. That’s how you can tell it’s Peaberry, without a doubt. It is unique, and accounts for only about 3 to 5 percent of the total coffee crop.

Except in more stressful years. Then Peaberry can go up to 8 to 10 percent of the overall crop. People say, oh, that’s good, you make more money that way, because Peaberry is more expensive. But no. You have a smaller coffee crop if you have a more arid growing season. There is less total coffee to sell. So we actually make less money in those years.

As I’ve said before, this year looks like an exceptionally good one for coffee, so I’ll take a guess and say we will probably have a very small amount of Peaberry from the harvest season that starts in September. So if you like it, you should probably order it early in the season. Many Kona Coffee companies have a Coffee Club where you can place your order up to a year in advance, and then receive what you schedule each month. Kona Mountain has such a Coffee Club, so if you want to be first in line for what there is of Peaberry next year, you might want to look into it. The way that Club is set up, you can change your order during the year, which I think makes it better than being absolutely locked into a program.

But Coffee Club or no Coffee Club, when we run out of Peaberry, as pretty much all coffee growers do in most years, there simply isn’t any more until the next coffee growing season.

I mentioned in a previous post that Peaberry has a nickname in the professional coffee community. Peabody. Everybody calls it Peabody. And do you know why? Well, if you do, please tell me, because I don’t know. I’ve just always heard it that way. Guesses, anyone?

Cream of the Crop

A very special event is going to happen in July, here Kona. If you really enjoy coffee, and plan to visit Hawaii during this time, be sure to come to the Big Island and go to it. I’ll be there.

It’s the Fifth Annual Cream of the Crop Coffee Tasting Competition, sponsored by the Kona Coffee Council. There is a professional cupping contest, where coffee experts judge the different coffees submitted by the farms of Kona, which is important to us farmers. And there are free samples of Kona Mountain and other coffees that you can taste, yourself. Compare, and see which ones you like the best.

And there is much more. Dessert tasting. Need I say more? That, to be honest, comes a very close second to the coffee tasting, even to me. Because the desserts are fantastic, and they feature Kona Coffee as one of the ingredients. How could it get any better!

Well, it does, because there’s also local art that is being exhibited, along with ‘ethnobotanical’ plants, by which I assume they mean that this year they’re going to show us plantlife that is native to Hawaii. We’ll see. In addition, there are coffee roasting demonstrations that are always interesting to watch. If you come by the store before you go, and get a chance to talk with me when I’m roasting, I’ll tell you what to keep an eye out for when you watch the demonstrations. You might be able to ask them some very professional sounding questions.

July 12, 2008 is the date, and Hualalai Four Seasons Resort is the place. 10 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. It costs $35, and I think it is well worth that. I understand some coffee farm tours are charging that much. By the way, Bill, you forgot to mention that the Kona Mountain farm tour is free. As in no charge. That’s kind of important. But I think you assume people just assume it would be free, because it’s us who are doing it. And that is true. But you still need to tell people.

Anyway, you can get tickets for the Cream of the Crop event online at the Kona Coffee Council website page. While you’re on that page, you can also see other events that are coming up, like the Made in Hawaii Festival, August 14 through 17, in Honolulu. That’s usually a good one, too.

Bon Appetite!

From the Seed to the Cup - Part 5

On the highway from Kailua Kona to the Airport, which we call the ‘Belt Road’, or its real name, Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway (caw-awe-who-mon-oo), there is a small new shopping area across from Honokohau Harbor (hon-oh-co-how). It has a name, but everyone calls it ‘the new Matsuyama’s, because the same people who built it have had a grocery store/gas station/snack shop on the upper road for decades.

The store facing the highway is Kona Mountain Coffee, with our volcano logo lit up with energy-saving LEDs. Kind of pretty, especially early in the morning when I get there, say 3 or 4 am. If you’re a coffee roaster, you have to get up before the coffee drinkers! And a lot of you are up pretty early, especially you fishermen. Kona has a lot of good fishing, but that’s another story. During the day, I’m there much of the time, either talking with people about coffee or… roasting coffee.

I love doing both things. But my passion is roasting. I really enjoy thinking about people drinking coffee that I’ve roasted, and enjoying it so much. I want them to come away from the experience thinking, ‘wow, that’s the best cup of coffee I ever had.’

You see, coffee is a fruit. It contains fruit sugars. When those sugars are caramelizing toward the latter part of a roast, you can determine your taste by the length of time you roast it. The longer you roast it, the darker the roast, and the deeper the flavor. The less time roasting, the more nuanced, lighter flavors there are to come alive when you brew it. The amount of heat is also crucial, because you can burn the beans. Or dry them out by roasting too long at too low a heat.

We have one of the most technically sophisticated coffee roasting machines in the world, a Diedrich that is so sensitive it takes into consideration the altitude at which the coffee was grown, and even the cultivation methods. It helps a roaster do a perfect roast. It has wonderful automated controls, and a timing system and… I still watch it every minute of a roast. Small differences in roast time and heat fluctuations during the roast, the exact amount of moisture in the beans on any given day, the humidity and temperature of the ambient air, the amount of airflow past the beans as they roast… everything counts, everything makes a difference. The technology is helpful, but it still needs the human touch to bring it past ‘an excellent roast’ to ‘the finest roast’.

I’ve been in this business long enough to make my roasts the way I know most people will like them, so we offer just two roasts. Medium, and Dark. That is enough range to satisfy most coffee drinkers. But if someone wants to ‘buy a roast’… I forgot to mention that I roast only 25 pounds at a time, so I can control the roasting most perfectly… so if they want to have me roast a batch exactly the way they say, I’ll be happy to do it. If they want it as dark as the gates of hades, with some of the caffeine roasted out of it, but with a really strong flavor, that’s fine with me, and I’ll be sure to stop short of making it into charcoal.

On the other hand, if they want it very lightly roasted, I totally understand. I’ve done both, but I’ve done under-roasts most often. The reason is that people want it that way so they can add them to cookies and other baked products. Then the baking finishes the roasting job. And it works very well that way. I’ve tasted some really ono (oh-no, delicious) results, although I don’t bake, myself. I know that’s a little funny, but I’m a roaster, not a baker. Anyway, I’m happy to oblige all tastes, and can judge when a special roast has come to the right place to pour it out onto the cooling screen in front of the roaster.

So now the coffee is roasted and ready to brew for the cup. I roast it fresh throughout the day. Some of it is bagged as whole bean or ground, and sold at the store. Our barista uses some of it for our unique Kona coffee espresso and other drinks. A lot of it is shipped same day to people who order it on the website And I drink some of it myself, every morning, to start my day. I hope that someday you get the chance to taste it.

From the Seed to the Cup - Part Four

Okay, we’re going to the dry mill now. A lot of people ask why we need to do anything else… aren’t the beans already dried to the perfect moisture? Yes, but as you remember, they are now are called parchment. And for good reason. There is another, inner skin, wrapped tightly around the bean that protected the bean during the drying process. That thin but tough skin needs to be stripped off and thrown away to release the coffee bean for roasting. We call that hulling.

To hull the bean, we need some very special machinery to get rid of the skin without harming the coffee bean inside. Hullers can cost up to one million dollars, depending on how fancy you want them. That’s just for one part of the process to take coffee from the seed to the cup.

After the coffee is hulled, we have what is called green coffee. Coffee that has been completely processed, but not roasted.

The next part is the screening process. The beans are allowed to fall through a series of screens to sort them by size. But size is only a part of the way coffee beans are graded. Another factor is their density, or weight… which is determined by the amount of moisture they retain. Just because two beans are the same size, and fall through the same screen, they are not necessarily the same weight. We have to take them to a gravity table like those used in the grain industry. Beans of a certain size, say Size 19, which is the size for Extra Fancy grade, are put on the table and then the table shakes them violently! As they travel down the table, the heavier beans move to one side, and the lighter beans and the chips and the rubbish go toward the other corner. As they fall off the table, we start receiving them in 100 lb. bags. The chips and rubbish goes into one bag, lighter beans in another, and the best beans with the right amount of moisture go into a separate bag. When it’s full, we sew it shut, and now it’s ready to go down to our store on the highway where we have our roaster.

There are four grades of coffee: Extra Fancy, Fancy, #1, and Prime, in order of size from largest to smallest. And a fifth’ grade’ called Peaberry that is really a different thing altogether. More about that later.

A very difficult question comes up at this point. If beans are graded by size, do those sizes taste different? Well, if you have the same size beans from different farms blended together, that will probably not taste as consistently good as a bag of coffee that comes from one farm. That’s why we believe in ‘estate’ Kona coffee that comes from just one farm, all the time.

But… and this is perhaps one of the deepest insider secrets about coffee… when you buy a bag of premium, highest quality, Private Reserve, Estate 100% Kona Coffee, including Kona Mountain Coffee, which I believe is one of the finest coffees in the world… you are getting both Extra Fancy and Fancy beans. Because, can I taste the difference between our Fancy and Extra Fancy beans? Probably not. Certainly most coffee connoisseurs could not. And that’s why coffee is not bagged or sold by Extra Fancy or Fancy grade.

What happens to the rest of the coffee, the portion that is not sold as 100% Kona Coffee? If you’ve read all the posts on this blogsite, you already know. As much as 80 percent is sold as green coffee to large companies that make most of it into that coffee abomination, ‘kona blend’, where the great bulk of the bag is coffee from anywhere, and the quality of that coffee can be anything. And usually only 10 percent of that bag is actual Kona coffee, from any number of farms, from the best to the bottom.

If all of us seem prejudiced against ‘kona blend’, it is because we think that it gives Kona coffee a bad name. Someone sees Kona on the bag, and they think that guarantees a really nice coffee. It doesn’t. In my estimation, there is no point in buying ‘kona blend’. Either pay the price for a 100% premium coffee, or just buy some decent low-cost coffee that’s good enough for everyday drinking and that you find pleasant drinking. Because ‘kona blend’ does NOT taste like Kona coffee. If you’ve tried it and said, ‘well, what’s the big deal about that?’, I agree, there is no big deal. But try some 100% Kona coffee. It is an entirely different experience.

Done for the day. Next time… roasting. My favorite.

From the Seed to the Cup - Part Three

Now we’ve got coffee cherry in 100 pound bags. That feels good, but there’s a lot more to do before we have coffee in the cup. The first thing we want to do is … keep an eye on it! I promised you an ‘insider’s secret’ in the previous post, so here it is, and it is not something you are likely to hear about unless you’re in the coffee business. In days gone by, a farmer could leave the coffee cherry in the traditional burlap bags pilled high on his farm somewhere, and come back to get it when he was ready to process it. Sort of like leaving hay in bundles on the farm after you mow it. Everyone respected that, and left it alone.

No more. We have ‘coffee rustlers’. A few guys in a pickup truck come in to a coffee field under cover of darkness and load up a couple of bags. Or four, or six. It doesn’t take long to do the math and see that a farmer can be out $1,000 in the blink of an eye. So nowdays, farmers have to be a little more akamai (ah-caw-my, smart, sharp) about leaving their bags of cherry lying around. At Kona Mountain, we don’t have to worry about it. We pick the coffee during the day and take it to the mill immediately that evening, because it makes a better tasting coffee. More about that in a minute.

Imagine, then, that we’re up mauka (mao-ka, toward the mountain) at Kona Mountain as the bright Hawaiian sun is setting off the deep blue waters of the Kona Coast. Very pretty. We go to the part of the farm where the coffee cherry was picked that day, and start to put the large, heavy bags up onto our flatbed truck. Secret two: there is a trick to how to pick up that 100 pound bag. You stand the bag up on it’s bottom, the short side of the bag. You crouch down, put your shoulder on the middle of the bag, put one arm on the side of the bag and one arm kind of under it, and… LIFT! With your legs, not with your back! You kind of throw it up and get under it and try to make it land on your shoulder and stand up in one movement. If it sounds easy, try it. My friend Pat, who is a 285 pound bodybuilder, gave it a try one day when he was on the farm.

He’s used to heavy iron. Leg press maximum 1,400 pounds. Shrugs 765 pounds. Pretty strong guy. But the first time he tried to get the bag on his shoulder after I showed him how, he didn’t make it… he had to put it down. Same with the second try. And third. And fourth. By this time, most graphic designers might have given up (yeah, that’s what he does for a living). But he tried again, and - just barely - it went up on his shoulder as he stood up. Then he could carry it around, no problem. But that lift takes a lot of technique. The cherry shifts in the bag as you lift it.

We load up the truck with the bags of cherry, and then we are off to the wet mill. As I said earlier, it’s best not to let the coffee sit in bags for very long. The pulpy fruit of the cherry starts to ferment as soon as it’s picked, and degrades the coffee beans inside. Much of the coffee in third-world countries is produced by what is called dry processing. That’s where the beans are dried with the skins on, without removing the pulp. And that is how a lot of the bitterness of those coffees comes into being.

At Kona Mountain, we do wet processing. As soon as we get to the wet mill, we strip off the outer skin and the fruity flesh surrounding the beans, which is called pulping the cherry. Then we soak it overnight to ferment the little bit of carbohydrates that is left on the inner skin that covers the beans. The next morning we wash off the sugar caused by the fermentation, and spread out the beans on decks called hoshidanas. As you may have guessed, the term is actually Japanese, because many of the first coffee farmers in Hawaii were Japanese who came here to help harvest the sugar cane that used to be Hawaii’s major crop. But that’s another story.

Now the beans are called parchment.

The parchment is raked by hand with wooden rakes that have short round dowels at the rake end, which turns the coffee and makes it dry evenly. The beans may be in a layer two to three inches thick, so turning them and giving each bean its time at the top in the direct sunlight is critical.

We rake the beans periodically for several days in the perfect heat of the Hawaiian sun. No drying machines. Everything by hand, which takes an experienced eye and a great deal of care. The goal is to take the moisture content of the parchment from a starting point of about 50 percent, down to 12 percent. This level of moisture maintains the essential oils in the beans, where the caffeine is, and yet is dry enough to keep it from molding on us. It takes longer in more humid weather, a shorter time when it the moisture in the air is low.

When the beans are at perfect moisture content are they ready for the cup yet? Not nearly. We’re about to take it to a second mill, the dry mill, and there is even more after that. So before we go any further, I’m going to sit down and have a cup of my coffee. I’ll try to finish up in the next post.

From the Seed to the Cup - Part Two

Okay. We left off with the coffee cherry still on the tree. Obviously, we first have to pick it. That seems pretty easy, doesn’t it? But it is very difficult, hard work. You don’t just go out on a certain day and pick everything in sight, like mowing wheat.

Coffee cherry ripens at different times on the same branch of a coffee tree. One day a few cherry are ripe on one tree, so you pick those, and then go to the next tree, pick a few, go to the next tree, and so on. The next day, back out to the orchard and see which trees have some ripe cherry, and pick those. Repeat, day after day, from the time the first cherry ripens until the season is pau ( pronounced pow, meaning finished).

And you have to be very careful to pick only the totally ripe cherry. Never partially ripe or, disastrously… green beans. When unripe or partially ripe cherry gets into the picking, they bring down the quality immensely. And although a bright red color is the primary sign that the cherry is ripe, it takes a surprising amount of understanding and experience to tell when it is truly ripe. There are no machines that can do it properly.

In this day and age, it is difficult to find local people who want to and are able to pick coffee cherry. There are a lot of easier jobs in our society. So for the last few years, maybe a little longer than a decade, people are coming from Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines and I’ve heard even China, though I can’t say that one for certain, to pick coffee cherry for Kona farmers. Kind of amazing, isn’t it? It’s sort of like getting a fabulous vacation in beautiful Hawaii, but having to work long hours doing hard manual labor in the tropical sun once you get here.

In any event, you can start to see how labor intensive coffee production is. That accounts for a great deal of the price of Kona coffee, because we pay not just ‘fair trade’ wages of a few dollars a week to our pickers, which is considered the gold standard for wages in other countries. We pay ‘actually fair,’ full American wages and benefits. Okay, maybe not all the farms in Kona do everything ‘over the table’. There are farmers who ‘cut corners’ here in Kona, like everywhere else. But our policy at Kona Mountain is to follow both the letter and the spirit of the law. That actually works out very well in the end. Our store price is in line with all the other award-winning coffees… even if we do have to be really akamai (ah-kaw-my, sharp, smart) in figuring out how to minimize our costs other places, like buying larger quantities of coffee bags so they cost less each. Things like that make it possible for us to provide people with a decent wage for some very hard work. Which allows us to sleep much better at night.

Off the soapbox, back to the coffee. Or rather, behind the coffee. As you will see, VERY far behind the scenes.

So now we have the cherry picked, and we put it in 100 pound burlap bags with our company art printed on the bag. That’s traditional in Kona. This is the way some smaller farms sell it to the large processors. They get paid, and they’re done with their coffee.

Now we enter into a bit of the insider’s semi-secret world. Quite frankly, consumers are kept in the dark as to how much coffee cherry sells for to the processors. But I’ll break the silence and tell you. Last November, 2007, the price hovered around $1.60 a pound. Shocking, huh? Makes you wonder why coffee costs so much when you buy it at retail, doesn’t it? Somebody must be making a LOT of money, is the thought that goes through everyone’s mind the first time they hear that price.

Ah, but there is a long, long road between coffee cherry and a roasted bean in a store or at a website online. I’ll try to lay it out for you so it makes good sense by the time we’re done. Truth is… if you do everything you need to do to make a good coffee here in Kona, you are very fortunate to break even, much less make an actual profit. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

The large processors get coffee cherry from dozens of farms, some better, some not as good, and blend it all together (see my previous post on this subject.) They sell the end product as 100% Kona Coffee, which is is. But it’s not estate coffee from a single Kona coffee farm. Premium Estate Kona Coffees like Kona Mountain are an assurance that all the coffee in a bag comes from one single farm, for the highest degree of quality possible. So we keep our cherry separate.

And that is the ‘higher’ road we’ll continue on next time. I’ll even have another ‘insider’s secret’ about green Kona Coffee for you in a few days.

From the Seed to the Cup

People in the coffee business talk about taking coffee’ from the seed to the cup’, and everyone is supposed to know what that means. But I think that presumes a lot. Okay, most people know that coffee grows on trees, and you have to pick it. But then it gets a little fuzzy, and most people skip over to the end where the beans are roasted and ground and you brew it and drink it.

But there is a lot that happens in that fuzzy area. And when I talk with people here at Kona Mountain about it, they find it very interesting. I hope you do too, because here is what I tell them.

You start with the finest coffee seed you can find, both in quality of seeds and quality of variety. Because without the right choices at the beginning, all your work goes to making an inferior coffee. And who would want to do that? Oddly, more people than you might think. I can’t explain why that is, but I see it all the time. I’ve talked about the variety we use at Kona Mountain in a previous post, so I won’t do that again here. The usual method of planting is to put about two dozen seeds in each hole. But we do it just a little differently because of the extra rich soil here in Kona. I can’t say exactly what the difference is, because it’s a little bit of a secret. But you get the idea. Some seeds sprout and some just do not. It’s pretty much the same as in all of nature.

Then the Kona just-right-amount-of-rain and just-right-amount-of-sun goes to work with the deeply fertile soil that has erupted as lava from the volcano and is eventually broken down into lush earth over time. The seed sprouts, a leaf of green appears, and the tree starts growing both above ground and making a root structure underground.

We take care of the needs of each tree as they pass through the seasons, sometimes having to deal with insects or other problems as they appear. We do this as quickly and as naturally as we can, for the health of the trees. In the case of our organic coffee, only approved organic methods are used.

Now we enter an area of great controversy.

Pruning. Cutting off part of the tree to encourage maximum production over the long term. There are probably as many opinions about pruning as there are coffee farmers. As the tree grows, so-called ‘verticals’ are produced, branches that shoot upward from the tree rather than outward. Some farmers prune those verticals in a certain pattern, others in another pattern. Still others wait until a tree has reached maximum production and is obviously getting too many branches for the trunk to support, and then they prune the entire tree severely. Those farmers prune part of an orchard one year and another part another year.

At Kona Mountain, we tend toward the first, partial pruning method. And it produces award-winning coffee. I think that says a lot. But there are times when a tree needs severe pruning because of special current conditions, such as drought. One of the hallmarks of a superior farm manager is to know which way to go at any given time for any given orchard of coffee trees.

It is not until the second year after planting that the tree flowers, briefly. Only in its third year does a tree generally start bearing significant amounts of fruit. Yes, coffee trees actually bear fruit, which we call coffee cherry. And it is the seed of that fruit that is called the coffee bean. The cherry has a thick, bitter skin, and the fruit part underneath, that no one eats, is actually very sweet . It has a texture similar to the inside of a grape. Under that, covering and protecting the coffee bean, is a sort of sticky layer.

Under that is yet another layer which is called parchment. This is a very important coffee term, so please keep it in mind.

Finally we come to a skin-like layer that contains two coffee beans. Or in the case of peaberry coffee, a single seed. More about peaberry later, also.

In fact, more about everything later. I have to go roast some coffee. Besides, when this stuff gets written down, it gets longer than when I’m talking about it off the cuff. So I’ll take up where I’ve left off, in the next post. I’ll make sure I do that post very soon so you won’t have to wait long for it. But now it’s getting into Saturday evening, and I have a family I need to be there for. I hope your weekend is going nicely, and that you will have a cup of your best coffee for a Sunday morning treat. I certainly will. I’m smelling the aroma already!

Coffee and Volcanoes

Our front page has been full of happenings about the volcano. We all share some concern, but the volcano emissions change significantly before they get here in Kona. What starts out as sulphur dioxide at Halemaumau and threatens the nearby communities of Ka’u, turns to a lighter aerosol we call ‘vog’ as it travels the tens of miles toward the Kona coast. Vog is not pleasant, but not as serious a danger, either. Of course people with respiratory problems are affected by even small changes in what the air contains. So this is not to make light of their possible problems. But the volcano is not as much of a problem in Kona as it is closer to Kilauea.

What does that mean for Kona Coffee? Well, first, this is not the maturing season. There is no immediate impact on the coffee you would buy today. The coffee trees are hale and hardy and are doing just fine with the minimal amounts of volcano emissions that make it this far. They should be just fine when they are called on to start making coffee cherry on their branches. And today there is a brisk wind blowing from the north, about 20 miles an hour or more. The air is clearing, at least temporarily, here in Kona.

The long range effects are more uncertain. There are two thoughts making the rounds. The first is that there needs to be a certain degree of warmth on the island to bring the rains to the coffee trees at the right time, in the right amounts. For years, people have been theorizing that the activity of the volcano changes that cycle. I haven’t been convinced, in the past. But with this level of activity, maybe so. The emissions produced by the volcano at this level make an aerosol covering for the island that drops the temperature downward. If that continues to happen, the crop may be below average next year.

The second thought is one farmers often have but is sort of like playing roulette. Last year the coffee crop was not large. So the thinking goes that next year’s crop will be above average. And I suppose it often works out that way. Trees that produce less one year are more ‘rested’, with perhaps more natural nutrients available to them from the soil. But it is not necessarily true. If the rainfall pattern is disrupted negatively, we will almost certainly have less coffee.

And with all the rises in other prices, such as the freight cost of getting materials to the Big Island via Matson’s ships, or via whoever-is-still-flying’s airplanes, I think we can safely assume prices of Kona Coffee will be heading upward even if the crop is the same size or larger than last year. Because we depend almost totally on materials shipped in to the island. Actually, we don’t have to. The Big Island supported over 100,000 Hawaiians before Captain Cook ‘discovered’ these island for the rest of the world. But we have chosen to go the ‘modern’ route. So we’re tied into the fluctuations in the price of oil, like everyone else.

My opinion: don’t worry about it. Enjoy the coffee now.

That is the Kona Coffee lifestyle. I see no point in spoiling a perfectly beautiful sunset with a cup of perfect coffee in my hand. Tomorrow will certainly take care of itself. Today I’ll do the work I have to do, and I’ll do it as well as I possibly can. I will show everyone I meet as much Aloha as my heart can express and they can accept. I will go home happy and satisfied with what I’ve accomplished, remembering the small kindnesses I have shown people during the day, and basking in the smiles that they shared with me.

I’m smiling again already. Ahhh! What a wonderful feeling!

A Blessing of Bees

The news media has been abuzz this past year with the mysterious disappearance of pollinating honeybees across the United States. The articles emphasize how important it is for us humans that the bees are going AWOL from their duties. Many crops cannot grow their fruit unless the pollen they produces is spread somehow from plant to plant. Without bees doing that spreading as they gather what they need from the flowers to make their honey, it has been estimated that we would see a loss of somewhere between a third and a half of our food supply from plants. Imagine that for a moment….

Now there is a study in Science Daily that has examined the past 25 years of bee activity in Britain and the Netherlands, and has seen a wide and continuing decline in bee diversity. Even more alarming, their conclusion is that wild bees and the flowers they pollinate are disappearing together! And the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, which has connections with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), warns that the steady decline in pollinator species is occurring worldwide.

It is easy to see how a drop in the quantity of bees would be significant and worrisome. It is not as apparent why bee diversity would be so important. But consider a study done at the University of Göttingen in Germany that looked at the effect of bee diversity on coffee, and specifically Coffea Arabica, which is a type of coffee widely grown in Hawaii. The researchers became capable of predicting the ‘fruit set’ of a season of coffee (that is the amount of coffee flowers that turn into coffee cherry and grow on the coffee tree until it is ripe for picking) by observing the number of bee species that visited a coffee orchard.

When three species of bees visited, the fruit set was approximately 60 percent. When twenty species visited, the fruit set went up to as much as 90 percent.

It was not important how many total bees visited. It was the number of different species of bees that was the determining factor.

Their bottom line recommendation was for conservation of rainforest next to growing areas.

Well, that is such a good idea. And in Hawaii, so far so good in that respect. Here on the Big Island we have maintained a substantial proportion of our rainforest and similar areas. And guess what? According to Hawaii State records, we produced about the same amount of honey last year as the year before. The total number of hives was almost exactly the same as the year before, too. The big bee die-off does not seem to be affecting us here in Hawaii Nei like it is in most other places. Perhaps conservation is only a part of the answer to the worldwide mystery of the bees. But maybe it is a big part.

If you come to Hawaii, come on by to Kona Mountain Coffee here in Kona on the Big Island, and we’ll put together a little jaunt up into Kona Coffee Country and our farm. If the timing is right, we’ll drive you up there ourselves, or alternately, will tell you how to get there and have our farm manager show you around. You can see for yourself how the coffee orchards of the Kona Coffee district are surrounded with a diversity of natural Hawaiian forest. It’s not only instructive, it is very, very beautiful. It is one of the reasons I live here and work in the coffee industry. You can feel the life of the land.

By the way, the bats we have here, along with the relatively few birds, and even the geckos that are present in abundance here on the island… all these are also important pollinators for some of the crops grown in Hawaii. But bees are still the most important, and I do not see how coffee could continue to be a significant crop without them.

There are many plans to strip the forests of this island and build on them. More houses for more people. Some of those plans have been put into effect, and others are being fought by conservationists. It is an uphill battle. And probably there is some level of compromise that is necessary. But we really should be careful how far we compromise our future. The fate of the bees on the mainland, and indeed world wide, should be a cautionary tale for us here where the land is more pristine than most other places. Will we take care of it the way it should be nurtured? Or will we let gain and profit be our only guide? It is still our choice.

In the meantime, let’s be thankful for the blessing of bees that we enjoy today.