Fodor's Hawaii 2013 by Fodor's

Author:Fodor's [Fodor’s]
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780876371534
Publisher: Fodor's Travel Publications
Published: 2012-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

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Kona Coffee

From the cafés, stores, and restaurants selling Kona coffee, to the farm tours, to the annual Kona Coffee Cultural Festival, coffee is a major part of life on this side of the Big Island. More than 600 farms, most from just three to seven acres in size, grow the delicious—and luxurious, at generally more than $25 per pound—beans. Only coffee from the North and South Kona Districts can be called Kona.

Hawaii is the only U.S. producer of commercially grown coffee, and it has been growing in Kona since 1828, when Reverend Samuel Ruggles, an American missionary, brought a cutting over from the Oahu farm of Chief Boki, Oahu’s governor. That coffee plant was a strain of Ethiopian coffee called coffee Arabica, and it is the same coffee still produced today, although a Guatemalan strain of Arabica introduced in the late 1800s is produced in far higher quantities.

In the early 1900s, the large Hawaiian coffee plantations subdivided their lots and began leasing parcels to local tenant farmers, a practice that continues today. Many tenant farmers were Japanese families. In the 1930s, local schools switched summer vacation to “coffee vacation” from August to November so that the kids could help with the coffee harvest, a practice that held until 1969.

Coffee is harvested as “cherries”—the beans are encased in a hard red shell. Kona beans are handpicked several times each season to guarantee the best product. The cherries are shelled and the beans roasted to a dark brown. Today most farms—owned and operated by Japanese-American families, West Coast mainland transplants, Native Hawaiians, and descendants of Portuguese and Chinese immigrants—control production from harvest to cup.

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