Kona Coffee Farm Tours

Kona Coffee Farm Tours

Even if you're not a java fiend, it's easy to get into the history and culture surrounding Kona coffee. From the hundreds of cafés, stores, and restaurants selling Kona coffee to the farm tours to the annual Gevalia Kona Coffee Cupping Competition, coffee is a major part of life on the Big Island and represents one of only a few non-tourism-related industries in Hawaii. Hawaii is the only U.S. producer of commercially grown coffee, and, though it may seem like the Kona coffee craze is a relatively recent thing, coffee has been growing here since 1828, when Reverend Samuel Ruggles, an American missionary, brought a cutting over from the Oahu farm of Chief Boki, Oahu's governor. That initial coffee plant was a strain of Ethiopian coffee called Coffee Arabica, and it is the same coffee being produced on the Big Island today, although a Guatemalan strain of Arabica introduced in the late 1800s is produced in far higher quantities.

In the latter half of the 1800s, many coffee plantations closed to make room for more lucrative sugar plantations, and by the early 1900s, the era of the large Hawaiian coffee plantation had ended. Plantation owners subdivided their lots and began leasing smaller parcels to local tenant farmers, a practice that continues today. The majority of the tenant farmers were Japanese families who managed their farms as family businesses with no outside labor. At one point 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. The cherries are shelled, and the green beans (more gray in color than green) inside are roasted to produce the dark brown beans seen in coffee shops all over the world. Despite family control of the harvest, the coffee production process was controlled by just two firms up until the late 1950s when farmers and farmer cooperatives began to buy and operate their own mills. Today, most farms -- owned and operated by a variety of Japanese-American families, west coast Mainland transplants, native Hawaiians, and descendents of Portuguese and Chinese immigrants -- take control of the entire coffee chain from harvest to cup.

Coffee-Farm Tours

Several coffee farms around the South Kona and Upcountry Kona coffee-belt area welcome visitors with tours that let you in on the whole coffee process, from harvesting green beans to packaging. Some tours are self-guided, and most are free, with the exception of the Kona Coffee Living History Farm. The brew, of course, is always ready.

Greenwell Farms. 81-6581 Mamalahoa Hwy., Kealakekua. 808/323-2862

Holualoa-Kona Coffee Company. 77-6261 Old Mamalahoa Hwy., Hwy. 180, Holualoa. 808/322-9937 or 800/334-0348

Kona Coffee Living History Farm (D. Uchida Farm).

Royal Kona Coffee Museum & Coffee Mill. 83-5427 Mamalahoa Hwy., next to tree house in Honaunau. 808/328-2511