The Kona Coffee Farm Experience

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is traveling to the world’s coffee production regions. This year’s trip to Kona was particularly memorable, as it marked David’s first tour of a Kona coffee farm.

Greenwell Farms was the first Kona farm we visited. Tommy Greenwell has been a friend for many years, and his grandparents began farming coffee at Greenwell Farms in the early 1900s. Amazingly, some of the first coffee plants still bear fruit – and this was the first stop on our tour of the farm. As you can see by the photograph below, the red berries are ready for one of the pickers to come by and harvest them.

Tommy, David and I then visited the pulping vats and drying roofs. In the vats, the cherries are cleaned away until only the coffee beans inside remain. Then, the wet beans are spread carefully and evenly on one of the nearby roofs to dry in the sun for several days. An interesting tidbit: it rains nearly every day in Kona, albeit briefly. As you can see from these photographs, the roofs are flat but there is a peaked portion that moves on runners and is pulled over the drying beans to keep the rain out during the storms.

After the beans dry, they are sorted by bean quality. At this point, the Kona peaberry is separated out from the Kona coffee beans. The peaberry accounts for about 3% of all Kona coffee, and occurs when the coffee cherry yields one round, pea-shaped bean rather than two halves (what we envision when someone says “coffee bean”). Kona peaberry coffee is highly sought-after coffee and is the most expensive type of Kona available on the market today. David and I sampled and compared Greenwell’s Kona and Kona peaberry coffees, and found the latter to be slightly lighter with a bit of a sparkling taste.

Once sorting has taken place, the beans are bagged and prepared for shipment. The beans are shipped as green beans to ensure freshness – we roast them once we receive them in Gävle to make sure we offer only freshly-roasted coffees to our customers.

As David said to me at the end of the day, “The more I learn, the more I want to learn.” I think most people who are passionate about coffee feel this way, too. So please do share any comments or questions with us about Kona, coffee production regions, farms or anything else that’s on your mind.