OUR COFFEE

Our coffee is 100% Estate Kona Coffee. That means all of the coffee comes from our farm and our farm only. YOUR COFFEE is not roasted until you order it. It may be roasted to our standard medium or dark roast; or it may be custom roasted to an exact temperature of your choosing. If you order five pounds, we will not only roast to an exact temperature of your choosing, we will ship it for free. See Custom Roasting for more information.

THE PROCESS

The cherries are handpicked, because they ripen at different rates on the same tree. There may be seven or eight harvests throughout the season. The cherries are pulped to remove the outer skin and pulp. The beans are then sun dried, aged, and stored in the “parchment” (inner skin) stage in a climate controlled environment. The parchment is milled, removing the inner skin (there are actually two layers) in 500 to 1000 pounds batches and stored as green beans prior to roasting.

Once ordered, the green beans are then roasted to the desired temperature, bagged, and shipped.

PRUNING

We use the Beaumont-Fukunaga method which is named after the gentlemen who started this technique in the 1940ʼs and 1950ʼs. It did not catch on right away, for a number of reasons. One of which is because the older coffee farms were not necessarily planted in rows and this technique calls for substantially pruning a different row every three, four, or five years versus pruning the oldest verticals on each tree. I think another reason is simply tradition.

Our farm was planted using the more modern method of rows which faciliitates using this method. Although it seems that the farm might be losing one third of its production capability, in fact this method increases yield and quality, because the new verticals on the totally pruned plant get more sun.

I noticed the last time I was in Napa Valley, that some of the grape vineyards had substantially trimmed back their vines and were encouraging them to grow vertically versus allowing the leaves to hang over the grapes. This was clearly to get more sun on the fruit. I think that the Beaumont-Fukinaga method does the same thing.