Kona Coffee

        One morning in Hawaii Mike suggested that, instead of drinking the ordinary and not very good brewed coffee at the airb&b where we were staying, we take a drive to find a good coffee. Envisioning a latte on some coffee house lanai overlooking the ocean, we googled "good coffee near Kona" and were directed, to our surprise, into the hills above Kona, on a narrow, winding road, and then up a driveway with a house at one edge and only one small sign saying not "Coffee on the Lanai" but "Coffee tours." A little unsure about Google's accuracy, we continued up the driveway.

        We came to a small house-like building, from which a small, hurried woman rushed out to greet us. "Are you here for the tour?" she asked, shoving laminated one-page guides into our hands. "It's self-guided."
        We explained that we were just looking for a cup of coffee, and she said we could have complimentary coffee after the tour, which we really should do. She was slightly hunched in her hurry and had hair so tightly pulled into a bun it might have slanted her eyes. She was enthusiastic about the tour, to say the least.

        It wasn't what we were there for, but we were there, and so we did the tour, which turned out to be pretty interesting—past the coffee bushes with beans just turning red

(harvest comes when they are burgundy, the woman had told us) and into the open-sided building with the shaker that took the paper husk off the bean, leaving the parchment (which seems like backwards terminology to me); then to the drying shed, where beans are strewn on the floor and stirred every few days while they are drying; then to the size separator, which was only a series of sieves of different sizes—size determining quality.

Everything seemed very low-tech.

        Back in the small barn cum large shop, we had our coffee, which the woman identified for us as (a) air-roasted coffee (very light, roasted in a popcorn-popper sort of process), dark roast coffee (roasted enclosed, to let the smoke saturate the bean), and vanilla-macadamia coffee, infused, she told us, sneering slightly, not with those sticky syrups that Starbucks uses, but with essential oils. It was all exceedingly good. She had reason to be proud of Holualoa Kona coffee, which is organic and still made by the family that started the business.

        The walls were lined with historic pictures of workers in days gone by, the women in their long dresses, the men in their mustaches, horses pulling wagons. There was a second-place ribbon from a coffee competition and a schematic outline of the history of coffee, everything on the funky rather than the slick side of things—except for the coffee, which was packaged in gold-foil bags and graded from "estate" through premium, excellent, and good to "rubbish," according to our guide.

        I was impressed enough with the coffee that I bought a bag of green beans (estate grade) for my son,

 who roasts his own beans and is either a coffee snob or a coffee expert, depending on your point of view. It was not cheap, as you can imagine, and mailing it to Washington after I got back stateside cost another $10, but it was all worth it when Ela roasted the beans and tried the coffee.
        He texted me: "Kona coffee.   Y-U-M." And then, "Like wow. Really fantastic." He said he was contemplating mortgaging the house so he could fly to Hawaii and get more. He said if only he were a stingy person! Then he wouldn't have to share his coffee beans with his coffee-afficionado buddy, as he was going to do. 

        Going to the Holualoa Kona Coffee Company's Kona Le'a Plantation was one of those surprise finds that tourists love to stumble onto. The tour was fun, the coffee was good, and nothing I brought home from Hawaii could have pleased my son more than those green Holualoa Kona coffee beans.