Jun 02 2010
Kona Coffee
Kona coffee is one of the most exquisite and expensive coffees available. It is rare and hard to come by which makes it a prime target for rogue companies who sell off-brands as the real thing. Kona coffee is grown on the Big Island, also known as Hawaii. It grows on the slopes of the island where the volcanic soil that is rich in minerals and porous combines with sunny mornings and cloud cover or late afternoon rain to create one of the most sought after coffees in the world.
Kona coffee beans are grown on small farms where the picking and processing are still done manually to keep the beans from being damaged by machinery. The coffee bushes are handpicked several times between the months for August and January. Each coffee bush will produce up to thirty pounds of coffee beans or cherry as the coffee growers call them due their similarity in appearance to a cherry.
100% Private Reserve Kona Coffee beans. This is from an older tree, around 110 years. Photo by Bob.
After being picked the Kona berries are put through a pulper to separate the pulp from the bean. Once this is complete the beans are soaked in a fermenting tank anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours. After the fermentation process, the beans are allowed to dry.
Once the beans are dried, they are sorted according to whether or not there are one or two beans per cherry. These are type one and type two Kona. There is also a type three Kona bean that is lower grade and cannot be legally labeled as a Kona coffee. However, there are many companies that sell coffee blends that are not Kona and yet they are labeled as Kona without the consumer knowing the difference unless they are connoisseurs.
Coffee distributors who use do this unscrupulous practice often blend a little bit of Kona with a Columbian of Brazilian coffee using only the minimum 10% Kona beans that are required in order to label the coffee as Kona. Hawaii’s law requires that pure Kona coffee carry a label stating that it is 100% Kona coffee. Unfortunately, the Federal government does not have labeling laws concerning Kona coffee.
The practice of selling blends as Kona coffee is not a new practice. In 1996 a coffee distributor was indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering. It was later determined that he had been selling a coffee blend since 1993 under the guise of it being Kona coffee. This only adds to the proof that Kona coffee’s popularity adds to the number of people who will offer a fake in order to cash in on the public demand.
Kona coffee is a delicious yet rare and expensive coffee that demands top dollar in the coffee world. Consumers must be diligent in their research of companies who sell the coffee to insure they are getting true Kona coffee.
-Sharon Chapman