Staying Calm in Hawaii

overheard in new york.com
Suit: "Hawaii is so boring! There's nothing to do but stay calm."
--52nd & Lexington

I guess it's all a matter of perspective. A relaxing vacation in New York City sounds nice right now.

It's true that life is slower here. The roads are empty by 7pm. Everything shuts down by 9pm. And just try to get a good bagel. Not happening. People are people though. Commerce happens, cell phones ring. We are a beehive of activity, just on a lower frequency.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Yeah, it's chill here. Even the Kona coffee is smooth and mellow. Nothing harsh, nothing biting.

Life in Kona is changing fast though. We've been discovered by the mainland. Real estate is booming, the population is growing. McMansions have been spotted popping up on the fringes of ag land. Some of us are starting to wonder if the coffee fields will be suburban tract homes in 20 years. It's possible. Enjoy your Kona coffee now, cause I think we're on the endangered species list for 2015.

Discount Anyone?

5% discount to all readers who order Lions Gate Kona coffee or macadamia nuts. Just write "blog discount" into the comments section on the order form.

See, this is what I do when I don't have time to do a full posting.

Aloha

One in Six

Oh, the beauty of the internet. Did you read today that 1 in 6 (six!) people sells or has sold goods on the internet. This is not just eBay either. This is cottage industry, springing up all over the 50 States. This is getting back to the individual entreprenuerial spirit that made this country what it is. Wow. I love it.

Thanks to the internet, farmers now have a shot at actually making a living. Let me throw out a little more Farmgirl Econ. I mentioned that we pay our pickers $0.45 a pound. If I sell that coffee as "cherry" to a local processor, he gives me $1.25 a pound. (dropping to $1.15 on December 1). So I earn $0.80 a pound for cherry. Seven pounds of cherry equals about 1 pound of roasted coffee.

So, the Kona coffee you bought at Starbucks for $39? Yep, I earned $5.60 for that. Not counting my land/fertilizer/personal labor costs.

That is NO way to make a living (and in truth, you can't at that price). So I don't make a living. That way, anyway. I control my own destiny as much as possible by skipping past the middlemen and straight to my customers. They get a better product, at a better price, and I get to do what I love and make a living at it. That is the true American Dream.

So, thank you for supporting the small farmers, businesses and entrepreneurs of this country. Thank you for using the internet.

What was I thinking....

.....starting a blog in the middle of coffee season?

It's a hot Saturday night here in coffee country, and I'm doing what every self-respecting farmgirl does on a night like tonight. Yep, pulping coffee.

Yes, all you people with your fancy dress-up clothes and dinners out, movie dates and theater tickets, think of me fondly as I sit here with coffee goop up to my neck and nothing but a million stars in the sky to entertain me.

Tonight is also payday for the pickers. We have an extended family of 5 living and working with us this season, plus two children. They are from Mexico, by way of the west coast. Visitors are fascinated by the Mexican subculture in Kona, but like any agricultural concern, life here would come to a screeching halt without them. And coffee is part of some workers' annual "route". For example, my crew will leave us right before Christmas to go back to Michoacan, Mexico. In the early spring, they will head to central California for strawberries. Early summer is citrus time, lemons and oranges. Late summer is apples. September, they head over here. They could stay and pick late-season apples in Washington, but they prefer the warmth of Hawaii. Who doesn't?

It wasn't always this way. But like all ag communities, the demographic has shifted. Kids leave the farm, and most local people want easier jobs than hard, sweaty, laborious coffee picking. Note I said easier, not better paying. Our pickers earn $0.45 per pound, and a good picker can hit up to 400 pounds per day. Do the math. Damn. I don't earn that much.

That brings up a topic for another day....the economics of coffee.

alohas!

Harvest Time

We are knee-deep in coffee cherry here at Lions Gate. All over Kona, farmers are borderline maniacal, working long days and trying to get the crop out of the field and into the mills. Coffee season, running from August through December, will add gray to the hair, take inches off the waistline, and generally wreak havoc on the social life. Not to mention, stain hands black with tannin.

Hawaii, such a relaxing beautiful place. Unless you are a farmgirl. Then the relaxation goes out the window. I know, you all have such pity on me. After all, I work for myself, and work in shorts and flip-flops no less. And I do live in paradise. But let's talk a little bit about the harvest process before you decide you want to move over here and take my job.

Our coffee is picked by hand, as is all Kona coffee. On a good day, my pickers (Gabriel, Angelica, Ephraim, Maria, and Rafael) bring in about 1300 pounds of coffee cherry. It must be processed within 24 hours or the cherry ferments and ruins the coffee. So I run it through a pulper, which separates the seeds (what we know as coffee beans) from the fruit. The fruit gets mulched back into the field, and the beans go into a water-filled fermentation tank. My pulper moves about 350 pounds an hour. With cleanup, it's a good night if the work is done before 10pm.

Twelve hours in the tank strips all the remaining fruity mucilage from the beans. The next morning, I move the beans out into the sun on traditional-style "hoshidana" drying rack. it has a rolling roof to cover the beans at night. Here, the beans are raked every hour until dry to the touch. Then we keep raking them twice a day until the moisture level drops to around 12%. It takes about two weeks in the sun. Some farms use hot-air dryers, which can change the taste of coffee.

Once at 12%, we pull the beans off, and store them in burlap bags in a climate-controlled room. This is the parchment (or pergamino) stage. Parchment coffee has a crunchy hull over the bean, much like a peanut shell. The bean must be stored for at least two months as parchment. This allows the pores in the bean to close up and the flavor to mature. Roast a bean before the two months are up and welcome to blahsville, with a grassy aftertaste. uck. Worth waiting two months for the good stuff.

It is impossible to make a bad coffee, good (well, maybe with lots of sugar and flavorings. maybe). But there are a million ways to make a good coffee bad. Each step in the process is vital to the end result.

And thus, the 15-hour workdays during coffee season. Making good coffee, one bean at a time. Still want my job? You can't have it. I love it!!