Back to the Regularly Scheduled Coffee Season

Excitement's over folks, back to work.

It's a mild coffee season here in Kona. Not terribly bad, but nowhere near good. I'm hitting my biggest round right now. The beans are beautiful, huge and very very ripe coming off the trees. Should be tasty coffee. The downside is that I'll just have one more small round in November and should be done by early December. My guess is that I'll be down about 50% from last year's bumper yield. I'm hearing similar reports from some other farms.

The wholesale price is at $1.25 per pound cherry (30 days net). Still not great, nor livable. Usually a poor year bumps prices. Since it's not, I'm not selling any cherry. Instead, I am processing every single bean I can fit onto my hoshidana. With the scarcity, the price for parchment (dried coffee) should rise in the offseason. It's called "value-added", and it's how the modern farmgirl survives.

Selling roasted coffee is the ultimate value-added move. Glad I took that Econ course in college.

The Great Quake of '06

Whoooyah! Pele the Fire Goddess, who blesses us with daily small shakers, hit us big yesterday. Maybe you saw it on CNN. 6.6 on the good ole Richter scale.

I was 15 feet up on my hoshidana (coffee drying rack) and almost learned to fly with the first jolt. I ran the sixty feet of the hoshi and jumped clear only to catch sight of my 10,000 gallon water tank blowing out a rib. Holy Moses! Here comes the flood! A wall of water shot across an outside workbench and cleared tools and coffee bags for twenty feet. It scoured all the dirt and rocks off the drive before pressure-hosing its way into the coffee mill. Oh my, what a mess! But immensely entertaining to watch, I must admit. Looked like a movie stunt.

No worries, the mill will dry and I will sweep out all the mud and rocks later. Don't know if I'll ever be able to track down all the sockets and wrenches that are now imbedded in the rock wall. That's the way it goes.

As for the water tank, it appears to be beyond repair. It lasted over 50 years and leaked a bit anyway. Hmmm, maybe it will have a second life as a tool shed. Take out a few more ribs, add a door....

The houses were fine, parents rode it out ok. Broken glass and mess was the worst of it. Don't believe CNN, I've done harder time through typhoons in Guam and earthquakes in California. :)

For those familiar with the area here, a good portion of the Pali (cliff) above Kealakekua Bay came tumbling down during the quake. The dust cloud was visible for several hours. Lucky for many people, the quake was early (7:07 am). By midday, there are usually 50 kayaks and several boats in the area. Could have been deadly.

'Tis the season.. to get Lost

It's coffee season here in Kona. We just finished our second picking round at both farms. That means crazy long hours and exhausting processing days. But I am very happy to report that the beans are huuuuge this year. Big and tasty. Not a whole lot of them though. As I blogged earlier in the year, last year's bumpercrop meant the trees would yield fewer beans this year. That's the way it works.

I haven't had a break in about two months, so I took of the weekend to fly over to Waikiki. Hmmm, check my head, I went to Waikiki to relax???

I happened to hit the very weekend when they were premiering the tv show "Lost" on Waikiki beach. I don't own a tv, but I do manage to watch this show on a regular basis, partly for its Hawaii locations and partly for its closet existentialism. It was quite entertaining to be among thousands of fans, many shrieking in appreciation of the cast as they signed autographs. Hey, the real star of the show is the island!

My main purpose in Oahu was to see Krishna Das sing. "See" is the wrong verb, because at a kirtan performance, everybody sings. For three hours, we sang and sang and sang our way into a joyful state. Yoga led me to kirtan, via an instructor who loved to chant at the end of her practice. It's like going to church, except without the preacher. Skip straight over the "sins of the flesh" and right to the good part, the joy of singing. Krishna Das is one of my favorites.

I'm back to the coffee now. Came home to 1500 pounds of cherry that had to be pulped. My next break won't be till the end of the harvest season....Christmas. Back to work!