Royal Kona Coffee and the History of the Kona Coffee Industry

Royal Kona Coffee has deep roots in Kona that go back 40 years. Our company has a pulping mill in Kona and purchases coffee cherry directly from more than 150 small coffee farms in Kona. We have a great respect for our Kona coffee farmers so for each 1,000 pounds of coffee cherry the company purchases it also gives each farmer 100 pounds of fertilizer for their coffee plants. This ensures the quality of future Kona coffee crops.

Our Kona mill uses the wet method to process coffee cherry and expertly dries every batch into  green coffee beans ready for roasting.  Roasting of the green Kona coffee beans is expertly done at our Honolulu roasting facility where each roast is individually monitored for consistency and quality.

Royal Kona Coffee from Hawaii – Truly one of the great specialty gourmet coffees of the world.
Kona coffee can be described as having a fine aroma, full-bodied flavor with distinctive “winey” notes. One of our customers referred to our Royal Kona Coffee as rich, smooth, bright; another described our Kona coffee as sweet, smooth, and fruity.  Author and humorist Mark Twain visited the Hawaiian Islands in 1866 and said “Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may and call it by what name you please.” 

Kona Hawaii’s Microclimate – The Kona district on Hawaii’s Big Island forms a two mile wide by twenty mile long belt stretching along the western slopes of the 13,000 foot high Mauna Loa volcano. Sheltered from the prevailing northeast trade winds by the towering volcano, the Kona district is calm, fanned only by the wispy off-shore breezes. The mountain’s long western flanks descend gradually until they drop off into the blue Pacific Ocean. Somewhat dry at lower elevations the slopes above the 1,000 foot level are green with lush vegetation, porous volcanic soil and ample water. Kona coffee is grown at elevations up to 3,000 feet.

It is no wonder that for more than 170 years coffee has been grown in Kona. This microclimate above 1,000 feet is unique.  The high volcanic mountains not only shelter the Kona district from the prevailing winds, but also halt the morning clouds at the mountain tops to make mornings in Kona generally bright and sunny, and allowing the clouds to slip over the mountains by mid-day to shade the region. This unique combination of shelter, volcanic soil, ample rainfall, and proper elevation makes the Kona region perfect coffee country.

   Birth of Kona Coffee: The Early Days (1828-1898)  

In 1828, ten years after coffee plants were first brought to the Hawaiian Islands, Samuel Ruggles acquired seedlings from coffee plants growing in Manoa Valley on the island of Oahu and planted these in Kona. The parent plants from which Ruggles took seedlings had arrived in Hawaii from Brazil three years earlier. This initial planting in Kona was for private gardens, the coffee beans to be used only for private consumption; this was not an attempt to establish a commercial coffee industry.

The first commercial coffee venture in the islands was in the Hanalei Valley of Kauai in 1842. The venture failed due to less than ideal growing conditions, drought, blight, and a labor shortage caused by the California gold rush. By 1858 the Kauai coffee industry was dead.

It was only after the Hawaiian Great Mehele of 1848 that certain lands of the Hawaiian Monarchy were available for private ownership by non-Hawaiians. This was an important stimulus for investment in Hawaii agricultural industries.

By the 1850’s commercial coffee growing ventures had begun in Kona. The model was the plantation style with Haole owners and planters, and Chinese, Japanese and Filipino laborers.

Destructive to the Hawaii coffee industry in the 1850’s was a serious infestation of coffee plants by white stem borer insects. This blight was known as “white scale” and injured many coffee plants throughout the islands making coffee growing uneconomical and eventually led to the decline of coffee yields on may of the island’s coffee plantations. Only in Kona, the most ideal coffee growing region in the islands, did the coffee business survive to any meaningful degree.  (Not until the 1890’s, with the introduction of the Australian Ladybird Beetle, that White Scale was brought under control.) 

Much of the Kona coffee plantings fell on hard time during the 1860’s and 1870’s due to declining coffee prices. Henry M. Whitney, editor of the Hawaiian Gazette reported in 1875, “Most [Kona coffee] now gathered grows wild in the woods, very little attention paid to its systematic cultivation.” The careless and slipshod methods of growing and processing coffee in Kona at that time were detrimental to the fragile reputation Kona coffee had begun to enjoy.

H.N. Greenwell was an exceptional early Kona coffee producer during this period of coffee decline. He took great pains to select and dry the Kona coffee beans he sold, and his coffee was superior. At the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, Austria, Greenwell was honored for his excellent Kona coffee.

By the early 1890’s the White Scale blight was under control due to the introduction of the Australian Ladybird Beetle and coffee prices were again on the rise causing more plantation coffee production in Kona and throughout Hawaii. During the mid 1890’s there was a coffee boom in Kona caused a sharp rise in coffee prices in world markets. Haole businessmen invested heavily in coffee plantations in the Kona District. Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese laborers came to the area and were paid low wages for agricultural work on the coffee plantations. The high coffee prices coincide with the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy which allowed more land to become available for coffee growing. All was rosy for the Hawaii coffee industry until 1899 when coffee prices fell steeply, causing investors to turn away from the coffee industry.  Kona remained one of the few places in the islands were the coffee industry survived, though it experienced a significant transformation from large coffee plantations to small coffee farms.  

   Small Family Coffee Farms (1899-1960's)  

By the time the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, Kona’s coffee plantations were experiencing a period of decline due to low prices and a worldwide coffee glut.  Many businessmen and investors turned their attention from coffee to sugar. The coffee plantation system dissolved in Kona and the coffee industry was near collapse. The land in Kona was steep and water was not plentiful enough for large-scale sugar production. Many Chinese and Portuguese farmers left the area to seek work elsewhere.

A new model for coffee production soon developed in Kona, the rise of small Japanese-American family coffee farms. That system of small family owned farms exists yet today and is the source of the coffee used by Royal Kona Gourmet Coffee. It was a Haole coffee planter, W.W. Brunner, who initiated the change by subdividing his former coffee plantation into five acre parcels which he leased to tenant farmers, most of whom were Japanese. Bruner agreed to furnish housing and other necessities to his tenant farmers with the understanding that he was to received one-third of each coffee crop as rent. Other coffee plantation owners in Kona soon followed Bruner’s example. The small family-run farms revolutionized the Kona coffee industry and kept it alive. 
  
Many Japan born immigrants (the Issei) came to Hawaii in the 19th Century as contract plantation laborers indentured to work for private sugar and pineapple companies for a prescribed period of time.  It was the second generation Japanese who were born in Hawaii (the Nisei), and later the third generation (the Sansei) who were instrumental in furthering the development of the modern Kona Coffee Industry. The ancestors of those initial farmers form the core of the Kona coffee farming industry today.

 
Coffee farmers of Japanese descent were the dominant ethnic group growing coffee during this period in Kona, though other ethnic groups were also represented in Kona and farming coffee during this time, including Hawaiians, Haole, Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipinos. 

In 1900 the Organic Act, which ended indentured contract labor, was passed by the United States Congress. Japanese and other plantation workers were free to leave the plantations and many saw opportunity and moved from other places in the islands to Kona where coffee farming was seen as a lifestyle of self-sufficiency and freedom. In Kona the Japanese population jumped from 8 to 1,718 in ten years. By 1910, Japanese coffee farmers were 80% of the total coffee farming population in Kona.

The coffee cherry, after it was grown and harvested, had to be properly processed. Coffee mills of two companies came to dominate the coffee industry in Kona, the Captain Cook Coffee Company and H. Hackfeld and Co., Ltd (later renamed American Factors). The company mills possessed the machinery, expertise and capital necessary to process the coffee cherry into dry unroasted “green” coffee beans, which could later be roasted. Both companies acquired large tracts of land in Kona’s coffee belt and began to lease small acreages of the coffee farmland to tenant coffee farmers. Together these two companies controlled 70% of the total acreage of coffee farms in Kona. The lease agreements required tenant farmers to sell their entire coffee crop to the two mills, and none to outsiders. American factors advanced the farmers food and necessary items through affiliate stores, under condition that the debt was to be repaid in coffee cherry.
 
Small Japanese owned coffee mills did spring up, and by 1934 there were nine coffee mills operated by Japanese in Kona. For these mills, obtaining coffee cherry from the tenant farmers was difficult since these farmers were obligated to deliver their entire crop to Captain Cook Coffee Company or American Factors.

The Kona tenant coffee farmers lived simple and self-sufficient lifestyles. Everyone worked together to fertilize and cultivate, prune the coffee trees, pick the coffee cherry, sort, pack and transport the coffee on the backs of donkeys. Until the end of World War II, donkeys were used in Kona to transport the coffee cherry to the pulping mills. The donkeys were known as Kona Nightingales because of the sound of their bray (cry). Today the donkeys have been replaced by Jeeps and pick up trucks which still haul coffee cherry to the mills daily.

The coffee harvest was from August through November with some cherry from high elevations still coming in as late as July. The coffee cherry was hand picked only when ripe and the coffee trees had to be revisited time after time to remove only the ripened coffee cherry. Picking coffee cherry was an affair for the entire family, including women and children. A good picker could harvest 100 to 400 pounds of cherry in a day. It is this hand picking which still to this day separates Kona coffee from other coffees in the world.

The public schools in Kona arranged the school year around the coffee harvest and instead of taking a summer vacation the children were dismissed from school for an annual “coffee vacation.” This practice started in 1932 and was not discontinued in the Kona public schools until 1969.

In the early 1920’s American Factors added a coffee roaster in Honolulu and began marketing Kona Coffee in the islands under the name Mayflower Coffee, and also private labeled the coffee for Kamigaki Roasters of Kona. This coffee was popular in the islands for a quarter century.