Hawaii Coffee Overview

See our current selection of Hawaiian Coffees at Sweet Maria’s.

Hawaii coffee increasingly trades on it's cup quality

At one time it was easy to be a bit cynical about Hawaiian coffee.  It’s value was not intrinsic, not due to its flavor quality, the fact it tasted good.  It had value by association: folks had a nice vacation and wanted to bring something back to relive their Aloha experience.! 

While that still may be the case (and there is certainly low quality coffee sold to tourists in this manner), there are also many people dedicated to making Hawaiian coffee taste as good as the high price suggests it should be!

The range of coffee wrapped in a bag that reads “Hawaii” is still there … it could be fine small farm Kona, or it could be an old  roast of “Kona blend” that is more suited to serve in a gas station!  The best Hawaiian coffees cost a lot and the worst cost way too much. 

Classic Hawaiian coffee is mild and balanced. Don’t expect fireworks. It’s a charming and subtle coffee when processed in the traditional wet-process method. For small-farm coffees from the big island, Kona in particular, medium roasts show mild cocoa and nut flavors, caramelized sugars, a slight acidic snap to the cup, medium body and a clean finish. Sweetness balances out bittering tones, and Kona coffees can really pop as single-origin espresso!

Kona is still the center of Hawaiian coffee, but …

We had occasionally offered coffees from Maui, Molokai, and Kauai. But these are not usually grown like true small farm Estate grade coffees from the Big Island, nor do they taste like them. Kona isn’t grown at impressive altitudes compared to other coffee origins, but on Maui and Kauai coffee is grown at exceptionally low elevations, sometimes near tide pool level! Also, much Kona is an older coffee variety, Typica, a traditional type that cannot be grown at the lowest elevations. Recently, we found out that Ka’u coffees have come a long way, and can be excellent. So Ka’u is a region with credible quality potential.

In a historical sense, coffees like Kona are the pinnacle of a particular definition of what “good coffee” is: clean, pleasant, mild, good aftertaste. This is a notion of “good coffee” handed down from a time when low-grade coffee was called Brazil Rio and it had a seriously foul, dirty taste (so distinctly awful it is still called Rioy in defective coffee terminology). The best coffees were considered the polar opposite; island coffees — mild, delicate and clean.

Certain exotic coffee origins we appreciate as intense and unusual flavor profiles, such as Yemeni coffees, Ethiopian Harar, and wet-hulled Sumatras for example, would be considered defective in this definition. If you love those intense coffees, Kona may seem too timid, too simple, too mild. With scores in the mid-80s, they don’t rate like the best Kenyas or Ethiopias, but the descriptors indicate balance and clean cup quality. Consider this when you taste good Hawaiian coffees. 

Hawaii Coffee Pricing and Risks

The famously fragile ecology of Hawaii has been shattered; along with other invasive species and insects, the recent appearance of Broca, the Coffee Berry Borer insect, has had a huge negative effect on the farms of Hawaii. And coffee fungus is having it’s impact too.

Hawaiian coffee costs a lot because there is no cut rate labor … if the world had universal labor laws then all coffee would be priced like Kona etc. We think that’s the direction it should go, and coffee should be treasured while farmers are fairly rewarded.

So the goal with Hawaiians is to quit thinking that all Hawaiian coffee is good, and to realize that only a handful of coffees deserve the high price in terms of cup quality (you can easily argue that all deserve a high price in terms of the care and labor expended in producing them). And frankly, you must pay quite a bit for the truly great small-farm Kona

The Hawaii Kona Value Proposition

Good Hawaiian coffee is expensive. The reason has as much to do with the dynamics of small-scale farming as it does with producing any product in the United States … things cost more. In particular, finding good workers and paying them well is expensive. And of course it’s well worth it to create good jobs and to hold onto good people in a competitive job market. But it means the final product is going to cost more.

If people aren’t framing the Hawaiian coffee value proposition right, they may expect that, based on price alone, a Hawaiian coffee should taste 5x better than some other origin. (Whatever 5x better means in regards to taste!?)

That person will be disappointed … and it’s a shame because while Kona or other classic wet-process Hawaiian coffee might not set off an explosion on your palate, it’s a wonderful charming mild coffee. It’s not the loudest but it’s awfully pretty. When did that become a bad thing?

If you do want a classic, clean-cupping Hawaiian coffee to speak to you a bit louder, a great idea is single-origin espresso. I’ve always been impressed with how all those subtle characteristics in a Kona get punched-up when you run it through an espresso machine! (Tip, dose up slightly … when we use 18 gr for other coffees, 19.5 is great for Darnell Estate Kona). And I can say that the crew here, including a few first rate baristas, were really impressed with their first-ever Kona espresso!

Kona coffee is a treat, and other efforts in Hawaii with alternate processing and varieties of coffee are producing very interesting, non-traditional coffee experiences that are well worth exploring.

Hawaii References in Our Coffee Library

Sweet Maria’s + Hawaii 2021 Update:

I must admit that we have been out of the loop on Hawaiian coffee. Our old sources have retired or sold their farms. Newer operations can sell direct to customers, and good for them! Large operators still sell volumes of coffee, but they aren’t great quality from my experience. 

We used to sell coffee produced by family farms that produced a decent volume, and didn’t want to bother doing a bunch of marketing and retail. They wanted to farm coffee, and that’s it. We hope to create new long term connections, and are encouraged to see the hard-working small farms roasting and selling coffee direct. But our reality in our cupping lab is to focus on where we find the best quality cup, so the energy we expend on sourcing from regions in … say, Ethiopia, doesn’t leave us with much capacity to seek the finest small farm coffee from Hawaii. 

The other confession is … we are kinda cheapskates I guess! We want to offer our customers a good value. Hawaiian coffee can be a tough proposition in those terms, when setting up these cups on a global stage. Hawaii Vs Kenya Vs Colombia Vs Guatemala Vs Ethiopia, in a blind cupping. Tough competition there.

 I want to see farmers get $50 for their 12 ounce bag of Hawaiian coffee. Coffee is hard work. But if I am going to buy 2000 lbs of Hawaiian coffee, and have to sell it to our customers at prices that are 10x a fantastic Ethiopian lot, it’s got to also be amazing. That’s a tall order. I think small farms that sell direct to customers are offering something we cannot, that direct connection, and that makes the $50 for nice coffee worth it for those involved. Just like any produce in a farmers market, there’s that extra value. And there’s the way you are putting consumer dollars into farmers pockets …which is fantastic!

More on Hawaii: Our article detailing some history of Hawaiian coffee

Our Hawaii Coffee Photo Gallery

See our current selection of Hawaiian Coffees at Sweet Maria’s.