"Kona coffee producers reflect Hawaiʻi’s rich, multiethnic history, and the vitality of its contemporary local enterprises. Samuel Ruggles, a missionary, first brought coffee to Hawaiʻi from Brazil in the 19th century. At that time, Hawaiʻi’s coffee farms were run by wealthy plantation owners, who lorded over large parcels of land. Following a global downturn in the coffee market in the 1890s, however, many of these big plantations were broken up. Smaller, scrappier family farms, often owned and run by Japanese immigrants, cropped up in their place. Today, Kona coffee is farmed by around 600 small growers.
Kona’s smooth, rich taste has long inspired fans. In an 1866 letter, Mark Twain wrotethat “Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may and call it what name you please.” Today, the lust for genuine Kona coffee has led to some egregious imposters. While Kona farmers produce only 2.7 million pounds of beans a year, more than 20 million pounds of Kona-labeled coffee are sold each year. Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the presence of blends between Kona and other, less-pricey coffees, a way to cut costs while still delivering some of the rich Kona flavor. Yet new chemical testing methods, designed to check for compounds found only in genuine Kona coffee, have revealed that many of the so-called Kona blends actually contain no real Kona coffee. Experienced Kona drinkers can often taste the fraud, and coffee aficionados would do well to pay a premium for the real experience; not only for the taste, but to support a legacy of small, local growers that stretches back over a century."
