The arabica variety of the coffee plant arrived in the islands in the early 1800's.  It was given as a gift to the first governor of Hawaii from some spanish explorers.  It was then brought to the big island and the Kona Coast by one of the early missionary families.  The conditions in Kona were perfect for Kona Coffee:

1.It is a shade tree so the cloud cover that comes over our tall moutain, Mauna Kea, almost      every afternoon shading our Kona Coffee Belt for these trees in the same family as the gardenia plant.

2.Our warm afternoon showers give it the perfect amount of rain. ( And us the perfect amount of rainbows. )

3.And last but not least all the nutrients caught in the volcanic rock give this acid loving tree the last boost it needed to just thrive here in Kona

We can thank the early immigrant farmers for their hard work and dedication to this crop for it's sucess also.  Many came over to work on the sugar cane plantations and moved over to Kona when their contracts expired. 

All year long there is something to do on a coffee farm, if you aren't picking those ripe berries, you are pruning, plucking shoots or fertilizing.  And then there is weed control.  Each farmer has choosen his favorite way of doing all this, and there are many farm managers who will take care of it all if you want to just enjoy the life on the farm.  If you have someone else do everything you can still enjoy approx. 40% of your income from your coffee trees.

There is a cupping contest every year and many gentlemen farmers enter to compete for the BEST Coffee in Kona!  It is featured in an event called the Kona Coffee Festival, one of the oldest farm festivals in the country. And is sponcered by Gevalia Coffee Company.  Professional cuppers come over and sample from over 50 farms every year.  The coffee can only be entered by the farmer and from the farm where it was grown.  We call them private estate coffee farms.

Now during the months of September to March the coffee beans become ripe on the trees one by one and there need to be picked by hand one by one, only the red ones.  They are dropped into a home make ususally lahala or bamboo basket and then poured into a burlap bag that holds about 100lb of coffee.  Each tree can yield up to 30 to 50 lbs of ripe coffee each year, and most farms have approx. 600 to 800 trees per acre.  The ripe beans are then pulped, soaked over night and racked onto a drying rack for about a week, to dry in the hot Kona sun.  Once this is done it is called parchment and it still needs to have the parchment taken off and roasted before you can enjoy the flavor of some of the best coffee in the world.  I always wonder who came up with all of that just to have a cup of coffee??   But I am glad they did.  Kona Coffee is the reason I move to Hawaii over 30 years ago and I have been a fan of it ever since.