Kauai Coffee

I am a coffee guy. Some folks, probably more, fancy themselves wine people, I think of my interest in coffee in a similar way.

To my knowledge, Hawaii is the only state that grows coffee as a farm product. Contrasting coffee as grown on Hawaii (big island) and Kauai is interesting. We have visited multiple coffee "plantations" in the Kona region of the big island and these farms are small. None we visited would be viable unless they had some supporting activities such as tourism or coffee processing. The planation we have now visited multiple times on Kauai is huge - 4 million trees (coffee fact - a coffee tree produces about one pound of coffee). Size matters in some interesting ways. Kona coffee is picked by hand with the pickers taking the cherries from the trees at different times to focus on the ripe berries. Kauai coffee is picked once by special mechanical pickers. The overripe cherries float so immersing the fruit in water allows the fruit that is too ripe to be discarded. However, underripe cherries are processed along with the ripe cherries which could be argued to change the quality of the product. I am guessing few can tell the difference or care.