Hawaii - Greenwell Farms Coffee

By David Ellis with John Rozentals

When Tom Greenwell talks about coffee, especially coffee from Hawaii’s Kona Coast, he does so with a passion — and an authority that comes from this fourth-generation grower of one of the world’s most valuable and in-demand agricultural products.

Tom’s great-grandfather, Henry Nicholas Greenwell was a British adventurer who found himself stuck in Honolulu in 1850 after a boating accident on his way to the Californian gold rushes — and incidentally, after unsuccessfully trying to buy himself a sheep station in Australia (which is another story.)

He made the best of his bad luck, set up a general store at South Kona, took the plunge, so to speak, into planting coffee, then citrus, and in the 1870s also went into cattle and sheep ranching.

In 1873, the President of the Kaiser’s Exposition awarded the Greenwell family a “Recognition Diploma” for their Kona coffee at the World’s Fair in Vienna, commenting that the family could be trusted as exporting a genuine, high-quality Kona product.

The family has since donated the general store to the South Kona Historical Society for use as a museum, and with the sale of the ranches the coffee business remains the heart of what is now known as Greenwell Farms.

“Kona coffee is very special,” says Tom. “It’s a very gentle coffee, with fullness of body, just the right level of acidity, and with a balance that excludes bitterness.”

He could have been talking about wine, and the comparison drew closer as we tasted — “cupped” is the term to describe it — a range of coffees to see differences attributed to bean varieties, growing conditions, age and roasting techniques.

Greenwell Farms is a substantial business: the night before our visit they’d processed more than 2500 tonnes of beans.

That’s a helluva lot of coffee, and much of it is sold directly through mail order and to the many visitors who take tours of Greenwell Farms plantations and production facilities.

They’re located near the town Captain Cook named, obviously, after the navigator who died in Hawaii in a skirmish with the locals at nearby Kealakekua Bay in 1779.

Captain Cook township and the Kona Coast are on what Hawaiians call simply “The Big Island,” about a 30-minute flight from Honolulu. With its still-active volcanoes, immense mountains, excellent snorkelling, amazing scenery — and absolutely world-class coffee — it really is worth exploring.

For Tom Greenwell, one of the great differences between wine and coffee is that the consumer is a much more significant cog in the latter’s production.

“When you serve wine, the winemaker has done virtually the whole task for you. For the consumer, it’s a relatively simple process of opening, perhaps decanting and then serving,” he says.

“When you serve coffee, you have to take a raw material — the roasted beans — and turn them into a, hopefully, high-quality beverage. I know from many years of experience that the same beans can produce quite different results when handled differently.”

To that end, Tom has the following suggestions for getting the best out of your coffee:

The best device for brewing good coffee at home, he says, is the simple plunger. In other words, a few dollars will produce a better result than hundreds, perhaps thousands, spent on a “sophisticated” espresso machine.

Buy beans that really have been freshly roasted, and only buy as much as you will consume in a couple of weeks. After that, there is significant deterioration in quality. Certainly don’t buy good-quality beans and keep them in the fridge for months to use on “a special occasion”.

Like good red wine, freshly ground coffee needs a little time to breathe. If you want to serve coffee after dinner, grind the beans before dinner and let them rest.

Don’t use boiling water. Boil the jug then wait for a few minutes to let the temperature come down to about 95ºC.

If you’re visiting The Big Island, join a free walking tour of Greenwell’s coffee fields and processing facilities that also includes a tasting of their various coffee products.

Tours vary slightly depending on the season and run continuously from 8am to 4pm Monday to Friday and 8am to 3pm Saturdays.

For more information go onto: www.greenwellfarms.com ;  www.bigisland.org or www.gohawaii.com