Mt. Thunder Coffee
Through our connection with the owner of our farm Steve
Braund, David, Thane Tienson and I took a private three hour tour of the Mt. Thunder
coffee plantation in Koloko, (north of our farm at the 3,000 ft elevation vs.
our 1,500.) It was given by John Langenstein, a coffee consultant and General Manager to Mt. Thunder. He is also the owner of about 50 acres of
his own coffee. He has worked in the
coffee business for over 30 years in Kona.
First we mingled with the tourists at the coffee tasting bar
and flat screen TV where we watched a video about Kona coffee and Mt.
Thunder. They have been featured on
“Dirty Jobs”, the Cooking Channel, in “Unwrapped”, the Fine Living Channel “A Taste for Adventure”, the weather channel, and others. These videos give you a nice overview of the
coffee process.
 |
| Poha |
We got the nitty gritty farm view, the machinery view, the personnel
view, the business view, and everything in between. John knows everything about this farm, the
employees, many of whom he hired, the growers, the pickers some of whom he houses
himself, the difference between dry milling and wet milling and why, the
cupping, and the financial ups and downs of his 30+ years in the coffee
business. He said that every part of the
process from farm to cup is a variable in a good cup of Kona coffee. Of course he believes that the finest coffee
is 100% Kona. He is dedicated to keeping
it that way.
 |
| Makaki tea |
We first walked down a garden path past many different
plants on the farm such as Poka, a delicious fruit grown at high elevations,
Makaki, which makes a health tea, Hapu ferns, green tea, and Poha, which makes
a delicious jam. We also walked by a
huge lava tube with a ladder, and a lava bridge which we walked over, looking
left and right at another huge lava tube below.
 |
| lava tube mauka |
 |
| Lava bridge |
 |
| Lava tube makai |
 |
| Chinese and French geese |
All along the way, white Chinese geese and grey French geese followed
us, making their presence loudly known.
John had a pail full of alfalfa grain in his hand. He fed the boar they keep in a pen. He said there are more wild boar on the
island than people. That’s a lot of boar
on an island of over 125,000 people. We met
some small donkeys who roam the farm as pets, and some larger ones named Lucy
and Florence who are kept penned and do some farm work at times. John knew all their names, including “pretty
boy”, a haughty grey goose.
 |
| Boar, and picking a Poha |
 |
| Florence |
We ended up at the bottom of the buildings where the coffee
is processed, so our tour was somewhat out of order of the actual
processing.
 |
| Pile of pulp that smelled like... |
The first thing we saw was
the huge pile of pulp, already fermenting, in the large flat area. This pulp, the outside “cherry” part of the
coffee fruit, is fleshy, sweet, and juicy.
If you have the time and energy to process it, it makes a great health
drink, and is in fact sold as “Kona Red” for $5.00 a 6 oz. bottle. Traditionally it was put back on the farm as
mulch. Today, it is not so much because
of the Coffee Borer Beetle that can live in the cherry and skins and reproduce
there. The CBB is so new to the island
that the farmers are still not sure what is safe and what is not. Mostly, the Extension Service Agent says that
sanitation on the farm is the most effective form of deterrent, which means leave
cherry on the ground after harvest. That
is an impossible task, but makes sense. Most of the KCFA meetings are on ways to deal with this pest.
 |
| Pulper |
After passing the stench of the pile of pulp, we made it up
to the machines that pulp the cherry, which is done with a lot of water. They were processing 20,000 lbs that day, and
only had three garbage cans of floaters.
Floaters are the under ripe cherry, the ones infected with CBB, and
debris. A man stood by the swirling vat
and swept out the floaters with a plastic kitchen sieve. The cherries were then sent to a pulping
machine which is just a big squisher that rotates. They also have one that is like a
centrifuge. The pulp makes its way down
a conveyer to that pile.
 |
| Pulping area |
 |
| pulp tank |
 |
| floaters |
John showed us the different parts of the coffee fruit: the outer skin and flesh, which when ripe is
a beautiful cherry red. Inside, the
bean(s) are coated in a fleshy clear slippery mucilage layer that is very
sweet. This layer needs to be removed,
either a wet or dry method. Both methods
are valid. John said that the dry method
allows for more consistency and larger batches.
Most small farms(the average farm is 2.5 acres) use the wet method, which is a
fermentation in water that takes about 10 to 18 hours.
 |
| Drum dryer |
 |
| Dryer flame |
Once the sweet stuff is off the beans, then they are rinsed
and laid out to dry. This is also a
matter of preference. Traditionally the
beans were spread on a hoshidana deck
in the sun. The roof could be rolled over the sun drying beans if it rained, which
it often does in late afternoon. Our
farm house had a hoshidana roof originally.
You can still see the rollers in places.
 |
| solar drying deck |
 |
| Braund farmhouse hoshidana roller |
Mike and Mary Macheyne of MnM Kona Coffee, our neighbors, use a big deck
they built covered with visqueen. Mt.
Thunder has a passive solar drying deck and custom dries batches of coffee for
individual farms. The coffee is raked
every hour. The beans are dried to about
11% moisture content. There are fancy
machines that will measure this, but John just put it between his teeth and
could tell by how hard it was to bite. They also dry the beans in a rotating
gas fired drum. This allows for
consistency, and drying in large batches.
We saw bags of beans that weighed 1,500 pounds. The mill processes 2 to 3 million pounds of
coffee cherry a year.
 |
| 1,500 pounds parchment |
After the beans are processed up to this point, they are
called parchment. That is because a thin
layer of skin is still around the bean.
This protects it and allows it to be stored for up to 2 years in a
temperature controlled room.
When the beans are ready to be sold, the parchment is
removed in a machine, much like a weed whacker.
Then the beans are called green.
They have a grey/green color.
John said that green coffee is the second most traded commodity from
oil. Steve, the owner of Braund farms,
sells this green bean, in 100 pound bags, to Alaska. Here it is stored and roasted as needed. Braund farm coffee is only sold in Alaska, is
the most expensive coffee at Kaladi Bros., and in our experience, it is quickly
sold out!
 |
| incline separator |
 |
| optical eye |
Before the coffee beans are roasted, they go through a
sorting process on an inclined shaking gravity table, and a computerized optic
scanner. The table shakes the larger,
heavier, beans to the top. There is a
hole and a bag underneath for each section.
Most estate grown coffee (small farms who process their own like Mike
and Mary), do not sort. But they are
careful to pick the ripest cherry, have complete control of the whole process,
and roast on demand, producing high quality coffee.
 |
| 68 degree storeroom |
When there is demand on the shelf in the store, more coffee
is roasted. You don’t want to buy too
much coffee at a time, because roasted coffee has a shelf life of a week or
two. Right after they put it in the bag,
it needs to breathe for three days.
There is a one way valve on bags of Kona coffee that allows the rest of
the roasting process to occur.
 |
| Roaster just finishing |
Roasting is done in relatively small batches and is an art. The commercial machine is like a popcorn popper in some
ways. During roasting you can hear the
beans “pop” which they call a crack. One crack is a lighter
roast. If the beans crack again, it is a
darker roast. When the exact temperature
is reached, the coffee beans are released onto a cooling mixing tray so they
don’t cook any longer. Lots of steam
comes out and it smells wonderful. We
watched a batch roasted to 415 degrees F and heard it crack twice.
“Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it’s hard to go back
to sleep.” - Fran Drescher
We walked through the packaging section of the company right
by the roaster. Even the quality of the
bag is a factor. Nitrogen flushed mylar
bags will keep the coffee best. Across
the driveway is the gift shop and where you can buy the Mt. Thunder
coffee. We bought some of the Cloud
Forest Estate which is certified organic, and grown there at 3,000 feet. We also bought some Private Reserve. The Cloud Forest is of course the most
expensive, over $40 a pound. Growing
coffee at high elevations is good and bad.
Good, because it produces a high quality, flavorful bean; bad, because
the crop is smaller when there is less sun.
Interestingly, high elevation coffee grows year round. It is always flowering and ripening. At our elevation of 1,500 ft., the “bloom” is
in late February, March, and lasts a day or two. Picking is from August until December.
 |
| official Kona certification |
If you come to Kona and visit a coffee farm, you will spend
about 15 minutes looking at coffee trees and visiting the gift shop after you
have a taste of their coffee. John
wanted us to see and understand every aspect of the process, the pros and cons
of choices in processing, to see each step and learn the many variables that
are present to make a good cup of coffee.
He reminded us that, after all the farming techniques and steps in the processing
and the roasting, you can still ruin a good cup of coffee in how it is brewed!
Some interesting figures about coffee farming I got from Brad at the Greenwell Farms tour: there are about 900 coffee trees per acre. You can get a yield of 9,000 up to 12,000 lbs of coffee cherry per acre. One pound of roasted coffee requires more than 7 pounds of cherry. Each tree therefore produces about 2 to 3 pounds of roasted coffee. Here is a coffee quiz that gives some interesting trivia facts about coffee.
In order to enjoy an excellent cup of Kona coffee, John
recommends buying fresh roasted whole beans stored in the original bag kept at
room temperature; grinding the beans per
batch evenly, and brewing in a French press with filtered water. For a professional coffee cupping, the
grounds are in the water for 4 minutes before tasting. The lighter roasts are better for enjoying
the complexities of the coffee flavor.
When we arrived in Kona, we bought Kona coffee, but by
habit, added our favorite creamer. At
some point we stopped buying creamer.
One of our guests requested sugar.
Sugar just coagulates on the shelf because of the moisture in the air,
so we never bought any, nor do we use it in coffee. He had to try honey. I guess it was okay. Kona coffee is so smooth, delicious, and
flavorful, we wouldn’t think of putting anything in it again.
One other point: We
noticed that the volume of coffee in a pound can be quite different. Therefore, to really measure properly, you
should weigh the coffee, rather than use a measuring cup. There are 35 cups of coffee in a pound. You do the math; we don’t have a scale so we
guess.
At the Kona Coffee Festival we met Sean Steiman, a coffee
consultant, who has written “The Hawai’i Coffee Book". Other resources we use are the new “Specialty Crops for Pacific Islands”, edited by Craig Elevitch, and the U. of Hawaii at
Manoa, booklet called “Growing Coffee in Hawaii”. Our experiences have just taught us that
there is much more to be learned about growing Kona coffee. That’s why we go to the KCFA meetings and get
togethers to meet other farmers and “talk story”.
This blog is just one of several I have written about our
experience on a coffee farm. I invite you
to read the other posts. Just sort for “coffee
farm”.
