Mt. Thunder Coffee Plantation, the Deluxe Tour

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”.