Mountain Thunder
Started: 2025-02-05 20:24:25
Submitted: 2025-02-05 21:47:40
Visibility: World-readable
Visiting a coffee farm on the way home
On our last day in Hawaii, we packed and left the condo in Waikola Village where we had stayed for a week. It wasn't especially close to anything, but it wasn't very far from anything on the north-western quadrant of the island. We had time to fill between leaving our condo and our plane leaving Kona airport at 14:45, so we dropped by Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation high on the mountain above the Kona coast, on the northern end of the Kona coffee belt. We had already seen a historic coffee farm to give us an idea of how people grew coffee a hundred years ago; I also wanted to see a modern commercial farm.
When we arrived one of the coffee tours was underway so we waited for the next one while sampling the coffee they grew and processed on the farm and looking through the small gift shop. They had four different roasts in vacuum carafes in front of the gift shop (light, medium, dark, and light+dark blended together) so I sampled each one, trying to evaluate the flavor of the coffee to decide which one I wanted to take home with me. I ended up settling on the light roast, even though their sample was a bit acidic, because I hoped that the light roast would work best in my pour-over at home, where the careful extraction would emphasize the flavor of the beans (and the native terroir of the Kona coffee belt) without turning as acidic as the filter pot samples.
We joined the next tour, which turned out to be mostly a talk about coffee and coffee processing standing in a little tent on the side of the parking lot. This small farm includes its own processing plant, which seemed uncommon for the small Kona coffee farms, but it was active processing the current harvest so we couldn't go as far into the processing shed as we might otherwise have been able to do. Our guide showed us examples of the coffee cherry as it's picked (bright red), pulped (removing the fruit covering the seed), dried, hulled to remove the sticky inner layer, polished to remove the parchment that clung to the seed, and sorted to select the best beans to sell at the highest price. He talked about single-seed peaberries (focusing all of the flavor in a single round seed rather than two seeds nestled next to each other in the cherry), how the state of Hawaii dictates what can be sold as "Kona coffee", and how roasting coffee affects the taste and caffeine content. (I learned much of this when I looked up how to process the coffee I grew on my coffee tree at home; but I still have a couple of jars full of half-processed coffee I need to deal with or discard.)
The coffee processing mill was operating to process the harvest but we got to step inside to see the machinery in action. It was noisy and dusty inside; the machines were clearly operating, and doing something, but we were left with only tiny signs to cross-reference back to the talk about coffee processing to understand what was doing what. (I think the picture above shows the size sorter to the left, with beans that made it through various levels of sieves exiting the vibrating sorting trays at different levels into different burlap sacks to be moved to the next stage; and the color sorter to select the highest-quality beans. Below are the huller and polisher, the previous steps in the chain.)
The coffee farm included a nature walk through the jungle into the coffee fields, self-guided with a booklet describing the tropical plants growing on the hillside on both sides of the trail.
We walked along the trail down the hillside, between tree ferns (native to Hawaii) and monsterosa leaves (not native), and between lava tubes. Many of the plants were annotated like a botanical garden (including one bushy Camellia sinensis (tea) and Coffea arabcia, though after spending a week on the island I recognized many of the most common plants.
The trail ended at an observation deck looking out over the coffee farm, the jungle adjacent to the farm, and the slope leading down to the Pacific Ocean below.
We spent a few minutes on the observation deck under the clouds that hung in the sky above, then headed back up the trail. I selected a bag of light-roast coffee to buy to take home (along with a selection of stickers, including one featuring the cat sleeping in a basket on the table in front of the shop), then headed back to the car to drive down the mountain to get lunch before heading to the airport.
Getting lunch proved easier said than done. The fast-casual burger restaurant we selected in a strip mall in Kona was crowded when we arrived, and although there was only one person in line in front of us, it seemed like they were attempting to convey a large complicated order so the line moved slowly. Then we waited for our food while I tried not to worry about how little time we had left to get to the airport. Finally our food arrived and we ate (some faster than others) and once we were done eating we hurried out the door, hurried to the nearest gas station to fill up before returning the rental car, hurried back to the airport (along with everyone else who was driving north out of Kona trying to turn left from the main highway onto the airport access road), hurried into the rental car return (just as the shuttle bus to the terminal was departing), and waited anxiously for the next shuttle to arrive while trying not to check the time and wonder if we would make it to our plane in time. (As we were driving to the airport I realized that I had probably made a tactical error in assigning our checked bags to Kiesa and I: this meant that both of us had to be present to check the bags, so one of us couldn't drop the other off at the terminal and loop back to return the car.)
The next shuttle bus arrived after what was probably a couple of minutes (which felt like an eternity) and we crowded onto the bus to ride to the terminal. There was no line at baggage check so we didn't have to wait (and we made it in time for whatever United's checked-bag deadline was; I didn't feel like I needed to check the time). The TSA pre-check line was short; then we followed the signs to our boarding gate through another agricultural inspection checking that we weren't taking unpackaged plants back to the mainland. Right on the other side of the inspection was a shop selling an array of plants certified and packaged to be taken on the plane.
By the time we got to the gate we still had half-an-hour before the flight left, which meant they were beginning to board the plane and there was a huge scrum of people ambiguously lined up at the boarding gate who may or may not have been organized by boarding group. I briefly considered the line then looped back to the shop selling plants and selected a red ginger seedling to take back with me, because it was a plant that I recognized from hiking on the island and it looked like it would be an interesting plant to grow.
I returned to the boarding line and waited my turn, somewhere behind the rest of my family who didn't buy one last plant before leaving the airport. When I boarded the plane and found my seat between Julian and Calvin I told them that I had to buy a plant because it's my secret weakness and Julian commented that it wasn't really a secret after all.
We took off and began the long flight back to San Francisco. I reviewed some of the photos I took on the trip and watched the movie Napoleon, which I had downloaded onto my iPad for the flight. Half-way through the flight we hit a bit of turbulence, which didn't seem especially bad but the flight crew turned on the seatbelt light and kept it on for more than an hour, occasionally talking to us about it over the PA; and the flight attendants scolded anyone who stood up over the PA. Finally the air settled down enough that we could stand up again and a huge line appeared at the restrooms, including Julian, who had passed up a chance earlier in the flight to use the restroom.
We landed in San Francisco and drove home to Santa Cruz, after a week on the Big Island of Hawaii with Kiesa's brother and his family.
