Roasting April 9th. Orders that include this coffee will be held until the roast date

Roast: Light

Tasting Notes

Red Oolong Tea and vanilla in the aroma . A sweet, balanced cup with flavors that suggest strawberry, watermelon, and pistachio

Kona Farm Direct

Produced at Kona Farm direct, a 6  acre farm located in the Holualoa area. Kona Farm Direct is the farm of 30 year industry veteran Kraig Lee. He operates a nursery here, growing coffee trees for many other farms on the island and maintains a portion of the property to trial plantings of many varieties. The best performing of these he has an acre dedicated to each of. SL34, Mokka, and Geisha. He also has a very small patch of 50 trees of the Laurina (also called Bourbon Pointu) variety growing. We were able to get 20lb of this special coffee. 

Laurina Variety

This variety as a dwarf mutant of the Bourbon variety originally discovered on the island of reunion off the coast of east Africa. It is a short Christmas tree shaped plant that produces small pointed cherries and seeds because of which it is also called 'Bourbon Pountu' or pointed bourbon. The beans produced by Laurina have  1/2 the caffeine of other arabica varieties. Production is very small compared to other varieties and the small cherries are very laborious to harvest. For this reason until recent years it was rarely grown commercially.

In 2009 our founder, Miguel Meza was able to obtain seeds of this variety amongst others such as SL34 and Mokka from the germplasm collection at Hawaii Agricultural Research Center in Kunia to plant at a new farm then being established called Hula Daddy Kona Coffee. Once these trees were mature they showed they were capable of producing exceptional coffee. Kraig from Kona farm Direct took seeds from Hula daddy farm to plant on his own and others. It still remains an extremely rare coffee in Kona with only 3-4 farms growing it and total production of this variety from all farms is likely less than 500lbs/ year.

Champagne Natural Process

Champagne Natural is a method we began developing in 2019 based off of research in Brazil that showed the potential of using selected yeast strains to improve to quality of coffee. We have continued to refine and evolve this process every season through continuous experimentation and cupping.

The process starts with sanitation of the cherries and removing any floating low density fruit. The cherries are then placed in a Bioreactor, covered with water and inoculated with selected wine yeast strains. After several days of fermentation the sugars in the fruit have been consumed and converted to alcohols, acids, and CO2, and also aromatic Esters which can give aromas reminiscent of fruits and flowers. At the end of fermentation the cherries are no longer sweet, but crisp and tart and effervescent from the CO2, tasting like champagne.

The Cherries are then laid to dry on trays in a specially built dehumidified drying building that rapidly removes the moisture from the fruit at low temperatures. After the coffee beans have dried to below 11% moisture they are rested for a few weeks in the dried cherries before milling.