Cup of Aloha: The Kona Coffee Epic (A Latitude 20 Book)

Kona is one of the world's premium coffees. Given its small-scale cultivation on family farms, Kona has played a relatively minor role in the world coffee market and has been especially susceptible to price swings and market gluts. Many times in its history, coffee growing in the Islands has been pronounced dead by experts, but each time the farmers have bounced back; they have even managed to outlast the sugar plantations that dominated Hawai'i's economy for nearly a century. A Cup of Aloha is a heartfelt portrait of the farmers, millers, landowners, merchants, and laborers who struggled to keep themselves and their industry alive. The author traces coffee's history in Hawai'i--from its arrival in 1828 to Kona's position in today's highly competitive specialty coffee market. Through the author's use of oral history interviews, readers will experience day-to-day life on a coffee farm and the challenges, natural and man-made, that inspired innovations and adaptations to the agricultural, economic, and social life in the Kona Coffee Belt.