A fraction of one percent of the world’s coffee supply
Kona coffee is not grown across a region. It is grown on a single narrow strip of lava-soil land on one side of one island, roughly 30 miles long and only 2 to 3 miles wide, running between about 500 and 2,500 feet up the slopes of Hualālai and Mauna Loa. That is the entire Kona Coffee Belt. Step outside it, in any direction, and the coffee grown there is no longer Kona.
Weigh that sliver of land against the coffee grown worldwide, and true Kona coffee works out to a fraction of one percent of the world’s supply.
Why is Kona coffee so expensive?
The Kona Coffee Belt, Big Island of Hawaiʻi — approximate, not to scale
Why this land grows different coffee
Our trees spend their mornings in full Kona sun and their afternoons under a blanket of cloud and light rain that rolls in off the mountain like clockwork. Nights stay cool. The soil underneath is young volcanic rock, broken down over centuries into something dark and mineral-rich that coffee seems to love.
Every spring, before the cherries come, the trees cover themselves in small white blossoms for about a week. It happens fast, and it happens right before the work of the season begins.
Our farm, and the neighbors we trust
We farm 25 acres ourselves. To keep 100% Kona coffee on the shelf year round, we also purchase green coffee cherry from a small circle of neighboring Kona farms we know personally. Every lot they bring us goes through our own quality check before we accept it.
What we will never do is blend that coffee with anything grown outside this strip of land, not to stretch a harvest, not to cut a cost. Buying from our neighbors supports fellow Kona farming families. If it says Kona Mountain Coffee, it is 100% Kona. Every time.
Every tree, picked by hand, many times over
Coffee cherries do not ripen together. On the same branch, some cherries are ready weeks before others. That means our pickers walk the same trees over and over across the season, four to six passes on average, taking only the ripe red cherries and leaving the rest for the next round.
It is slower and it costs more than stripping a tree in one pass. It is also the reason the cup tastes the way it does. Hand-picking is the least glamorous decision we make.
Milled, washed, and sun-dried on our deck
Cherries come off the trees and go straight to the mill. The skin of the fruit is pulped, the parchment washed clean, then spread out on our drying deck in the Kona sun. It gets raked by hand through the day, every day, until moisture is right, usually seven to ten days depending on weather. Once dry, we sort it by size and by grade before it ever leaves the farm.
Extra Fancy Kona, Fancy Kona, and Kona Peaberry
Extra Fancy
Our Private ReserveThe largest, most uniform beans in the harvest. Full body, bright acidity, least defects.
Fancy
Our EstateSlightly smaller than Extra Fancy, still exceptional.
Peaberry
A natural rarityA natural mutation where one round bean forms instead of two flat ones. Dense, sweet, rare, and sought after.
What is peaberry coffee?From our fields to our door, in burlap
Once our green coffee is dried, sorted, and graded, it travels from the farm to our Kailua-Kona location the same way Kona coffee has moved for generations, in traditional burlap bags stitched shut by hand. That is the last stop before roasting.
Customers kept asking to take a bag home with them, so now, once a bag has done its job, we sell it as a souvenir. It has held real Kona coffee from our farm, and it looks the part.
Shop our burlap bags
Roasted in small batches daily, by our Roaster
Every batch is roasted in small lots at our Kona store by our Roaster, who has been dialing in Kona coffee’s profile for years. Small batches mean we can pull each roast at exactly the right moment for that lot, rather than running one setting across everything. Once roasted, coffee is hand-packed for freshness and shipped from our door to yours.
See the farm for yourself
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Have a question about an order?
The best way to contact our shipping department is through emailing us.
orders@konamountaincoffee.com