Organic Kona beans inspire new coffee line

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Lion Coffee is introducing a line of organic Kona coffees, including dark, medium and light roasts. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser A brew debut at Chef Mavro In the near future, Chef Mavro restaurant will begin serving organically grown Lion Kona coffee. It is prepared by means of an unusual siphon or vacuum system in which steam from boiling water is drawn up through ground coffee, condensed and passed back through the grounds. It is said to create a smooth yet intensely flavored brew.

It moved on to a line of products that, in many cases, had little do do with coffee: creamy cold frappes, chai and Thai tea, juice blends and energy drinks.

Now Lion Coffee is ushering in the next evolution: organically grown Kona coffee. The new line reflects a nationwide trend toward an overlap between the gourmet/fine food/specialty foods universe and the health/whole/natural foods world.

Jim Wayman, president of Hawaii Coffee Co., Lion Coffee's parent company, says this crossover is what happens when the guy who loves goat cheese and collects California cabernets begins to care about his aging body: He wants to eat in a healthier way, but without any loss of taste or quality.

Lion's organic line is composed of four products: Organic Kona Gold Premium (medium roast); Organic Kona Gold European (dark roast); Organic Kona Gold Vanilla Macadamia (for those who must have that flavor kick); and Organic Lion Gold (light roast), available at Longs stores.

The 10-ounce packages of ground coffee are 10 percent Kona beans and 90 percent beans from regions beyond the Islands, all organically grown. (Whole-bean organically grown coffee will be available in the fall.)

The organically grown coffee is being sold at the same suggested retail price as regular Lion Kona Gold and Kona Blend — $5.99.

Wayman said the goal is to keep the price for the organically grown Lion line low enough that people who tried it during the introductory sale at Longs Drugs ($3.99 a package) will want to buy it again, even if it's a few pennies more.

Every morning at the Hawaii Coffee Co. processing plant in Kalihi, Wayman and several members of his staff conduct a "cupping" — coffee industry talk for a tasting. They may be comparing one day's roast to another or checking out a new product.

On a recent morning, the blind tasting pitted two organically grown Kona blends against their conventionally grown Kona sisters. The organics came in at No. 1 and No. 2 on everyone's list.

Wayman said this has happened both with experienced tasters and novices. The word that keeps coming up to describe the taste is "clean" — meaning a very crisp, straightforward and distinctive flavor without a lot of side notes or aftertastes, he said. (I found the Organic Kona Blend flavorful and pleasing, and a 100-percent organic Kona — which unfortunately is not for sale — full-flavored with even greater complexity.)

Lion's project is the first significant attempt to brand and market organic coffees in Hawai'i at grocery-store prices. And it's taken two years to get the effort off the ground.

Lion's chief supplier, Trent Bateman of Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation on Mount Hualalai in Kailua-Kona — see www.mountainthunder.com, or phone (888) 887-8584 — said he needed that much time, hoarding beans and buying them from other organic farmers to amass enough coffee to launch the line. His is the only certified organic farm to both grow and process beans; they've been farming coffee organically for eight years. In recent years, a number of farmers have gone into production and more are doing so, he said.

In an attempt to encourage still more farmers to grow organic coffee, Bateman had become an informal middleman, shipping his own organically grown beans and those of other farmers to California-based Kona Kava, which marketed the beans. But it was a clunky system, with a delay between delivering the beans and getting paid.

The partnership with the deep pockets of Hawaii Coffee Co. (which owns both the Lion and Royal Kona coffee brands and has a thriving mail-order operation and private label operation), has allowed Bateman to assure farmers of a place where they can come daily to get cash for their beans at a reliable, posted price.

"This has always been available to other Kona coffee farmers but not to organic growers," he said.

Organically grown Kona coffee beans are extremely rare. Of a typical 2-million-pound annual Kona coffee harvest, as little as 100,000 pounds are organically grown.

This is how small the organic Kona coffee industry is: Bateman's Mountain Thunder Coffee is the largest organic coffee farm in the United States. And he only farms 20 acres of beans. There are fewer than 100 acres in organic coffee in the officially designated Kona coffee growing region, a miniscule fragment of the industry, Bateman said.

Because the beans are so hard to come by, farmers who raise Kona coffee organically are paid half again as much as those who use conventional growing methods involving pesticides and other chemicals. But theirs is a much more complex task.

Farmers who seek certification from the Hawaii Organic Farm Association must eliminate the use of all man-made pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. An established farm that has been using chemicals must cease for three years before it can seek certification.

"It's almost easier to start a farm from scratch. A lot of people I'm talking to are doing that," Wayman said.

At the plant, Lion's workers must keep organically grown beans strictly separate from the others, and must follow a certain protocol for clearing and cleaning equipment between processing the two types of coffee, he said.

The big problem for coffee farmers is weeds. Instead of spraying with petrochemicals to keep them down, organic coffee farmers are trying a variety of methods, from mulching to mowing and weed-whacking. But mulching isn't very reliable, and mowing and weed-whacking are costly because of workers' salaries. Bateman is trying geese. He said sheep work, but they'll eat the coffee trees, too.

Then there are nematodes, tiny worms which infect coffee roots. There is no really effective treatment, but Bateman is excited about a new "tea" that's being brewed from mushrooms by an innovator on Maui. It is said to kill nematodes without chemicals. But that's still in the development stages and not approved.

Still, with Hawaii Coffee Co.'s buying power, Bateman said, he hopes more farmers will become part of the "green cafe movement."

"We don't need fertilizers going into the ocean and our ground water. We don't need to be spraying poisons on our food. If all farmers receive 50 percent more revenue, it's an incentive for more farmers to get into growing organic," he said.