Chris Manfredi knew Ka‘u coffee was good the first time he tried it.
Chris Manfredi knew Ka‘u coffee was good the first time he tried it.
But he wanted to know just how good, so in 2007, Manfredi sent the first batches of Ka‘u coffee off to the Specialty Coffee Association of America Roaster’s Guild Coffee of the Year Cupping Competition.
The coffee, brand new to the world scene, placed 6th and 9th in a field of 100.
Interesting, Manfredi thought.
There are few agriculture success stories in Hawaii like that of Ka‘u coffee, which brought new life to an area still struggling to recover from the loss of sugar in the 1990s.
Since that first SCAA competition, Ka‘u farms have continued to notch accolades, and the district’s coffee industry has continued to grow.
“We’re out there now,” said Trini Marques, co-owner of Alii Hawaiian Hula Hands Coffee. She and husband Francis both grew up working in the sugar industry, and were part of the group that brainstormed coffee as a solution to the sugar problem. They planted their first trees in 1996 and had their first harvest two years later.
“The community needed something,” Marques said.
“There was really no industry in the queue — Ka‘u was just kind of idling along,” Manfredi said Saturday, drinking from a cup of frothy Ka‘u cappucino brewed up inside the Pahala Community Center.
The hoolaulea of the eighth annual Ka‘u Coffee Festival was underway. Hundreds of cars lined Kamani Street in Pahala and packed into the field next to the town community center. People came from around the Big Island, from Neighbor Islands and from the mainland, said Manfredi, who has organized the festival since its inception.
It wasn’t just one farm that put Ka‘u on the map, and the hoolaulea gave people the chance to take in the full picture by talking with the farmers in person, either at an outdoor booth or on one of several farm tours held throughout the day.
Each booth had coffee on hand for tasting, allowing attendees the chance to try a spectrum of Ka‘u tastes.
“There actually are differences,” said Joan Obra of Rusty’s Hawaiian Coffee.
Wood Valley coffees have a complexity brought about the cooler temperatures of the area, she said, while Cloud Rest coffee has hints of lime.
Then again, Obra said, “It depends on the processing.”
Inside the community center, five baristas spent the day demonstrating just that, brewing different farms’ coffees five different ways in a showcase of the beverage’s versatility.
Barista Patrick Oiye, using the V60 pourover method (“A good, easy introduction to pourover,” he said), grew up in Seattle and now lives on Oahu. He works at the Hawaii Agriculture Research Station, studying coffee trees.
Hawaii is an ideal place to mesh coffee botany with coffee business, he said.
“It’s a very accessible place to see where coffee is grown,” Oiye said. “You’re connecting one end with the other.”
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.