A pair of festivals on the Big Island
showcase a classy stimulant and a gourmet
depressant -- Kona coffee and fine wine
Honoring the pioneers
By Betty Shimabukuro
of the farming life
Star-BulletinBefore they were old enough for kindergarten, the children were picking coffee. They'd work from dawn to dark, climbing 8-foot ladders to pull beans off of branches, all through the harvesting months.
Then came hauling, cleaning, milling, drying the coffee -- all without electricity, or running water, or automobiles.
Today, Kona coffee has a gourmet cachet, a reputation that speaks of richness and elegance. But this classy, premium, modern brew has decidedly unglamorous roots, dating back to a time when whole families lived on $500 a year, always in debt, always struggling.
And Kona has not forgotten.
By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
Moto Nakasone, one of Kona's coffee pioneers,
in 1922, the year she left Okinawa for Hawaii.
The annual Kona Coffee Cultural Festival always recognizes in some way the men and women who stuck with coffee through times when they could barely get a penny a pound for their beans.Yes, there is a parade, and a recipe contest, and a competition to select the finest bean. There's a queen and a karaoke night. "But more important we have a chance to recognize our pioneers," festival chairman Norman Sakata says. "It's the most important part, as far as I'm concerned."
This year's festival, which ended Saturday, marked the 170th anniversary of coffee in Kona and was dedicated to those pioneers. People like Sakata's own parents, who raised a family of 10 in a three-room home with dirt floors, built of lumber recycled from the sugar mill. The ceiling was covered in rice sacks. "That also used to be our underwear," he recalls.
People like Moto Nakasone, who arrived in Hawaii at age 20 from Okinawa and took up farming with her husband in Kona. Now 97, Nakasone was picking coffee up until the family sold the farm a few weeks ago.
With her son Takeo translating her words from Japanese, Nakasone recalls working barefoot in the fields, even when spraying poison. Transportation over the rocky land was by foot or by donkey. They struggled continuously to meet their mortgage payments of $40 every three months for the 11-acre farm.
Takeo Nakasone recalls rising at 4:30 a.m. to wash the coffee picked the day before. They'd climb into a huge tub full of water and beans -- "oh, it was slimy ... and winter months, you know, cold."
One word comes up continually as his mother speaks, "muzukashii" -- "difficult."
The coffee beans the Nakasones and the Sakatas picked for mere pennies now go for $1.30 pound. The Department of Agriculture estimates 1,700 acres of land is now in Kona coffee production, yielding 1.85 million pounds of beans for roasting in the 1996-97 season.
It's been a sustained boom for an industry that has seen severe swings in fortune since the first commercial crops were planted in 1928 by European and American farmers. Those early efforts went bust by the 1860s, victimized by blights and labor shortages.
By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
Walter Kunitake sells his family's Country Samurai
coffee from a small shop in Kailua-Kona.
The Kona Historical Society has recorded coffee's slow upward climb from that time: Hawaiians started harvesting wild coffee from abandoned trees and selling the beans to exporters. Then, Portuguese farmers took over the old, 100-acre plantations, breaking them up into 5- to- 10-acre plots. When they moved on into ranching, Japanese immigrants moved in.These issei carried Kona coffee into the 20th century and can claim credit for its longevity. Many were refugees from the sugar plantations -- they'd served out their labor contracts or simply run away from the harsh conditions of plantation life.
Not that coffee farming was easy. There were booms and busts, but mainly busts, and farmers found it nearly impossible to get out of debt. The Depression finished off many farms.
All these decades later, the quality of beans grown on these farms is way up, young entrepreneurs from the mainland have brought new life to the industry, and Kona coffee has claimed a firm share of a gourmet coffee market that has been on the rise since the early '70s.
The pioneer farms that survived are now in the hands of second- and third-generation farmers, some of whom are taking more aggressive approaches to marketing their coffee.
Walter and Sharlene Kunitake, both from coffee families, produce the Country Samurai brand, which won third place in the annual cupping contest, judged last week.
Instead of selling their beans to a processor, the Kunitakes are holding onto their coffee, selling it in their own stores. "Coffee was always in my blood," Walter Kunitake says.
His mother, Kiyono, is 88 and picked 75 bags of coffee last season. His three young children pick coffee and whack weeds on the farm.
Norman Sakata, now 72, also put his five children -- the oldest is now fortysomething -- to work. His wife, Marilyn, remembers taking them to the fields when they were just a year old. As a game, she'd hang a Vienna sausage can around each child's neck with string, and they'd learn to pick and fill the can with coffee beans.
It's a work ethic hard to imagine for those of us who can barely get our teen-agers to do the laundry.
"Sometimes I feel kind of embarrassed that I worked the kids so hard," Norman Sakata says. "But countless times they've told me how happy they are that they went through that hardship."
The adversity built a strong value system, he says, and that is the legacy of the coffee pioneers, men and women who faced the worst of times and still stuck with it.
"In spite of the hardships they never gave up, because they wanted to instill in their kids -- us -- that you always work hard."
The ruling family of Kona coffee this year is the Brocksen's of Honaunau. Kings and queens of coffee
Gus and Cynthia Brocksen of BrocksenGate Estate won the Gevelia Kona Coffee Cupping competition, the annual contest that names Kona's best bean.
The bean, marketed under the label Pele Plantation, is grown organically -- no herbicides and only organic fertilizer, Gus Brocksen said. This year, because of dry conditions in Kona, they had to invest in 2 miles of hose to keep their trees watered.
Pele Plantation is sold at the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai or by mail order, call (808) 328-2028. The Brocksens also have a Web site, peleplantations.com.
Second-place went to Kim and Lewis Johnson of Left Coast Farms, which is available at the Big Island Outlet in the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel. Call, toll-free, (888) 707-6624 for mail order.
Third place went to Walter and Sharlene Kunitake's Country Samurai Kona Coffee, sold at the family's store in Kona Square on Alii Drive. Call, toll-free, (888) 666-KONA to order by mail.
