You Helped Make This Coffee

We live among the coffee trees, we’ve watched the cherries turn a bright red, and just when we were beginning to think it was a myth, a large family of Mexicans plucked the ripened goodies from their homes, and the coffee mill was switched on.
(Photo to come...Pete is lagging behind because he's been doing some paid weed-whacking on the side.)

The family has been picking Konacopia’s coffee for the last five years now, and are extremely efficient—the six of them, including an 8-year-old girl and a boy no older than 12 (there are also two older boys who now work in construction), picked over 800 pounds of coffee in a day and a half. This was the first harvest, but because not all of the coffee is ripe, they continue to harvest every 2-3 weeks until October or November. Farms at higher elevations have a later harvest, which often goes into February.

After we’d gone around and collected all of the full coffee sacks using the tractor, we weighed each one (the average full bag weighed 85 pounds), and then poured the cherries into a tub at the bottom of the mill. The pickers are paid 65 cents per pound, so I guess this is where our “free” labor comes in handy.

When the mill is switched on, we pull up on a vertical piece of wood, which opens a “door” at the bottom of the tub, causing the cherries to flow out into a chamber. In this chamber there is a vertical conveyer belt containing perpendicular slats that scoop up the cherries from underneath, and carry them to a horizontal conveyor belt at the top of the mill. Here they are sent into a bin and hosed with water, and out pops a bean while the hull of the cherry is sent down a chute that leads to the ground. The beans sit in the tub overnight to allow them to ferment. The next the morning, they move into the “shaker,” a screened conveyor that shakes any last beans out of the remaining cherries, and then deposits the beans into a large bucket.

This is where our work really begins. We scoop the beans out of the larger bucket using five-gallon buckets, and dump them out onto the drying roof. The drying roof is a large (I would estimate 15’ by 40’), flat rooftop covered in blue tarps and then fiberglass screen, where we pile the beans up and then rake them out (almost like a Zen rock garden) so that they form a thin layer. Then, in our bare feet, we navigate through the rows of beans, checking for any “unripe” (white) beans, green berries, leaves, or “other” items that are lurking within. These rejects we simply toss onto the ground. The next cup of Kona coffee you drink may contain beans that I stepped on with my stinky feet, or touched with my bare hands.

What’s most interesting to me is the process of careful growing, hand-picking, sorting, pulping, drying, and roasting. I like knowing that one of the girls who picked the beans offered us some of her Chex Mix as a snack; that if you stand below the mill while the cherries are flowing through, you’ll get hit in the head with no less than three flying strays; that the broom that Pete used to sweep up any loose beans was bought at a hardware store down the street and he was the first person to use it because the old broom was broken; that all of these details are going to be somewhere within this coffee, later packaged, sent to stores, purchased, and dripped into your cup. And you could go back almost infinitely—who planted the trees? fertilized them? What were they doing the day the trees started to grow? What was the weather? What did their hands look like? When I think of this infinite process, I can see how everything overlaps somehow, making the world a web of interdependent people, places,…and coffee.

Hawaii is truly a land of origins. To be part of the production of something, whether it’s a product that someone else will later eat, or a piece of fruit that I myself will consume, is a humbling experience. Not to mention that the island itself is continuously growing through the eruptions of its two active volcanoes. Sometimes I think it wouldn’t surprise me if a dinosaur trotted past us.