The Kona Coffee Bean

If you are anything like me, most mornings can be neatly split into two categories: before, and after, coffee. College put me on this path and graduate school cemented its course: I am an AM caffeine junkie (aside: if I drink it after noon, I am up all night).

I’ll admit that it is not the most sustainable habit – coffee requires a significant amount of energy to produce and ship, and of course there are significant water, chemical, and land impacts (such as deforestation) associated with it – but damn, it tastes so good. Not that I ignore these inconvenient truths. More than the next man, I’ve done my best to balance the impacts of my habit: I’ve bought organic coffee; I’ve bought fair trade. But do they taste as good? Are they even organic?

While I have enjoyed the taste of coffee over the years and have even advanced my own preparation rituals and techniques (I make a mean cappuccino and latté – ask any former roommate), I’ve never been what one might consider a “purist.” To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what being a coffee purist even entailed. That is until I paid a visit to the Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation in Kona, Hawaii.

I love coffee

Last week I toured Mountain Thunder, sampled their exquisite brew, and made some purchases. I now know what the best coffee in the world tastes like, and can proudly say that it is indeed organic. Good luck finding it locally produced though, unless of course you live in a coffee-producing region. But even then chances are the very best stuff is shipped out for export and is not kept for local consumption, as is the case in much of Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia, where locals are usually left with the lower quality grade beans. Which is a shame in my opinion. Not in Kona though, and not at Mountain Thunder, they keep the best stuff for the locals. As well they should.

TOP: hand picked coffee bean, right from the tree; MIDDLE: top of the line, high quality "green" coffee bean (before roasting); BOTTOM: lower quality "green" coffee beans, what is found in most Kona "blends"

The Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation is one of the premiere coffee producers in Kona. Which in turn makes it one of the world’s best, as Kona is an area known for its exquisite coffee beans – a unique blend of climate, farming, meticulous care and precision production techniques. Just like the only real champagne comes from Champagne, France, (the rest is merely sparkling wine), only coffee grown in the small stretch along the western shore of the big island of Hawaii is actually Kona Coffee. Most Kona coffee sold in the market is a blend, with roughly 10% of the beans coming from Kona, and often the lower grade beans. Only in Hawaii are coffee producers actually required to report how much of their blend is actually Kona coffee. Not that you can’t taste the difference, but I thought you could use the heads up.

So what makes it organic? Okay, so it is not all organic, but at least Mountain Thunder has phased out the use of pesticides to control weed growth for its premiere crop. Instead of synthetic fertilizers they use a combination of pig, donkey, and goose manure and composted remains of the coffee bean that are stripped away in the production process.

Not that they wouldn’t scale up. Organic farming is hard work, and the considerable paperwork and testing that is required to certify products as organic makes it all but cost prohibitive for a lot of farmers. Funny how pumping pesticides and synthetic fertilizers into your crops requires less “hoop jumping” than employing natural farming techniques and producing an organic product. I suppose we just pay for that elsewhere, like with rising cancer rates and health care costs, or with the global warming pollution attributed to the production of synthetic chemicals, or…

An organic farmer after a long, hard day

So why is it worth bucking up and buying the best from the best, the most local and organic coffee you can find? Take this little back of the envelope calculation into consideration: as an estimate, each cup of coffee you drink is equivalent to roughly 59 grams of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. If you drink 2 cups of coffee a day every day of the year, that is roughly 43 kilograms (1000 grams = 1 kilogram) of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere just because you are trying to wake up (or stay awake). And that is not even scratching the surface of the water used. Organic coffee and environmentally responsible coffee plantations cut these impacts down. Or you could give it up, but I’m not there yet.

So although you may not be “paying” for it, coffee is a luxury good. Have some culture, have some class, buy the good stuff.