Professional Coffee Knowledge Exchange

FrontStreet Coffee - Hawaiian Kona Coffee Introduction

Legend has it that after losing a romantic dispute, the volcano goddess Pele fled to the Big Island of Hawaii. Her volatile temper often erupts in anger, and the island's volcanoes still erupt to this day. As a result, the soil in the Kona region of the Big Island has moderate acidity and is rich in minerals. Combined with the warm, humid local climate, this unexpectedly created Kona coffee, which ranks among the top three coffees in the world.

Today there are more than 600 coffee farms in the Kona region. They cluster on the volcanic slopes at elevations between 800 and 3,000 feet, forming a unique "coffee belt." Each March the coffee trees produce delicate white flowers that bloom for only two or three days, and each flower represents a future fruit. Kona coffee boasts the world's most beautiful coffee fruit — plump in shape, vibrant in color, and with a bright luster. There are no time-saving shortcuts to harvesting it; only diligent hands can pick the fruit one by one.

Each fruit contains two seeds, which we commonly call coffee beans. Fifteen pounds of coffee fruit yield only two pounds of beans. When the two seeds grow together, they become the even more precious "Peaberry," which accounts for only 5% of total production. Every afternoon, farm workers carry the harvested fruit in bags back to the mill. After peeling, washing, and sun-drying, the beans undergo roasting of varying lengths to create the diverse flavors of Kona coffee.

Greenwell Farms is the oldest coffee farm in the Kona region. Since 1850, when Henry Nicolas Greenwell left England and set foot on the Big Island, his family has been engaged in the coffee business here for more than 160 years. In the 1990s the farm nearly went bankrupt, and current owner Tom Greenwell almost gave up the family business. In the end, by introducing advanced management ideas and cultivation techniques, along with some seemingly unbelievable methods, the farm prospered once again.

Today they still insist on pruning the fruit-bearing coffee trees back to 50 centimeters after each harvest, ensuring greater yields in the future. The farm's recent award-winning coffee is named Jeni.K, from carefully cultivated trees in the farm's Konanaewa region. This coffee showcases a perfect tropical character: a refreshing taste mixed with rich guava aroma, with hints of vanilla and chocolate in the aftertaste. Jeni.K takes its name from the farm's owner, Jennifer, so the packaging features a blooming rose. As the coffee aroma drifts gently, the owner's deep affection spreads far and wide.

Through its aroma and flavor, those who have tasted Kona coffee say it combines a hint of smokiness, fruitiness, and a subtle earthy fragrance, making it easier to appreciate the original flavor before grinding. The coffee served at the White House for important occasions is precisely Kona coffee. Yet Kona's growers and producers will tell any visitor who comes seeking fame to set aside those coffee-table etiquettes, savor each sip carefully, feel the rich layers of flavor in the mouth, and let the coffee speak for itself. In this season, let a cup of Kona coffee bring distant Hawaii to your side.

In Brief

FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research hall, happy to share coffee knowledge with everyone. Our unrestrained sharing is only to help more friends fall in love with coffee. Every month we hold three coffee promotion events with significant discounts, because FrontStreet Coffee wants to let more friends drink the best coffee at the lowest possible price. This has also been FrontStreet Coffee's principle for the past 6 years.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Kona is prized for balance rather than extremes, and the same is true of a good medium roast. During roasting, three factors decide the final flavor and must be kept in balance: acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The darker the roast, the more bitter and full-bodied the cup; the lighter the roast, the more acidic and delicate. For drinkers who want a balanced cup, medium-roasted beans are the best place to start, and FrontStreet Coffee's medium-roast lineup is built around exactly that idea.

If you dislike both sourness and bitterness, the Brazil Queen Estate is a good match. Grown in the world's largest coffee-producing country from the distinctive local Yellow Bourbon variety, it is clean and gently sweet. A medium roast brings out creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread, and sugarcane aromas and sweetness, and it brews just as well as a pour-over or in a moka pot or home espresso machine. For a sweeter medium roast, Strawberry Candy combines a Costa Rican honey-processed coffee with a washed Panama Geisha; medium-roasted to emphasize its best qualities, it shows both orange-blossom honeyed tone and a rounded sweetness, and suits cold brew, pour-over, and espresso alike.

Two more medium roasts round out the range. FrontStreet's 2013 sun-dried Typica, a representative Chinese specialty coffee, carries the traditional Yunnan small-bean character, roasted medium to bring back its balanced, gentle profile with notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot — good for pour-over, cold brew, or a drip machine, and excellent value. And Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1, grown from the Typica variety in the Blue Mountains, is medium-roasted so its acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body fuse into one elegant whole: chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel from the first sip, a balance few other coffees can match.