100% Kona Coffee

AL's Kona Coffee

Tree to Bean to You!

Why Kona?

One can study and persue coffee growing perfection, but nothing can replace mother nature. AL's Kona Coffee is 100% grown on our farm in the famous Kona Coffee Belt on the Big Island of Hawaii. All coffee called "100% Kona Coffee" (please see note below regarding this misunderstood notion) must be grown in an area that is only three miles wide and twenty miles long. Only in this very specific location, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on the side of an active volcano, are the perfect conditions for coffee found. In this region, the soil is rich and dark, packed with nutrients and microorganisms that have been brought from the Earth's core to the Earth's surface just a short few hundred years back. We estimate our soil to be around 800 years old. The youth of the Big Island in geologic terms means the soil is fresh and extremely nutritious as nutrients have not broken down or been used yet. Climate is another very important contributing factor to Kona's amazing coffee. The warm, sunny mornings, afternoon cloud cover with misting rain and cool crisp nights, year round, provide the ultimate growing weather for coffee trees. The only place in the entire State and pretty much the entire United States, the Kona region's rainy season is the summer, when the coffee can benefit most. The Kona region does not experience much temperature variation throughout the year where days average in the high 70s and nights average in the mid to low 60s.

Regarding the "100% Kona Coffee" description, in Hawaii, state law dictates that only coffee grown in the very tiny Kona Coffee Region, and consisting of only coffee grown in that region can and must be called "100% Kona Coffee." However, the state law does not prohibit, or even frown upon the use of the Kona name for just about anything. The large coffee farmers in the state, none of which are found in the Kona Coffee Region, use the Kona name freely and it hardly ever refers to real Kona Coffee. Many blenders in the state use 10% coffee from the Kona Region and 90% from anywhere and everywhere and put the Kona name on it. Consider if you were buying Bordeaux wine from France and only 10% of the wine was from Bordeaux and the rest was "box wine"....what do you think you would be tasting? There is much controversy in Hawaii regarding these practices which are very deceptive to the consumer. But, the state lawmakers are reluctant to make any changes as they don't want to rock the boat and lose the support of the large corporate interests in blending coffee and using the Kona name to extract money from unsuspecting consumers.

Further, on the mainland, there is no rule or law whatsoever regarding the Kona name, so Kona can be used on anything. Many blenders may place a single Kona Coffee bean in a 100lb bag of coffee and call it Kona! So next time you are 7-11, Quick-Pic, Jack-in-the-Box or any of the 100's of merchants selling "Kona" coffee, think about what you are probably really getting. If the coffee is not perfectly balanced on the pallete, meaning low acidity so that it feels soft on the tongue, and has no aftertaste whatsoever (Kona never has any bitter aftertaste, no matter how strong you make it), then it's not truely Kona Coffee.

To guarantee you are getting "100% Kona Coffee", your best bet it to buy directly from one of the 800 small farms in the Kona Coffee Region, like ours!

KCC KCFO
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Holualoa, HI 96725