Kauai Coffee Production Tour
From the time our plants blossom to when the coffee is shipped to you, our beans undergo a rigorous quality control process to ensure that every cup you enjoy is of the highest quality, worthy of the Kauai Coffee name.
Coffee starts like many other fruits we enjoy - as a beautiful, fragrant, and delicate blossom. These blossoms eventually develop into the coffee cherry, and it is the seeds of this fruit, usually two to a cherry, which become the coffee bean familiar to most of us.Harvesting
On Kauai, the blossoming begins in February or March, and by May, the young fruit begins to form. The fruit ripens around late September, and harvesting begins. We employ harvesting technology very similar to many wine grape harvesters in regions like California's Napa Valley.
Kauai's harvesting period runs from mid-October through early December. We harvest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using 3 shifts - a practice unique in our industry. Due to the size of the estate, and the existence of several micro-climates, we rely on daily scouting reports to select the fields with maximum ripeness. Twelve mechanical harvesters that were originally designed for blueberries perform our harvesting. Over the years we have worked closely with the manufacturers to modify the machines' original design to more efficiently pick coffee cherries.
Wet Processing
After the coffee cherries are harvested, trucks deliver them from the fields to the wet processing plant within two hours, eliminating the chance of fermentation and damage to the coffee. At the plant, the cherries are separated into three types, as determined by stages of maturity - ripe, natural and immature coffee, by using inherent differences in density and hardness. We produce five grades of coffee from our wet processing plant with an average daily capacity of 650,000 pounds of cherry.