Shopping For Coffee

 

One of Hilo's most interesting attractions is the Hilo Farmer's Market. Packed with vegetables, fruits, honey, soap, ethnic foods, clothes, handcrafts and yes, coffee, the Hilo Farmer's market operates on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from however early you can manage to wake up to about 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

 

Big Island Coffee/ Kimchi booth at the Hilo Farmer's Market
Photo by Arah Ko 

 

The Hilo Farmer's Market has booths selling over half a dozen different Big Island coffee brands, so one bright Saturday morning I stopped by the market and picked up one of every brand I could find, determined to have my own home coffee tasting.

 

 

Divine Hawaiin coffee booth
Photo by Arah Ko

 

It didn't take me long to figure out that coffee tastings are actually called coffee cuppings. (Thank you wikipedia!) The coffee I bought was all medium roast and if I could get it, whole bean. I purchased coffee from Buddha's Cup, Big Island Coffee, Big Island Roasters, Kona Mountain, Divine Hawaiian Coffee and Sharkie's. I will be posting about the individual brands as well as the result of the coffee cupping soon!

Cappucino Crazy

A classic heart-shaped cappucino.
Picture taken by Arah Ko.

There are a lot of reasons many people prefer other coffees to cappuccinos. Some people don't like bitter coffee and go for the Frappe type of drink while several black-coffee drinkers I know avoid cappuccinos because "they are all foam", but there are also a few pros to this particular beverage...

 

 

One reason to order a cappuccino is if you don't want too much caffeine. Though the degree of caffeine in a cappuccino verses a plain cup of coffee varies depending on where you get it, your typical Starbucks Grande cappuccino will only have about 150mg of caffeine while the same size of Starbucks drip coffee is around 330mg.

 

A beautiful swan design cappuccino from the Ala Moana Mall-- after I had taken a sip from it...
Photograph by Arah Ko.

Reason number two for not dismissing a cappuccino if you're ordering out is that they can be fairly difficult to make at home, requiring very specific milk temperatures and an espresso machine. So if you want a little variation in your coffee habit, it can be a fun thing to try.

 

I haven't even seen one of these dog cappuccinos online! Even though a lot of cafes don't design their cappuccinos if they are in a to-go cup, the cafe we went to did it without us even needing to ask~
Photograph by Arah Ko.

 

My third reason (and excuse) for ordering cappuccinos is probably the most obvious one: cappuccinos can look amazing. There are hundreds of cappuccino designs ranging from hearts and leaves to monkeys and cartoon designs. The cappuccino photographs above were taken at the Ala Moana Shopping center in Honolulu where they have an amazing coffee shop called Honolulu Coffee Co.! I highly recommend a visit.

What happened when I tried to grind green coffee...

Drying Coffee
Photo by Arah Ko, Sept. '12

Green coffee is what processed coffee beans are called before they are roasted. While green coffee can be green, it also ranges from a light green to a chalky grey.

Some studies had been conducted to see whether or not green coffee can aid weight loss, but so far it remains a myth because no scientific study has proven it yet. In any case, I decided I wanted to try green coffee for myself, but was surprised when I put it in the coffee grinder and it started to make a noise like a breaking lawn mower. Little bits of shell were being torn off tiny grey-green coffee beans. After a little more careful research I found out that my coffee had been green coffee with the hull and dried pectin (or mucilage) layer still on and that the blender had taken the outer layer off while leaving the very hard little green beans behind.
 

Above to left is green coffee, to the right is coffee with parchment skin.
Photo by Arah Ko, Sept. '12

 



While my green coffee blending experience didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped, I did learn some things about coffee that I hadn't known before.

Coffee fruit are made up of seven layers and we only end up using the center cut of the bead, the part in the very middle, and the bean itself surrounding the center cut. The outer skin, pulp and mucilage layers are removed in both dry and wet processing. The parchment layer comes off during the coffee washing or drying. The last remaining layer called the silver skin is either removed by machine or it burns off in the roasting and becomes chaff. What is left of the fruit is roasted and ground for our enjoyment.

 

I curbed my disappointment about not being able to drink green coffee by brewing myself a cup of 100% Hawaiian coffee-- which was great-- but I'll have to tell you about it next week...

Yours Caffeinatedly,

Arah

Harvesting Coffee Cherries

 

Coffee grows on bushes in little green and red fruits called cherries. The coffee is ripe when the cherries turn dark red. After being picked and brought in the coffee begins the process of becoming the beans you buy in the store, but because I'm just making some for myself the process is a bit different.

 

Coffee is typically processed one of two ways, the wet method or the dry method.

 

For the wet method the coffee cherries are sorted and pressed in tanks of water and then either shelled by fermentation and washing or machine assisted wet processing. Both ways require specific equipment. Most Kona Coffees are processed in the wet method.

 

The dry method of processing coffee cherries is the oldest one. Whole coffee cherries are sorted and set out to dry on a flat plane or concrete and regularly rotated until their skins come off leaving the rest of the fruit.

 



Having tried to take off the skin the dry method last year without success (they all rotted) I am practicing neither the wet nor the dry method. Because I only picked one bowl of cherries, there are few enough to simply mash the cherries with a potato masher and pop the beans out by hand.

 

 

The beans are free of their skin and pulp and what can be seen now is the white, slimy pectin layer of the coffee. I set these out to dry in the sun for a few days.

(I hope this works. I've never heard of anyone doing it this way before...)



Keaau is the town right... There!

   Keaau is a town on the Big Island of Hawaii on the Hilo side, or East side of the Island. While Kona is famous for it's dryness (and coffee) Hilo side is a lot like Jurassic park-- except instead of big dinosaurs, we get geckos... Because of these extreme climate differences, some people don't realize that coffee can actually grow on both sides of the island.

   Hawaii is the only State in the U.S. that can grow coffee, vanilla and chocolate and Kona coffee tastes great because of the rich volcanic soil it lives in. We're growing our own coffee, just a couple bushes of it here in our yard on the rainy side of the island. Right now they look something like this:

This year I plan to go to several Kona coffee tastings, grow, dry and brew my own coffee, review local coffee shops and blog about it!

A hui hou!