Learn About Coffee

A Brief History of Hawai’ian Coffee

In 1825 Chief Boki, then Governor of Oahu, acquired coffee trees in Rio de Janeiro on his way back from London aboard the British warship H.M.S. Blonde. These coffee trees were planted in the Manoa Valley on Oahu, and from a small field trees were introduced to other areas of Oahu and the neighboring islands. In 1828, Reverend Samuel Ruggles moved trees from Oahu to the Big Island of Hawa’i’i and planted them in the Kona district on the western slopes of the volcanoes Hualalai and Manau Loa.
In the late 1800’s efforts to establish coffee plantations were defeated by economics. Over time, small farms averaging less than 5-acres in size replaced the Kona coffee plantations.

By the 1930’s there were more than 1,000 farms and as late as the 1950’s there where 6,000 acres of cultivated coffee in Kona. By the turn of the last century there was coffee on all the major Hawaii islands. Kona Coffee is grown on the dark volcanic lava rock slopes of Kona, a city for which it gets its name from, located on the west coast of the Big lsland of Hawaii.

The Kona Coffee Belt is an area that is roughly only one mile wide by thirty miles long. It is situated on the western slopes of two volcanoes, Hualalai and Mauna Loa, at an elevation ranging from 500 – 3,000 feet.

Kona has produced coffee continuously since the early 1800’s.