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Connoisseurs Approve
Gods Gift to the Coffee Bean - For the coffee drinker,100% Kona is like
the finest wine. Take a drive any time of year through the verdant uplands on
the West Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii and you can’t help but notice a
distinctive aroma wafting through the fresh tropical air—the smell of roasting
coffee . - Spirit of Aloha • October, 2005
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God’s Gift to the Coffee Bean
For the coffee drinker, 100% Kona is like the finest wine
October, 2005
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| John Langenstein and coffee berries |
Take a drive any time of year through the verdant uplands on the West Coast
of the Big Island of Hawaii and you can’t help but notice a distinctive aroma
wafting through the fresh tropical air—the smell of roasting coffee. That aroma
simply means you’re in the heart of a region famous for a signature gourmet
product that brings sighs of delight to connoisseurs around the world: Kona
coffee. It’s only here, concentrated in a narrow corridor stretching about 30
miles between the mountain communities of Holualoa and Honaunau on the flanks of
Mauna Loa, that this highly-prized coffee is produced. This is the Kona coffee
“belt,” as it’s known, where a combination of factors makes for superb coffee
growing conditions: rich volcanic soil, an ideal elevation of about 1,100 feet
and a gentle climate—the coffee plants are kissed by morning sun and caressed by
afternoon rain showers.Everything about this mountainside area on the Kona
coast seems so coincidentally perfect for growing fine coffee that one grower
calls it “God’s gift to the coffee bean.” The grower is John Langenstein, owner
of Langenstein Farm in the fertile Honaunau area overlooking Kealakekua Bay in
South Kona. Coffee—the word comes from the Turkish kavhe- has been grown on this
coast for more than 150 years, originally transplanted from Guatemalan stock.
The plant itself is actually a member of the gardenia family and when the trees,
which resemble large bushes with whip-like branches bloom, they are covered with
small fragrant white flowers. This happens eight or 10 times a year, resulting
in mountainsides of brilliant white blossoms which the locals call “Kona snow.”
Hawaii produces the only American coffee and some is grown on all the Islands
except Lanai. But Kona is the king, grown on farms called “estates.”
Langenstein’s Kona coffee farm is one of about 40 or so estates found in the
coffee belt, most of which are on the small side, from two to eight acres. The
coffee grown on Langenstein’s estate farm is comparable in many ways to fine
wine grapes grown on small estates in California and elsewhere. It is a labor
intensive crop, requiring hand picking (no mechanization here!) and a
traditional meticulous and time-consuming processing to bring out the complex
taste. Indeed, the words used to describe the best Kona coffee sound exactly
those used for the finest wines: ultrasmooth, low acidity, creamy head,
multi-dimensional, silky, full-bodied, rich aroma, even “winy.” The Kona
coffee produced by Mr. Langenstein is like a fine wine, and he has worked hard
to make it exceptional in every way. You might call him an accidental grower,
because when he arrived on this coast from the San Francisco Bay area in 1975
and bought his overgrown property, he didn’t know it once was a coffee
plantation. But he discovered 90- year old coffee trees and, knowing that old
vines make better wine, he thought the beans from these vintage trees might make
good coffee. They didn’t—they made great coffee. From that moment on, he became
a man with a passion, to make the best Kona coffee on this coast and share it
with the rest of the world. With an extensive background in the food and wine
industry and a former owner of a successful catering business, Langenstein knows
what culinary quality is all about. In the case of Kona coffee, this first means
selling a product that is 100% Kona coffee. Langenstein explains that most of
the “Kona Coffee” you can buy in the Islands or elsewhere is actually a blend:
usually just 10% Kona coffee mixed with 90% vastly cheaper and inferior foreign
coffees. These blends, unfortunately, can still call themselves “Kona” coffee;
so when the typical consumer purchases this product, it tastes nothing at all
like the real thing.
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Like all great food products of the world, there is no
substitute for the authentic, 100% genuine article. But even between the 100%
Kona coffee produced by the various estates here, the quality can vary
substantially, depending on the grade of beans, the care used in the processing
and many other factors. Mr. Langenstein has invested so much of his blood, sweat
and tears into his farm in the last three decades, that he treats each crop,
practically every bean like precious children. He oversees the many steps of the
arduous processing to ensure that quality is there from the first red bean on
the tree to the final dark, rich product. Just so you know, these steps include
picking, pulping (removing the bean from the red outer covering), drying the
beans on a special outdoor platform, grinding the parchment off the beans,
sorting and grading and finally, roasting. Langenstein actually ages most of his
beans in the parchment stage for two months; he believes this mellows the coffee
and brings out flavors the same as storage in oak barrels helps mature wine.
Mr. Langenstein’s diligence in producing a superior coffee has come to the
attention of food and wine publications, even the New York Times. You’ll find
his 100% Kona coffee served in some of the Islands’ five-star restaurants and
hotels, including Alan Wong’s, the Halekulani, Manele Bay and the Fairmont
Orchid. Some people visit his farm, where he’s happy to take visitors on a tour.
But the way most folks get to enjoy his Kona coffee is by simply ordering from
his internet website, whose name is, well just what you’d expect it to be for
someone so passionate about a coffee from Paradise—www.kona-coffee.com.
To assure clients that his coffee is 100% Kona coffee, he personally signs each
fresh-roasted bag of coffee beans he ships out. He says it shows that all the
beans are true Kona, hand-picked at optimum ripeness and processed and roasted
to the individual order. He offers three roasts, by the way: a lighter medium
roast, a full-body Vienna roast and a darker French Roast. He urges you to drink
his coffee straight—no added milk or sugar— to experience the extraordinary
flavor of this world class coffee. Yes, you pay more for Langenstein Farm 100%
Estate Kona Coffee than the coffee you’ve been drinking. But you won’t mind. One
cup and you’ll know what God meant real coffee should taste like.
An Appetite for Hawaii - Off the usual
tourist trail, food growers and entrepreneurs help define the islands'
delicious, distinctive cuisine. By Martine Booe - Bon Appétit •
March. 2002
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From the Bon Appétit: America's food and entertaining
magazine
March, 2002
By Martin Booe
Langenstein Farms
Coffee Culture |
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| John Langenstein took over a long-neglected
coffee farm on the west slope of Mauna Loa 27 years ago.
Today, the mainland defector, who likens the complex flavor of his
hand-picked coffee to fine wine, is one of the state’s most respected
growers of Kona beans. He sells his roasted on-line at kona-coffee.com.
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The ancient chiefs on the Big Island didn't joke around. If you crossed them by, say, stepping on their shadow, you got whacked-unless you managed to scrimmage past the chiefs' warriors to the "place of refuge," a six-acre temple compound
located on a jagged peninsula south of Kona. If you make it, you were as good as new.
Today, the spot is known as Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park. I wandered around the grounds, contemplating the notion of redemption just by walking on a piece of land.
So redeemed, I took a short drive up the mountain to the quaint village of Captain Cook and the pungent aroma of roasting coffee beans.
At Langenstein Farms, which overlooks the place of refuge, John Langenstein creates refuge in each cup of his own Kona estate-grown coffee.
"Drink this for a month and you'll notice it improves your sense of well-being," Langenstien said. This was my first experience with pure Kona coffee,
and its silky body, creamy head and complex flavor made it a far cry from the many lackluster Kona blends (they may contain as little as 10 percent Kona)
that are sold elsewhere. As we trudged along the rocky hillside, Langenstein zealously tore at invading weeds. "I am a fanatic," he said. Then he paused and corrected himself. "Actually, I'm a maniac. But really, the thing that's unique about what I'm doing is that I care.
New York Times - AS you drive south along the west coast of the Big
Island, you can't help smelling the coffee roasting. By R. W. APPLE Jr.
- New York Times • Feb 28, 2001
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From the Volcano, the Rarest Brew: Kona Coffee
February 28, 2001
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
CAPTAIN COOK, Hawaii -- AS you drive south along the west coast of the Big
Island, you can't help smelling the coffee roasting. With that, and the slopes
of Mauna Loa on your left, bathed in the
sumptuous sunlight of a Hawaiian morning, and the whales cavorting in the blue
Pacific on your right, who needs roses?
You are smelling the pride of the Kona coast, the best coffee produced in the
United States. It comes from trees growing in the slowly decomposing lava flows
that stripe the hillside along a milewide, 25-mile-long piece of land stretching
from Holualoa south to Honaunau. One of the most prominent growers in Captain
Cook, John Langenstein, calls these 2,500 precious acres "God's gift to the
coffee bean."
Coffee is grown on most of the Hawaiian Islands, but Kona's well-drained
basaltic soil is perfect. The climate pattern is perfect, with sunlight in the
morning, which is beneficial, and cloud cover in the afternoon, a natural canopy
that blocks out the day's most intense heat, which is not. And the rainfall is
perfect - 60 to 90 inches a year at 1,100 feet, compared with 2 inches on the
beaches only a mile away.
Whether brewed in a drip pot or in an espresso machine, pure Kona
produces a cup of coffee with a creamy head and a magnificently
full body. Its taste is winy and multidimensional, with enough
acidity to give it balance. The first time I tasted it, almost a
decade ago, I knew it was something special, and I'm no kind of
coffee connoisseur. My choosy wife, Betsey, agreed.
At a retail price of $20 a pound or more, growers here concede,
Kona is one of the world's costliest coffees. Yet no one is getting
rich; Mr. Langenstein estimates that he cleared about $20,000 last
year. His mill, a ramshackle apparatus made of plywood and
galvanized steel, with handmade pulleys and belts, is 100 years
old. He sticks at it, he said, because he loves the climate, having
grown up in Newark, N.Y., near Rochester, where winters can be
brutal, and because "it's such a great place to raise kids."
Mike Craig, another grower, summed it all up in four pithy words
"Life's great, work stinks."
For the dozens of small growers, economies of scale and hip
marketing campaigns are beyond reach. So most sell mostly on the
Internet. The only producer of pure Kona who seemed to be making it
big turned out to be a fraud. Officials of Kona Kai coffee were
convicted in 1996 in a $20 million swindle in which cheaper Central
American green (unroasted) coffees were put into bags marked
"Kona." Not all French bread comes from France, one of the
miscreants argued; "why should all Kona coffee come from Kona?"
There is, in fact, no need to flout the law. A perfectly legal way
to make money on Kona coffee is to blend it with less expensive
coffees and sell the result as Kona.
That's what big roasters do. They benefit from the name while
bypassing most of the cost that goes along with using only
carefully hand-tended, handpicked beans from the Kona coast. They
must label their stuff "Kona blend," and the purists can call
theirs "100 percent Kona," but the word "blend" somehow ends
up in
smaller type.
A University of Hawaii study a couple of years ago estimated that
20 million pounds of Kona coffee are sold annually, although only
about 2 million pounds of Kona beans are produced. Legally, a blend
containing 10 percent Kona can be called Kona coffee.
"We have a terrible marketing problem," said Merle Wood, a big-
time corporate lawyer turned small- time coffee grower. He said it
with the air of a man who has spent a lot of time trying to roll
boulders up Mauna Kea. Well he might. As the president of the Kona
Coffee Council, an alliance of small growers, he and several
colleagues, led by Mr. Langenstein and Mr. Craig, have struggled in
vain to establish a certification mark for coffee grown in the Kona
district.
Such trademark protection exists for Maui and Vidalia onions and
for Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, as well as for many wine regions,
but the growers' efforts have been blocked by the big coffee
companies.
"Our market is on the mainland," Mr. Wood said. "Starbucks
has
taught people there about good coffee, but it's a very long way
away, and convincing them to insist on pure Kona is a very
difficult proposition. This is a poor island, where nobody but the
tourists can pay or will pay 20 bucks a pound for coffee. But what
tourists take home, if they take food at all, is chocolate-covered
macadamia nuts."
Coffee trees (Coffea arabica, mostly of Guatemalan origin) grow to
20 feet tall in Kona, and they sometimes live for a century or
more, developing trunks up to six inches thick. As is often the
case with grapevines, the old trees yield the best fruit.
Actually, the trees look more like bushes, with heavily ridged
leaves and long whiplike branches that bend toward the ground when
heavy with fruit. Members of the gardenia family, they produce
amazingly fragrant, brilliantly white flowers that coat the hills 8
or 10 times a year, usually beginning in December or January.
"Hawaiian snow," the locals call it.
The fruit that follows is a berry about the size of a cherry
tomato, which gradually turns from green to scarlet as it ripens.
But this is not an accommodating fruit like the apple or the peach.
With so many flowerings a year and a ripening period of seven to
nine months, there can be no single harvest.
So the pickers, mostly Mexicans, have to make their laborious way
down the rows of trees as many as a dozen times a year, steadying
themselves on the steeply sloping mountainside as they pluck the
ripe berries from the trees. They squeeze the berries, and out pop
the seeds - fresh coffee beans, coated in a sweet mucilage-like
substance. Usually, there are two; when there is only one, it is
called a peaberry. (Some growers argue that peaberries make a
superior cup of java, but others dismiss that as hype).
At this stage the coffee is known as "cherry," and a lot of
arduous processing lies ahead before it is ready for the roaster,
let alone the grinder, the pot and the cup. The foamy covering is
removed in a pulping mill. Then the beans ferment overnight before
drying, either in a gas oven or, preferably, on what the early
Japanese farmers here called a hoshidana, or drying deck. This is a
series of concrete pads with retractable corrugated steel roofs
that can be left open to the sun and closed when it rains. The
beans are raked repeatedly during daylight hours to keep them from
spoiling.
When the moisture content is reduced to 11 or 12 percent, the
beans develop a papery covering called "parchment." At this stage
they can be stored for fairly extended periods.
Many small operators among the 600 growers here, lacking the
capital to install expensive machinery, are forced to sell their
cherry to the big processors for whatever price they can get, which
in bad times is not much, rather than waiting for the market price
to rise. Others pay a fee to have the raw beans processed for them.
The final stages involve grinding off the husklike covering,
grading the beans (Extra Fancy, Fancy, No. 1, Prime) and, of
course, roasting.
Mr. Langenstein, who produces 8,000 pounds of coffee on his 8.3
acres in a good year, ages some of his beans for as much as 12
months in parchment. A onetime wine-and-food man at Hawaiian
hotels, he thinks this mellows the coffee and brings out subtleties
in its flavor, the same way that storage in oak barrels helps
mature wine.
Coffee growers, fierce individualists all, disagree about almost
everything. Is gas-drying or air-drying better? Should roasted
beans be kept at room temperature, in the refrigerator or in the
freezer? And perhaps the most contentious question of all: light
roast or dark? Mr. Langenstein thinks dark-roasting caramelizes the
coffee too much, thus increasing the caffeine concentration and
making it harder to taste the nuances in the brew. Mr. Craig, just
a few miles up the road, thinks lighter roasts taste wimpy.
Choose your poison.
A missionary named Samuel Ruggles brought the first coffee trees to this island
in 1828 - for their ornamental value, not to produce a cash crop. But by 1845,
the first exports were on their way to California, and starting about a hundred
years ago, Japanese farmers came to dominate the growing of coffee in Kona. Some
came directly from Japan, but many escaped from slavelike conditions on Hawaiian
sugar plantations before their contracts expired, rode here on donkeys along
narrow cliffs and changed their names.
Living frugally in tiny frame houses, often without electricity or running
water, the farmers were constantly in hock to the stores owned by the big mills.
In an exhibition at the Kona Historical Society, a farmer named Yosoto Egami
recalled, "The store advanced merchandise for your family . . . and at the
end of the year, in return, you had to give your crop to the store."
Restricted by geography to the small zone near Mauna Loa, the Kona coffee
industry, and indeed the coffee industry in the islands as a whole, never
approached the size of the giant Brazilian, Costa Rican and African plantations.
It was plagued by economic collapse in its main markets, the United States and
Japan, and later by price volatility. One old-timer recalled the price of cherry
falling to 33 cents a pound, from $1.37, in two or three weeks.
Most remaining Japanese-American growers are getting old, and some, like the
mother of Eddie Sakamoto, the nonpareil wine waiter at the Canoe House hotel,
grow coffee only part time now. They sell their output to the Kona Pacific
Farmers Co-Op, which processed about 1.5 million pounds of cherry (from about
300 farmers) last year.
Recently, the historical society acquired and restored the former D. Uchida
farm, established in 1913, as the Kona Coffee Living History Farm, which still
produces coffee the old-fashioned way. Think you know something about frugality?
Then check this: ceiling panels sewn from cotton rice sacks. (Small groups are
given tours, by advance reservation only, by costumed guides. Detailed
information on the World Wide Web at www.konahistorical.org.)
It was the arrival in the 1980's and 1990's of retirees and others from the
mainland, known here as haoles, that transformed coffee-growing. Striving for
maximum quality, more than 40 of them now market their own estate coffees -
those grown on a single farm that is owned or leased by the farmer, with careful
records kept to establish its origin. Five of these estates have been grouped
together for greater marketing efficiency as Pele Plantations (www.peleplantations.com),
but most have stubbornly gone it alone.
The new growers are a varied bunch, to put it mildly. One of them, Gus Brocksen,
who heads Pele Plantations, hands out business cards identifying himself as
"Head Bean." Another, Mischa Sperka, is a voluble former museum
curator of Central European origin who farms 10 acres and processes his own
coffee and that of 25 neighbors. Nikki Ferrari, who runs a sizable non-estate
mail- order business under the name Hawaiian Mountain Gold, says he is a distant
relative of the Italian automaking family.
And then there is Mike Craig. I found him at the end of a steep, stony, rutted,
twisting road, well up the mountain, where he lives with his family in a kind of
treehouse, with its sides open to the breezes, surrounded by towering Norfolk
pines and orange-flowering African tulip trees. A burly, bushy-haired man who
used to teach and coach at a high school in San Diego, he came here after
watching a Pacific Southwest Airlines jet crash there in 1978.
"It was an omen," he said. "When planes start falling on your
house, it's time to try something new."
Eight years later, he became the first all-organic producer of Kona Coffee,
substituting weed-whacking for herbicides and compost for chemical fertilizer,
and enriching the soil further with glacial rock dust. He found in short order
that his product, now sold under the Rooster Farms label (www.roosterfarms.com),
could command a premium price, he said, "just as it ought to." He
charges $25.95 a pound, with shipping extra.
"It's twice as much work," Mr. Craig's wife, Lindy, added, "but
it's not near twice as much money."
Like the others, they depend heavily for sales on the Internet, word of mouth
and a mailing list built up over the years. Like the others, they do most of the
work themselves, and do it well enough that they have a contract to supply
coffee to Merriman's, the Big Island's top restaurant.
Mr. Langenstein weighs each bag of coffee he sells on a tiny Directo postage
scale, seals it with a gadget that looks like a curling iron and signs it by
hand, "so people know what they get." His coffee, labeled Langenstein
Farms, sells for $25, shipping included (www.kona-coffee.com).
But the big guys may be coming. A few days before Christmas, a 1,570- acre ranch
on the Kona coast, once owned by the actor Jimmy Stewart, was sold to a local
investor for $7.4 million. The investor, Guy Cobb, said he planned to replace
the pastures, forests and macadamia groves that now cover the land with coffee
trees.
King Kona - Hawaii's esteemed coffee bean shows that fine
wine isn't the only delicious estate-grown sipper. By Harvey Steiman
- WINE SPECTATOR • SEPT. 30, 1999
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King
Kona
Hawaii's esteemed coffee bean shows that fine wine isn't the only delicious estate-grown
sipper.
By Harvey Steiman - WINE SPECTATOR • SEPT. 30, 1999
 John Langenstein steadies himself against the rocky tilt of his farm on the steep
slopes of Hawaii's Mauna Loa, on the Big Island, and picks a bright red berry, about the
size of a cherry tomato, from a small tree. Like many winegrowers, Langenstein uses only
his own estate-grown fruit, processing it carefully according to long tradition, aging it
for months or even years.
He squeezes the berry above a visitor's
cupped hand, and two coffee beans coated with a hazy white foam drop out. "Try
it," he suggests. The foam tastes sweet, like candy, but it's more than that; there
are overtones of other flavors - hints of spices and nuts and flowers.
To turn those berries into coffee,
Langenstein will ferment away the sugars and sun-dry the beans. Those wonderful flavors
will permeate the beans, ultimately making a more interesting brew. Traditional coffee
processing demands time-consuming procedures filled with hand labor, many of which have
parallels in winemaking. Of course, it all pays off in America's most highly prized cup
o'joe - Kona coffee.
Unfortunately, Kona coffee has another,
less savory parallel with wine. Much of what is sold as Kona coffee isn't what it appears
to be. Much of it is Kona blend, which can legally contain as little as 10 percent Kona
coffee. Langenstein fumes, "Hell, that doesn't matter. At 10 percent, you can't taste
the difference. but you are still charged a premium because it has the name Kona on
it."
 Hawaii produces the only American coffee on
the market - which is surprising for the country that initiated the coffee break. you get
good coffee from the other Hawaiian islands (except Lanai), but there's no question that
Kona is king. A recent University of Hawaii study reported that 20 million pounds of Kona
coffee are sold annually, even though the Kona coffee harvest averages only 2 million
pounds a year.
A fraud action taken in 1996 against on
coffee firm in Hawaii determined that some Kona blends contained no Kona coffee at all.
The temptation to cheat is huge. Kona blends comprise the most profitable segment of the
specialty coffee industry, says Langenstein. True Kona coffee retails for $20 per pound
and up (Kona is a rare commodity, which explains the price tag). Consumers will pay
because the coffee is that good.
 In the early 1990s, Langenstein and other estate Kona coffee growers tried to
create a certification mark for Kona coffee grown in the Kona district of Hawaii, similar
to one used on Maui onions. Opposed by big coffee companies, the Kona mark never
materialized. The only assurance for consumers is a label stating that the product in
question contains 100 percent Kona coffee - or better yet, 100 percent estate-grown Kona
coffee. If your coffee purveyor offers Kona, ask to see the original package before
buying. Unless it has such a label, assume it's a blend.
"Kona blend has definitely tarnished
the image of Kona coffee," says Jeff Lewis, who roasts and sells pure Kona coffee at
The Kona Coffee Store on Highway 11 in the heart of the district. He also sells it through
the mail and over the Internet. "People gasp at the price and say, 'I can get it on
the mainland for $10.' What they don't realize is that they're not buying real Kona
coffee."
A lanky, bald, deeply tanned man named
"Stretch" arrives. He is wearing flip-flops, a Batman T-shirt and is carrying a
burlap bag half-filled with green (unroasted) coffee beans. Lewis agrees to roast the
beans, which are intended for Stretch's personal use, by 5 p.m. Locals often grow and brew
their own coffee, just as residents of wine country might make their own wine.
"What makes it special is when someone
takes a sip and says, 'That's the best cup of coffee I've ever had,'" says Lewis with
a smile. "That's what makes my day."
So what's the difference? The character of
Kona coffee hits the palate from the first sip. Pure Kona made in a drip pot has a
creaminess and a complexity of flavor, combined with a lively acid balance, that makes
wine comparisons valid. Made as espresso, it has an incredibly smooth character. It is an
aristocratic coffee.
 To get that way, the
coffee must be grown on the volcanic, wet-facing slops of Mauna Loa, the second-tallest
mountain in Hawaii. The Kona coast stretches south of Kailua and includes the towns of
Honalo, Kainaliu, Captain Cook and Keokea. It's a beautiful stretch of mountainous coast,
regularly misted by light rain showers. Coffee and macadamia nut plantations spring up
from the hillside forests.
A dirt road bumps and winds up the
mountainside to the farm, where Langenstein can produce 8,000 pounds of coffee in a good
year. Pickers squeeze fresh coffee beans from the fruit and fill baskets with the
sugar-coated beans (called "cherry"). They empty the baskets into a rinsing vat,
where the beans ferment overnight. Then the beans are dried for five days on concrete pads
covered with a removable corrugated steel roof. The pads must be raked regularly to keep
the beans from spoiling. When the beans are dry enough, they develop a flaky, parchment
like coating, and are then packed into burlap bags and transferred to an aging shed.
 "I've been experimenting with
aging," says Langenstein. "It's like oak aging for wine. All my coffee is aged
at least two or three months [before roasting], but I have some that has aged for a whole
year in parchment. It mellows and brings out inherent subtleties that distinguish one
estate from another."
Langenstein also makes sure air is
circulated through the shed to keep mold from forming. "I guarantee my coffee to be
mold-free," he says. "You have no idea how important that is. Go into a coffee
warehouse and slap a bag. That cloud that puffs out is mold. Most people who say they
can't drink coffee are really reacting to the mold."
 The beans are milled to remove the papery
coating, but first Langenstein borrows another idea from winemaking: He puts the beans
through a selection process, removing any wizened, white or beige beans. After roasting,
they appear remarkably uniform and unbroken, and these beans are made into coffee that
wants no cream or sugar. "I used to pour cream and sugar into coffee,"
Langenstein says. "Now I would no sooner add anything to my coffee than I would pour
7-Up into my wine."
Langenstein knows about wine. He owned a
successful catering business in Sausalito, Calif., before moving to Hawaii in 1975. The
Big Island was a pretty remote place then, and it didn't take much to buy the wildly
overgrown spread near Keokea, which he did not know was a coffee plantation. He discovered
the 90-year-old trees, and knowing that old vines made better wine, he picked about 12
pounds of coffee to see if the held true. "It was strictly seat-of-the-pants
processing. But it was the best coffee I ever had," he says.
To earn enough money to live, he worked as
a bartender in resort hotels, where his passion for Kona coffee finally convinced him to
start making and marketing his own. Incensed that tourists drinking Kona blend thought it
was the real thing, he made a pot of his own coffee behind the bar. Pretty soon, hotel
guests were passing up the free Kona blend at breakfast to buy Langenstein's coffee at $2
a cup.
Members of the Kona Coffee Council market
their coffees as 100 percent estate-grown. Many of them welcome visitors and sell the
roasted beans through the mail and over the Internet. (For more information on sources for
100 percent estate-grown Kona coffee, visit the council's Web site: www.kona-coffee-council.com.
It has links to member estate's sites and mail-order information.) Among specialty
coffees, pure Kona ranks among the most expensive, ranging from $20 to $30 per pound. But
Langenstein has an answer for that, too.
"I'll pay $30 to $40 for a good bottle
of wine without blinking," he says. "You can get - what? - six glasses of wine
from a bottle? Because it's so rich, I get 60 cups from a pound of my coffee. That's 50
cents a cup."
You can't buy a decent wine for that.
Harvey Steiman
WINE SPECTATOR • SEPT. 30, 1999
Corby Kummer, 'The Great Good Cup', Diversion Magazine,
February 1993
"...genuine Hawaiian Kona coffee is produced in
very small quantities, despite the wide distribution of what is labeled 'Kona'.
Most of this is actually a Kona blend (meaning as little as 10% genuine Kona
coffee), and even pure Kona can be indifferently grown and processed.
True Kona is a remarkably aromatic, ultra-smooth brew with clean, mild flavors
and very low acidity... One producer I can personally recommend is John
Langenstein, who works an eight-acre farm in Honaunau. Each bean is hand picked
at peak ripeness, pulped, meticulously washed, sun-dried, and then air-roasted.
The result is about as far from supermarket coffee as it is possible to
get."
'The Best of '94', Diversion Magazine, December 1994
"For variety and quality, no-one beats the Coffee Connection in
Boston... But Langenstein Farm on the Big Island of Hawaii wins special mention
for the best Kona coffee. Its aromatic, ultrasmooth brew is offered in medium,
dark, and French roasts."
'Black Book', Departure Magazine, May/June 1995
"Langenstein Farm sells terrific 100% Kona coffee."
Janice Wald Henderson, 'Dining', Diversion Magazine, February 1996
"Langenstein Farm sells excellent Kona estate coffee (the real thing,
as opposed to the aforementioned blends) at its Big Island locale . . . .
Chuck Furuya, Food & Wine Magazine, March 1997
"Langenstein Farm produces exceptional quality estate Kona coffee"
Notes:
John is not the farm manager but continues to be a partner in the farm.
Diversion Magazine is a privately sponsored publication for physicians at
leisure.
Departure Magazine is distributed by American Express to their platinum card
members.
Gourmet Food Magazine is a commerical publication for the discriminating gourmet
food enthusiast
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