12. Hawaii

Hawaiian coffee presents an interesting conundrum for a project like this.  First of all, while there are certainly roasters in Hawaii who roast coffees from non-Hawaiian origins, it seems like a waste to order coffee from Hawaii and not get coffee from Hawaii - which does kind of put it on a different playing surface from everyone else, since it's simply a dramatically different type of origin than most.  (Hawaiian coffee is grown at lower elevations than Arabica in most other major origins; the surrounding ocean gives the more moderate climate usually generated by elevation.  But nevertheless this typically generates lower-acid coffees with different flavor profiles.)  The Hawaiian coffee industry is also relatively small, which means you can do a pretty deep farm-specific dive rather easily if you want - and it also means (along with American labor costs) that the coffee tends to be a LOT more expensive.  I'm personally fine with this - given what production requires, it's pretty easy to argue that the vast majority of world coffee tends to be way underpriced, especially at the grower level - but the upshot is that if you want 100% Hawaiian coffee, and I did, it's gonna cost you.  The bag of Ka'u above cost 42 dollars, basically twice as much as nearly any pound of coffee from Central America or Africa would have cost me.

State #12: Hawaii

 

Maui Oma Coffee Roasting Company

Kahului, HI

 

Another question when it comes to Hawaii is, which sub-origin do you want?  Kona is the most famous, but I've had Kona before and it was... well, I should probably try it again, because I tried it right as I was starting to really get SUPER into specialty coffee and I found the flavor profile sort of unusual.  I didn't entirely enjoy it - but nowadays, as I work on really tasting every coffee I buy, I might have a somewhat different experience with it.  At any rate, that coffee came from Big Island Roasters, and while I would happily have ordered from them again because I really like their presentation, my goal with this project has been not to revisit roasters I've already tried.  I ended up going with Maui Oma because they had a pretty good selection of the multiple sub-origins - coffees from Maui, Kona coffees from the western part of the Big Island, and Ka'u coffees from the south of the Big Island.

The 100% Ka'u prime was entirely Red Catuai (Catuai is a Brazilian varietal created in the 1940s as a cross between Mundo Novo - at the time a recently discovered natural Typica x Bourbon cross - and Yellow Caturra, a natural Bourbon mutation) and was processed using the "pulp natural" method, which is basically similar to honey processing - it's not full natural where the bean is dried in the entire fruit, but it's not fully washed.  The fruit gets pulped, but the beans are dried without having all the mucilage washed off of them.  As such, you would tend to expect fruity notes in a coffee like this, but I didn't really find much.  Both of these coffees were roasted a little more towards the medium-dark side of the spectrum - there was a bit of shine to the beans as when the oils are just starting to get roasted out - and I wonder if that took away some of what fruitiness would have been left over.  Instead, the coffee had more of a roasted, toasted-nut flavor - and I didn't detect a whole lot else.  The acid was low as you'd expect; the body was good, with a pleasant mouthfeel, and the taste certainly wasn't bad, but I would have hoped for a little more going on.  I rated this a 6, Above Average.

The 100% Yellow Caturra from Maui was very low acid.  It was mechanically picked (Maui's less hilly farms allow this, whereas one reason Kona is so expensive is that Big Island coffee tends to require manual picking) and processed as fully washed, so I wouldn't have expected much fruitiness and I certainly didn't get it.  Instead, it had a fairly classic "coffee" taste - some notes of chocolate and nuts, with a hint of spice and caramel on the back end.  As with the Ka'u, it was pretty drinkable, but there was maybe not quite as much on the palate as I would have enjoyed; it seemed like a lot of what I was tasting was the roast.  So I ended up also rating this a 6, Above Average.

Although from a financial standpoint it's probably just as well, I feel like I want to like Hawaiian coffee more than I have to date.  Paradise Roasters, one of my favorite roasting companies, has a Hawaiian arm and they do some pretty high-grade stuff, so maybe once this is over I'll have to revisit the origin from their angle.  (They had a couple things on offer recently that did sound pretty interesting.)  For the time being, though, Maui Oma ended up with a score of 12 - perfectly fine coffee that will get you through any morning, but at least to my palate, good, not great.  Next up, a state that's about as far from Hawaii as it gets: Idaho!