Coffee Tours at Kauai Coffee Farm

Coffee Tours at Kauai Coffee Farm

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If you’re the type of person who loves waking up to a nice fresh brewed cup of coffee, then do I have the place for you.  Kauai Coffee Company, located in Kalaheo, is a coffee lovers dream.

Tell me a little bit about Kauai Coffee Company.

Well, we’ve been actively farming coffee here for 23 years, before that we had 110 years of sugar with McBryde Sugar Company.

How big did you say this farm was?

In total, we have 3400 acres.  Each year we actively farm 2300.

Can you tell me a bit about the plants? Well these are all arabica coffee trees.  They’re trees in an orchard.  They’re not shrubs or bushes.  Each of these rows that we’re looking at makes up a farm, which makes up an estate.  An estate means we take care of everything.  Propagating the trees from a seed, nurturing them, developing and harvesting them, processing, roasting, and packaging.

Are those beans? What do you call those?

These are ripe beans, this is what we look for when we go out to harvest every year.  If you look, they’re nice and large and plump, that means they’re ready to pick. Take that.  If you pull them, you can extract the bean by squeezing them.  There you go, that must have been an espresso bean.  It’s really white.  This is a raw bean.

It doesn’t smell like coffee at all.

Not at all.  You can eat that, chew on that and all you’ll get is a light, sweet, grassy flavor.  When you roast it, that’s when you draw out all those flavors, the fragrances, that you call coffee.

The visitor center is open year round?

Yes it is.

And what kinds of things can I find in there?

All kinds of things.  We’re open 7 days a week, 9-5.  We’ve got a free walking tour, which is really interesting and kind a light hearted and fun, so that people enjoy themselves and learn something.

We’ve been coming here about 20 years, it’s just a good variety of coffee.  And of all the different varieties of coffee, we like this one the best.  You can really taste the flavor, it’s not like there’s just one generic flavor – just a hint.  It’s a very strong flavor. We’re big coffee drinkers.  Yes, very big coffee drinkers.  We’re actually taking a bunch back for gifts.  There’s nothing like fresh coffee.

My favorite part of the coffee farm is here at the visitors center, where you can sample over 20 different flavors. So come on down and see which ones you like best.