Editor Donald H. Harrison has recently returned from a roundtrip cruise between San Diego and the Hawaiian Islands. Following is his fourth in a series of stories.
By Donald H. Harrison
KURTISTOWN, Hawaii — Usually my thinking about coffee runs no deeper than “do I want sugar or artificial sweetener to go with it?” although I’m pleased to see that most brands carry a kosher hechsher. Now, thanks to a shore excursion arranged from Holland America Line’s MS Zaandam and called the “Gourmet Volcano Adventure,” I have other matters to consider.
For example, do I want a coffee made from hand-picked beans, or coffee from beans picked by machine? One is more expensive, but the other may taste better.
And, do I want a lightly roasted coffee, with plenty of caffeine; a medium roasted coffee; or a dark roasted coffee, the latter having plenty of flavor but considerably less caffeine?
Another question to ponder: If I can get a regular coffee with little caffeine, do I really need artificially decaffeinated coffee, which may have utilized chemicals like formaldehyde in the process?
James Thompson, the coffee maven at Hilo Coffee Mill here, posed these questions while explaining the ins and outs of coffee production during a lecture on a 24-acre farm where they not only grow their own coffee, they prepare for market the coffee produced by another 100 coffee farmers on the big island of Hawaii.
Thompson told us that Hawaii’s climate is pretty constant all year around, resulting in the coffee plants being continuously productive for eight months a year. The son of the former agricultural research director at the University of Hawaii, he said “it always amazes me–I have been studying agriculture all my life–to see flowers and green fruit and ripe fruit all on the same branch; that doesn’t happen elsewhere.”
The ripe fruit, “the burgundy, maroon, colored ones” are the fruit worth picking, said Thompson, whereas the green fruit requires more time on the branch to ripen. When you pick by hand, “you take what is ready on that branch and move to another branch, and then another bush, and you keep working your way around the grove like that.”
On the other hand, machines are color blind, so they pick both the ripe and unripe fruit.
Whether picked by hand or by machine, the skins are separated from the fruit–and in some cases made into energy drinks — and mucilage is removed from the seeds by adding water and allowing the mixture to ferment, a process that typically takes a day.
“During this fermentation day,” said Thompson, “there will be seeds that will pop to the surface. We call them ‘floaters.’ The floaters don’t have the density to have either good coffee flavor or to sink. We’re happy that Mother Nature sorted those out for us. We skim them off and they go into the compost. Because we have been so selective in our picking–and so have all of our farmers–we don’t get a lot of floaters, so it is not a big loss.”
On the other hand, he said, with machine-picked operations, “it is not uncommon for a quarter, maybe even a third, of the crop to float. That is too much to throw away, so they don’t. They mix it back in and it becomes a lower quality coffee because of it.”
Once fermentation is complete, the seeds are washed in rainwater. “We live in a tropical rain forest, so that is an abundant resource here,” Thompson said. “Rainwater doesn’t have any chlorine in it, not even the little bit of chlorine that is in the municipal tap water to keep us more germ-free, which would change coffee’s flavor at this stage, so we stay away from it.”
Next step in the process is to dry the coffee, not the easiest task in a tropical rain forest. Hilo Coffee Mill puts the seeds on special screens that can be stored separately in a greenhouse type building, and by keeping the door open, expose them to fresh breezes.
The screens enable the company to keep each farmer’s product separate, so that the farmers can sell them as “estate coffees” — meaning that everything in the package came from the same farm.
When the seeds are dried, there still is a parchment-like hull “that is around the green bean,” Thompson said. “That paper hull serves a purpose for the seed — it’s like a sponge, it holds moisture to it, and it stores fresh this way because each hull is like a little insulator.”
The paper hull needs to be removed from the seed before roasting.
Thompson poured tiny swigs of coffee into small disposable cups. The first sample was “a medium coffee from the island of Hawaii–a fairly light roast,” he said. “A light roasted Hawaiian coffee should be smooth, mild, not have any bite to it (but) one thing, it will have a lot of is caffeine. Some folks know, some don’t, that the lightest roasts will have the most caffeine, the darkest roasts–such as French roast–will have none. It is nearly decaffeinated by the time you get to a French roast.
“I like knowing this,” he added, “because if I drink this medium roast all day long, I think my heart would go ‘grr, grr, and not be very good for me. I will switch over to an Italian roast — not so dark as a French — and that way I can drink this lightly caffeinated, but bold tasting coffee in the afternoon, and maybe have a cup with dessert after dinner and it won’t keep me up at night.”
He said that with an Italian roast, “the oil has popped out of the bean; and its caffeine level is all the way down to the teens. I might have to drink 5-6 cups of that to get the same amount of caffeine I get from a medium roast. I like knowing that because I can drink all day and into the evening.”
Decaffeinating coffee requires it to be soaked in some sort of substance. Some producers soak it in formaldehyde, which can result in that chemical being added to the coffee. Another process uses only water. Thompson advises purchasing a dark roast coffee rather than a decaffeinated one.
Besides Hilo Coffee Mill’s emphasis on hand-picked coffees with roasting times geared to the level of caffeine one might desire, the company has also been developing by-products. The skins of the fruit are quite high in caffeine, and recently have become the basis for a burgeoning energy drink industry. It is not uncommon for the pulp made from the skins to be blended with the juices of pineapple or other tropical fruits.
After the paper hull is removed from the bean, the hulls can be placed around young plants and used as a weed control mulch, Thompson said. They also can be used to protect farm animals’ hooves from becoming soft and sodden as a result of so much rain. Or they can be mixed with straw and be used to cushion the nests of egg-laying hens.
Thompson said adding natural ingredients to the coffee at the time of roasting can produce some pleasing taste varieties. He said his company sells coffee in 20 different flavors, among them pineapple, macadamia nut, and butterscotch.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com