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Spirit of Aloha magazine
September/October 2006
Up here atop Mount Hualalai, the clouds rolling across the sky like waves look close enough to grab. While our car inches up the snaking road, wild chickens and turkeys dart out from the underbrush onto the pavement as if to deliver the message that we're close to finding what we seek.
At last we see it: a smallish, rather unassuming sign on the right side of the road, the words "Heavenly Hawaiian" signaling the end of our day's journey.
We turn sharply onto the drive, orderly rows of coffee trees standing at attention. Still climbing the hillside, we round a bend where the hoshidana materializes. A middle-aged blond woman, her hair loose over her T-shirt clad shoulders, stands inside and pours burlap sacks of cranberry-colored coffee cherries into a bin. She barely looks up as we pass her, appearing very focused on the task while burdensome bags surround her sneakered feet.
The drive empties abruptly into a modest parking area where we ditch our canary yellow rental car and stretch our legs. We find ourselves next to a swimming pool flanked by two buildings that look strikingly like somebody's houses-no plaques or tourist welcome signs in sight. I creep awkwardly up to one door and peer inside.
"I think someone lives here," I inform my brother.
"Are you here for a tour?" a woman's voice echoes from behind us. We turn to find the woman we'd just driven by. She smiles as she approaches, tossing a half-eaten avocado out of her path-that's why the dogs are getting so fat, she explains. Some guard dogs they are, she giggles; "They don't even bark."
She walks us out to the edge of the pool, which offers a lustrous lay of the land: the acres of coffee and macadamia nut trees below and the ocean far beyond. She tells us to call her Trudy, and that she and her husband, David (Bateman), purchased the farm just over a year ago. David's much better at the tours, she says modestly, but he's at a coffee council meeting.
She then runs through details of exactly what they do here, types of trees they grow, and how they do grafting to make stronger plants. She shoots down each one of our questions with a pinpointed missile of an answer. We wonder if, in fact, David could possibly be better at the tours. It's January when we visit, and Trudy's only been here since late October. Her tan reflects the long hours spent working outside since moving to Hawaii's Big Island. She's learned a lot in such a short span.
She, too, remembers the drive up to Heavenly Hawaiian. "It was in January and they had an early bloom that year," Trudy recalls. The farm's 12,000-or-so coffee trees were blanketed in blossoms whose fragrance, she says, resembles gardenia or plumeria. "They call it 'snow on the mountain.' When you're down in town and you look up at the mountain, it looks like it's snowing because it's all white." My brother and I can envision what it must have looked like. Now it is a tame but lush sea of hunter green.
Trudy, an ER nurse, and David, an attorney, had long joked about moving to Hawaii, leaving Olympia, WA behind. Friends encouraged them to escape their stressful lives-but they enjoyed their jobs, their social engagements, their church activities, their children: two grown boys, one with kids of his own.
Then they sat on the lanai here, at this farm so close to the skies. They sipped the seductive Kona coffee-some of, if not the world's best. They ate freshly baked cookies. They surveyed the sea of trees and sea itself, just as we did. And things started to shift.
That day, they had only intended to accompany friends interested in buying a farm; but months later, they found themselves orchestrating their first coffee harvest, armed with knowledge gleaned from books, not practice.
Trudy escorts us to a nearby tree and instructs us each to pick a berry. The other tour we went on didn't do this, we tell her. "How can you learn then?" She and David have learned all their lessons the hard way. In a later interview she tells me, "Looking back at it now that the season's over, we realized that we probably made every mistake that there was to make-some of them three times to make sure we really got the lesson learned.... We figure we probably lost about $20,000 over-drying our beans [for example]."
I bite through the thin, sweet fruit. Just one millimeter in, my teeth hit the hard pit that inhabits the majority of the red-hued shell. Within a layer of clear slime (that later gets removed) reside two greenish bean-shaped halves. These get dried and roasted to become the brown beans that consumers purchase. If you're extra lucky, you discover only one bean inside the fruit; these, called peaberry, are at a premium because of their rarity and unique flavor.
This is what Trudy brews for us when we've finished exploring the greenhouse where infant trees are grafted, the hoshidana where coffee gets sun-dried, and the reams of machinery used to distill the coffee beans from the raw fruit.
She asks us if we'd like to swim in her pool. Or maybe hike up to the water tower. Or pick fruit off the trees next to her home. Or try some coffee. I look at my brother, imagining his brain exploding from absorbing excess information. And yet he answers, "I'd like to try some coffee."
Trudy opens the front door to the home she and David live in and steps into her kitchen to begin prepping the coffee.
"I'm sorry I don't have any cookies," she calls to us as we take seats on their lanai, which doubles as the farm's office.
While waiting for his brew, my brother takes Trudy up on her previous offer to pick fruit-since she swears it'll go to waste otherwise, and also since it's a new skill he can master-and spends several minutes wrestling with the biggest papaya I've ever seen.
Trudy coaches him on how to use the long metal tool to harvest the fruit. "Just push up," she keeps telling him, but this papaya isn't giving up so easy. Finally it submits. (Later my mom tells us it's too ripe, but my brother still beams with pride.) I can imagine Trudy in the ER, coaxing babies out of young mothers and knives out of gang members' hands. Her soothing voice makes even the fact that she's just opened her home up to total strangers seem more normal.
To make up for the dearth of cookies, Trudy brings us plates of natural granola bars and bowls of mixed nuts. I feel taken care of, grateful-perhaps this is how the farm's immigrant (usually South American) pickers feel when she brings them cookies on hot fall days.
David strides into the house and out to the lanai, snagging a seat facing us on a wicker bench. He's grey haired but youthful, tanned arms peeking out from a white polo shirt. He spouts out pertinent numbers and figures for the farm and talks about their international guests and foreign markets-making it immediately clear how well the couple complement one another. An entrepreneur, David has been involved in running a winery, in real estate, in many business ventures. Trudy, who professes she's "not a computer whiz," has been a mom, a nurse, someone who knows a lot more than you'd think or than she even lets on. He serves on the coffee council; she serves the cookies. They both work hefty hours and point out that the coffee co. is much more than a business; it's a lifestyle.
Trudy pours coffee for us into clear glass mugs. It's also our first time trying pure 100% Kona coffee. Drink it without milk first to get the most flavor, they advise us. Ick, I think; not once in my hundreds of cups of coffee have I ever enjoyed black coffee, but I do as told.
The rich, warm brew rolls down my tongue and my eyes open wider-but not just from the caffeine. The hearty taste, thick and roasty, comes without a single drop of wince-inducing bitterness. The acrid aftertaste I associate with the beverage is markedly absent. I realize how much more there is to coffee than who roasts it and for how long. Roasting is just the final stage of many that, like the sun shining on hell or paradise, only illuminates what's already there; it can make a bad starting product seem a little better, or can make an outstanding starting product seem like heaven. Coffee beans themselves have distinct character due to growing environment and here in Hawaii, where sunny mornings precede rainy afternoons, where frost is a distant memory, and where nutrient-rich volcanic soil sets the stage for a sea of coffee plantations, coffee tastes like it ought to: smooth, earthy, robust, clean.
We ask for seconds.
Then we ask to buy bags of beans to take home.
"I, like most people," Trudy tells me later, "thought that Starbucks was way overpriced. But after working on a coffee farm and going through every process...I know how much work went into getting that. I really appreciate it."
The Batemans produced some 200,000 pounds of coffee cherry this year, and simultaneously ran a retail business, filling orders from across the globe. They sell green beans for home-roasting and pre-roasted beans of all classes. They do everything on-site except the very final stages of coffee processing: dry milling (where the bean is separated from its coating) and roasting.
They trust other farms for these vital stages, just as other farms trust Heavenly Hawaiian to sun-dry and rake their beans in their hoshidana. Not every farm has everything they need, but in the "spirit of aloha," they help each other out. They open their doors for one another, just as they do for the random people in rented cars who show up late in the afternoon hoping to find out what island life is really like.
Trudy says in her past life on the mainland of the U.S., "I don't think anybody, not many people would come unannounced. So for me that was a real change. The difference is on the farm, you don't have time to clean very much. When it's harvest season you are just flying out of there. So I had to kind of get over the fact that my house is not always going to be spotless-but it's OK. People aren't coming to see the house."
But that's what makes them stay...what makes them buy.
(Heavenly Hawaiian Farms, 78-1136 Bishop Rd., Holualoa, HI 96725. 808-322-7720. coffee@heavenlyhawaiian.com. www.heavenlyhawaiian.com.)
-- Jenny Mayo
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