Kona: What’s Brewin’?

God’s in his heaven--somewhere over my left shoulder, I think, hidden by the mist on Mt. Hualalai.

And here, in Holualoa town on Hawaii’s Big Island, the first stop on my day in Kona Coffee Country, all’s right with the world.

A Beethoven piano concerto plays indoors at the Holuakoa Cafe, where owner Meggi Worbach is chatting with some regulars. I sit in the garden, where vines dotted with flame-colored flowers crawl over arbors and the paths between the well-spaced tables are paved with crushed macadamia nut shells.

Before me, there is a tall glass in a woven hale-grass holder--a latte perfect even by the exacting standards of a former Seattle-ite--and a plate of Indonesian peanut toast and avocado salad, food as beautiful and healthful as it is delicious.

I am idly watching a child pull the tube-shaped crimson flowers from a bush, just as I once did in Grandma’s yard on Maui. Ridiculous chartreuse birds--mejiros--hang upside down in the hedge bordering the road through this tiny art-and-coffee village.

I can feel the city sliding from me, puddling at my feet. I have come, as nursery rhyme says, “to see what I can see” in a single day’s driving from one end of the Kona coffee-growing district to the other.

Technically, that district reaches from sea level up the western slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa mountains. Practically speaking, it’s a patchwork of several hundred farms--2,000 acres of cultivated coffee trees--in a north-south strip from Holualoa, where I sit, to Honaunau, about 25 miles south. I will spend the day on the Mamalahoa Highway (180) and Kona Belt Road (11), which bisect the mountains north to south at 1,300 to 1,500 feet, with the blue-gray haze of the Pacific below me and the blue-white mist of the mountains above.

I have a Kona Coffee Country driving tour map (see Guidebook, facing page) listing 30-plus farms and coffee millers who routinely open their gates to visitors. I have a date later with the curator of the Kona Historical Society’s Uchida Coffee Farm, a restoration work in progress, and an afternoon appointment to tour a rustic farm and mill. And I have--most precious--time.

Just minutes before, on Highway 180, I had spotted my first coffee picker, a weathered-looking older man with a burlap sack slung from his neck, the bag held open by a wire frame sewn into the top. He was working in a leisurely fashion, stripping sunset-colored berries from a stem. He wasn’t harvesting, he told me when I stopped to chat, just checking his crop.

“We waiting. Watching. Goin’ be soon,” he said in Hawaii’s word-sparse pidgin English, of the start of the 1998 picking season.

All along my route, the farmers are waiting.

In the cool of the morning, before the mist has burnt away from the peaks above them, they pass among the trees, checking for color on the coffee beans, running their rough hands along the clusters, crunching the occasional ripe “cherry” between their teeth to release the sweet vegetal flavor. Sometime in late summer or early fall, the balance tips from green to bright red on the long, laden branches, and the slow bottom-to-top sweeps of the fields--each tree picked over several times--begins in Holualoa, Kainaliu, Kealakekua, Captain Cook and Honaunau. It will continue into November, about the time of the 28th annual Kona Coffee Festival Nov. 1 to 14, celebrating 170 years of coffee growing on these slopes.

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Not so long ago, a visitor to Kona who wanted to know more about how coffee got into cans had to be pretty persistent. A friendly farmer might walk you through the fields if you happened upon him. Mills--dusty, busy, potentially dangerous places--discouraged guests.

But the culture of Kona has changed, people tell me.

Publicity-shy second- and third-generation Japanese-American farmers have been joined by loquacious mainlanders and Europeans who happened into the area in the ‘60s and ‘70s and stayed to buy farms and mills or open cafes, B&Bs; and retail shops. The newbies opened tasting rooms, advertised tours, developed “estate” coffee labels and sales-savvy packaging and kicked the industry into the computer age, establishing Web sites and thriving mail-order operations.

Now, even a longish day of driving and drinking (coffee, of course!) will not suffice to see all there is of farms and mills, tasting rooms, shops, restaurants, museums and cultural attractions along the Kona coast.

I put a little over 50 miles on my rental car in a day that began as my trips to Kona always begin--with a local-style breakfast of Portuguese sausage, gravy and rice at Sam Choy’s restaurant in the Kaloko Industrial Park, just 2.5 miles from Keahole Airport--and ended racing for a 5 o’clock flight.

I highly recommend an early look at the Coffee Country map; pick the farms you’ll visit and call ahead unless you’re sticking to the larger places. My strategy was to head east up mauka (up the mountain) from the airport to Holualoa to take advantage of the spectacular views of the Kona coast, then drive south on the Kona Belt Highway all the way to Honaunau.

From the Holuakoa Cafe, I dropped in to see the Holualoa Inn, a distinctive bed-and-breakfast spot just down-slope of the middle of town. Built by the missionary-descendant Twigg-Smith family, this gorgeous six-room lodging is surrounded by a garden such as only an old Hawaii family could create--trumpet flowers and cup of gold, avocado and mango trees, ginger plants two stories high, dry stone walls typical of rural Hawaii. The entire structure is wood-paneled and floored in polished eucalyptus (shoes off, please); there’s a blue jewel of a swimming pool, beautifully appointed common areas and a tower deck with an awesome view.

I also dropped in on one of two Holualoa coffee outlets owned by socialite Nikki Ferrari, a distant relation of the Italian car-making family. Ferrari came to Hawaii a decade or so ago, fell in love with Kona coffee, bought a farm up mauka and converted a van into a portable tasting room, which she parked near a popular restaurant down in Kailua-Kona town. Now she’s got a trio of coffee outlets and an extensive mail-order business under the Hawaiian Mountain Gold Coffee label. The outlet I visited, Ferrari Coffee Plantation House, is marked by a giant pink coffee cup.

Twenty minutes later, I was shaking hands with Sheree Chase at the Kona Historical Society’s headquarters in the old Greenwell Store at Kealakekua. Chase is curator and project director for the Uchida Coffee Farm, a 1930s-era coffee plantation now being restored under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

The Society also is working on a planned $1 million Kona Heritage Ranch from the period 1870-1917, including a dairy, smithy, bunkhouse and an authentic ranch house recently donated to the effort by a local ranching family and painstakingly dismantled by a team of volunteers.

I had visited the Uchida Farm before and never forgotten it. Stepping inside the dim, spare, tin-roofed house is for me a “chicken skin” return to my great-grandparents’ time. Like my Portuguese ancestors, the Uchidas traveled to Hawaii across long seas with few possessions and many hopes.

Everything in the Uchida home, which is surrounded on all sides by the coffee orchards, speaks of hard work and making do: the tobacco bag that serves as a water filter on the dripping faucet, the ceiling panels sewn from cotton rice sacks, the salvaged casement windows adapted as Japanese-style sliders.

Uchida Farm, which reverted to the Greenwell family when the last son left the property in 1994, is still a working coffee and macadamia nut farm and will continue to be so: The profits provide one-third of the attraction’s budget. Visits are by appointment now but, by early 1999, the Kona Historical Society--which has a contract to buy the property from the Greenwells for a rock-bottom $300,000--plans a seven-day-a-week operation. At its heart will be a guided walk among the coffee trees, with stops to visit with farm workers or with a woman pickling lemons in the kitchen or working in the family garden; a chat with a costumed “Mr. Uchida,” sitting in the parlor reading the Japanese-language Hawaii Hochi newspaper; a mill tour and the chance to participate in farming activities.

“When people leave here, we want them to really feel like they saw it, smelled it, touched it,” Chase said, “the life the Uchidas had.”

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That life was built around coffee, and my next stop--after a truncated shopping spree in Kainaliu, a village worth stopping at--was a visit to a present-day coffee operation, Old Hawaiian Coffee, up a steep, rutted driveway at Mile 105, near Captain Cook. Here, Misha Sperka tends 12,000 certified organic coffee trees on 10 acres of land and operates a ramshackle coffee mill that processes 850,000 to a million pounds of coffee a year for 25 neighboring farms.

Sperka, who learned to love good coffee in Europe, greets me barefoot and bareheaded in the inevitable afternoon rain. He is definitely of the new breed, a man of strong opinions who scorns the slick “visitor centers” that line the Kona Belt Road--”you can’t learn about coffee by watching a video”--and who delights in old machinery and stove-top espresso makers.

While mosquitoes perform repeated blood draws on my legs, he launches into a bean-to-roaster explanation of how coffee is made, the 40 or so ways that the processing can go wrong and what, exactly, makes Kona coffee different (sunny mornings and wet afternoons, old rootstock and handpicking, “one by one by one by eye,” which assures that only ripe beans are used).

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As we peer into the mill works and pace the drying floor, he expounds on his coffee philosophy: “I’m for a good cup of coffee once or twice a day instead of 20 cups of colored water all day long.”

Sad to say, there is a fair amount of colored water along the Kona coast, judging by my notes, hurriedly compiled in a variety of tasting rooms.

Among my favorite tasting rooms was one recommended by Sperka, the Coffee Shack, just a couple of minutes north of his farm, where I tasted some wonderfully rich and aromatic pea-berry dark roast ($27.50 a pound) from the Kahauloa Estate of the Citron family. (Peaberries are round, dense beans that haven’t split into two halves; they produce intensified flavor.)

Despite Sperka’s skepticism, I felt honor-bound to visit one of the larger coffee tour centers and had set my sights on the Mauna Loa Royal Kona Coffee Visitor Center, a short way back toward Captain Cook. If you don’t care for mud or mosquitoes, or if you’re trying to sandwich a coffee tour into a morning so you can spend the afternoon at Volcanoes National Park (another couple of hours down the road), this is the approach to take.

At Mauna Loa (as at Bayview Farm and Royal Aloha Coffee Mill and Museum, both down on the Napoopoo Road), you can watch a video about coffee harvesting and milling, sit at a tasting bar, see a mill in operation, view a photo exhibit, shop for coffee as well as gifts . . . and never leave the pavement. There’s even a picnic spot and a lava tube to explore. You can linger as long as you like on the deck and drink in the view along with samples of half a dozen different coffees (even flavored varieties, a scourge on the land, in my opinion).

If you are making a day of it, my suggestion is that you take advantage of the free coffee samples as you drive your outward-bound route, then stop back to do your gift buying at the spot where you found your favorite. Just be aware that some tasting rooms close as early as 3 p.m.

Or, what the heck, do as I did: Mortgage the house, buy whole beans wherever you stop and plan to spend the next few months tasting coffees while you daydream of another trip to Kona coffee country.

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GUIDEBOOK

Java Junket

Getting there: Only United has nonstop service L.A.-Kona. All other routings involve connecting through Honolulu, then taking either Hawaiian or Aloha airlines to Kona; only Hawaiian connects all the way through. Round-trip fares begin at $602.

Where to stay: Holualoa Inn, P.O. Box 222, Holualoa, HI 96725; telephone (800) 392-1812. Luxurious six-room B&B; on 40-acre coffee estate in Holualoa town with panoramic view of Kailua-Kona, pool, hot tub, gardens; daily breakfast and pupu (hors d’oeuvre) platter. Rates: $135-$175 double.

Rainbow Plantation, P.O. Box 122, Captain Cook, HI 96704; tel. (808) 323-2393. Charming, rustic B&B; on seven-acre macadamia nut and coffee farm, five rooms; fresh-baked bread daily, farm-grown fruit, vegetarians readily accommodated; outdoor kitchen available. Rates: $65-$95 double.

Dragonfly Ranch, P.O. Box 675, Honaunau, HI 96726; tel. (808) 328-2159. Twenty-year-old “place of healing” run by Barbara Kenonilani Moore near Place of Refuge National Park (at sea level); yoga, lomilomi massage, five unique rooms, do-it-yourself in-room breakfast. Rates: $85-$200 double.

Kona Coffee Country map: Free at hotel activities desks or the Big Island Visitors Bureau, 75-5719W Alii Drive, Kailua-Kona, 96740; tel. (808) 329-7787. Or write the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival, P.O. Box 1112, Kailua-Kona, HI 96745.

Where to eat: Between Mile Markers 110 and 112 outbound from Kailua-Kona on Mamalahoa Highway (Route 11): Chris’ Bakery for hot malasadas (Portuguese doughnuts); Kona Specialty Meats for char siu or pipikaula; Furukawa’s Kitch’n Cook’d potato chips outlet near Marker 110 on the ocean side. Furukawa’s and Chris’ close at 3 p.m.; all are closed Sundays.

Full restaurants: Sam Choy’s in the Kaloko Industrial Park, tel. (808) 326-1545), and Oodles of Noodles, run by former Ritz-Carlton chef Amy Ferguson Ota in Crossroads shopping center, (808) 329-9222. Highly recommended: Holuakoa Cafe, 76-5901 Mamalahoa Highway in Holualoa town; tel. (808) 322-2233.