Our events will feature Rusty’s Hawaiian coffees, as well as beans from our sister company, Isla Custom Coffees. As a sourcer and developer for importers, roasters and cafes, Isla works with a greater variety of island coffees than we do.

Between both companies, you’ll get a diverse taste of Hawaiian coffees. Here’s a list of our events this week, in order of appearance:

GORILLA IN THE CAFÉ
2155 Kalakaua Avenue, Honolulu
December 19
3:15-5:00 p.m.

WHOLE FOODS MARKET
Kahala Mall Shopping Center, 4211 Waialae Avenue, Suite 2000, Honolulu
December 20
11:15 a.m.-1:45 p.m.

MORNING GLASS COFFEE + CAFE
2955 East Manoa Road, Honolulu
December 20
6:00-8:30 p.m.

DOWNTOWN COFFEE
900 Fort Street Mall, Suite 100, Honolulu
December 21
11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.

DFS GALLERIA WAIKIKI
330 Royal Hawaiian Ave., Honolulu
December 21
7:30-11:00 p.m.

ISLAND BREW COFFEEHOUSE
377 Keahole St., Honolulu
December 22
10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

We’ll share more information about individual events on our Facebook page. Please join us there!

The chances of winning were very slim this year: Coffee producers from 26 countries submitted more than 250 entries from the 2011/2012 crop. Experienced judges cupped and thoroughly evaluated the sensory attributes of each sample.

Only 10 coffees are on the 2012 winners list. Take a moment to read it, and you’ll notice something remarkable: Three U.S. coffees — all from Ka’u — made the cut! We’re delighted to join the ranks with beans from Honduras, Colombia and Ethiopia.

Our entry, a washed Typica/Caturra blend, had a score of 86.47. Some of you have asked about its availability. (Thank you!) Alas, we’ve already sold the winning lot. But we’ll make an authentic reproduction of it next season.

All patrons flying on Hawaiian Airlines learned about Pete’s win at the 2011 United States Barista Championship (USBC) and his second-place finish at the WBC. They also learned how it all started at our farm:

“No barista in competition, [Pete] says, had ever ‘honestly taken it from the source, from the beginning, all the way through to the final steps of actually serving that coffee.’

He knew he wanted to try — and because he’d just moved to the one part of the country where coffee actually grows, Hawai‘i, he was in a perfect position to do so. To begin he had to find the right farms. He settled on Rusty’s Hawaiian in Ka‘u, one of the Big Island’s most acclaimed coffee farms, and owner Laurie [sic] Obra welcomed him to pick fruit. ‘That gave me specific knowledge to really identify a lot of things,’ Licata says. ‘If you pick coffee cherries that are not quite ripe, or they’re too ripe, or whatever it is, then the sugars aren’t developed in the coffee bean as much. It’s not as naturally sweet.’ ”

The rest of the article is here.

The article already is online. Mark had a lot to say about Rusty’s Hawaiian, as well as a nod to Miguel:

“About 30 miles southeast of Kona is the Ka’u region, featuring a completely different microclimate and richer and deeper soil. The coffees, including Rusty’s Hawaiian (www.rustyshawaiian.com), are beginning to receive more recognition. Rusty and Lorie Obra, natives of the Philippines, began planting coffee on their leased Ka’u land in 1999. They planted seedlings from other people’s farms, resulting in quite a hodgepodge.

Since Rusty died of lung cancer in 2006, Lorie has run the farm alone. With advice from coffee guru R. Miguel Meza (who also helped the Patersons), she began to experiment with her different types of trees and processing methods. Her yellow Caturra is easy to spot, since it turns yellow rather than red when it ripens. Obra discovered that when the cherries were naturally processed, they yielded a remarkable cup. I can testify that it is extremely fruity and spicy in aroma and flavor, with an orangy nutmeg tang and brighter acidity than you’d generally expect from Hawaiian beans.

I also sampled Rusty’s Red Bourbon, which is processed using the wet method, except that instead of soaking the pulped beans in vats of water, Obra mostly lets them ferment in their own juices. This results in a spectacularly full-bodied and fruity but clean cup. Obra does most of the work herself, including the processing and roasting, and she is obsessive and meticulous.”

Our thanks to Mark for taking the time to taste our coffees! You can read the rest of the article here.

I think of the hours it takes to select the ripest coffee cherries from every harvest. Or remember Mom’s instructions for drying honey coffee by hand: Rake the beans to expose them to sunlight and air.

“This coffee is a tribute to my Dad,” I answer. It’s the same sentence I repeat to myself after hours of pushing beans with a rake.

More than five years after my father’s death, caring for his coffee still is the best way to express our love for him. My mother explains this in a video:

We can tell you many other stories about my father’s influence in our lives, but it will take much more than a blog post. I’ll leave you with this tidbit: Even now, strangers stop me to share tales of his kindness and generosity.

We’re delighted — and relieved — that Lorie’s experiments with Kenya-style processing paid off. This method, popular in Kenya, is modified for our climate. It took a year-and-a-half of trial and error to refine it for the winning coffee.

We carefully select ripe Red Bourbon coffee cherries, then pulp them to release the seeds, or coffee beans. We ferment the beans in water, then drain and rinse them. Then we add fresh water for another round of fermentation before laying the coffee on racks to dry.

The dried beans must rest to balance the flavors before roasting. The result: a clean, elegant and bright coffee that starts off with flavors of lemon and turbinado sugar, then shifts to blackberry, red wine and chocolate as it cools.

Here are more details from the Hawaii Coffee Association’s press release:

Rusty’s Hawaiian 100% Ka’u Coffee received top honors for the second consecutive year in the competition between coffees entered from each growing origin in Hawaii. The coffees were ‘cupped’ and scored from a pool of 58 premium Hawaiian coffees from eight districts by a panel of six notable coffee industry professionals using standardized blind procedures….

Lorie passionately expressed simultaneous joy and sorrow adding that she was emotionally torn between sadness and elation because her late husband and farm namesake, Rusty, could not share the award while expressing joy over realizing his dream. “This is for my late husband, our farm, the Ka’u district, the HCA and all Hawaii coffees from across the state,” Obra said.

The expanded cupping panel included Shawn Hamilton of Java City Roasters, Warren Muller of Inter American Coffee, Paul Thornton of Coffee Bean International, Lindsey Bolger of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Jay Isais and Jesse Martinez of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Four of the six are licensed coffee graders. None are based in Hawaii to help ensure impartiality. “The cup quality and diversity has improved every year”, said chief judge Hamilton. “We’re experiencing flavors that would never have been associated with Hawaiian coffee in years past. Everyone is upping their game.”

So we thank our friend, Shawn Steiman, for writing this article in Roast magazine. He explains coffee processing well — and saves us a lot of time and effort in doing it ourselves.

We’re also grateful for his mention of us on pages 28-29. He shows how exacting we can be when it comes to processing non-washed coffees, such as our Natural Yellow Caturra and Natural Red Caturra:

Another Ka‘u coffee farm known for experimentation and passion is Rusty’s Hawaiian Coffee. Lauded with awards (2010 Hawaii Coffee Association Cupping Contest first-place winner, 2010 Outstanding Producer of the Year by the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe, and several 92+ scores from The Coffee Review), Rusty’s is a paradigm of meticulous processing. Owner Lorie Obra works tirelessly to process her coffee to perfection. The pulped naturals can require raking every 20 minutes the entire day after pulping whereas the full naturals need the most attention three to five days after being laid out.

“Non-washed coffees must be raked very frequently so they will dry faster and avoid getting moldy,” Obra explains. The level of attention necessary to dry the coffee properly requires a great deal of time and energy. This translates into higher labor costs as someone (Obra, usually, or her daughter, Joan) needs to babysit the coffee and monitor the weather once drying begins until the critical periods have passed.

It’s a tiny snapshot of the work we do, but we’ll have to leave more tales for another time. And yes, our processing methods are incredibly labor intensive, but we have a very good reason to be so particular.

Once they met up, it was only a matter of time before something special happened. Sprudge wrote a song about Miguel sorting competition coffee for U.S. barista champ Pete Licata. Miguel, in turn, improvised a melody. And all that singin’ and sortin’ was captured on video. Want to see it? Here goes:

We couldn’t be happier for Pete. His second-place finishes at the 2007 and 2008 USBCs left him hungry for a win. That prompted him to harvest, process and roast his own competition beans — a feat no barista had ever tried.

If Pete had something to prove, so did we. Our band of companies known as “Team Hawaii” worked with him for months on the winning espresso.

Fresh Cup captured the significance of our collective success:

Licata’s victory serves as a coming-out party of sorts for Hawaiian coffee and the quality movement under way there. Lorie Obra, owner of Rusty’s Hawaiian, says she’s excited for the international exposure the win brings. “That will really elevate Hawaiian coffee in the world,” she says. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, Hawaiian coffee is all hyped up.’ We’re showing them we’re not hyped up; we are the real thing.” Meza says he’s especially excited that Licata will be representing American-grown coffee at Bogota, Colombia’s World Barista Championship, which for the first time will be held in a coffee-producing country. “Hawaii is often overlooked as a true specialty producer, and we really wanted to show Hawaii can produce a diversity of great coffees,” he says. “The Hawaiian industry is near and dear to our hearts.”

You can read the entire article here.

Not me. I think of a quiet drive up to Rusty’s Hawaiian farm in March. That’s when I tagged along with Pete to get a peek behind the prep for the 2011 U.S. Barista Championship.

Pete was trying something no barista had done before: He was picking, processing, roasting and slinging his own beverages — literally from the fruit to the cup. At this point, Pete had won the 2011 South West Regional Barista Competition with beans from Rusty’s Hawaiian and Kona Coffee & Tea.

My camera followed Pete through the typica and caturra fields, then back to our little mill. Pete seemed like an old hand, picking with skill and grace. He processed his espresso with care and selected the best coffee-cherry skins for his signature drink.

I worked tirelessly to capture him on video, so that I could best tell his story in advance of the U.S. championship. Here it is: