HISTORY
FOREBEARS
In 1946 Margaret and William Twigg-Smith settled in Kona, retiring from life in Honolulu and returning to Margaret’s familial Kona roots where her great-grandparents Reverend Asa and Lucy Goodale Thurston had lived for more than 40 years, having arrived in 1820 and introducing the first Christian word to an indigenous Hawaiian populace, and a few foreign residents.
Some 140 years later, in their aging years, Margaret and William chose Holualoa, renovating and building on to a crumbling stone and mortar foundation structure originally built by a Portuguese rancher and dairyman for his large family in 1895, just a few miles distant from Margaret’s forebears’ homestead, Laniakea, on the same slopes of Mount Hualalai.
BUSINESS INCEPTION AND LABEL
One of Margaret and William’s grandsons would eventually settle in the same home with fresh sights on growing and processing coffee some forty years later. Along with his young bride, they would raise a family of four and start a coffee company they named Kona Blue Sky Coffee. The name, inspired by an accounting term referring to the potential value of a business’s intangible assets; reputation, processes, and procedures, pleased the visionaries here, as Kona’s blue morning skies are frequently so blue and clear. The term blue sky also relates to goodwill, a quality we find appropriately delightful.
Excited with the vision of providing an excellent product from “seed to cup,” including the hospitality of a land well-known for its generosity and spirit of Aloha, the result is a recognized cup of Kona coffee we are proud to call Kona Blue Sky Coffee.
Wanting Kona Blue Sky Coffee to have a label worthy of the product they were producing in the early 1990s, one that would stand the test of time, much like distinguished labels of fine wines, they didn’t have to look much farther from their doorstep for inspiration, the charming architectural lines of Tutu (an affectionate Hawaiian grandparent title) Margaret’s home. In 1951, visiting California artist friend, Millard Owen Sheets, gifted Tutu Margaret a watercolor painting of his view from the guest house lanai as a goodwill gesture in thanking her for his stay. The painting of the home with the Kona coast in the distance, and the vast Pacific beyond was the perfect artistry for our label. It’s a view we still cherish here at Kona Blue Sky’s home in the upland cool of Holualoa.
THE COFFEE ORCHARDS AND MILLS
The first coffee orchards were planted by Margaret in the 1950s adjacent to her home, with fruit trees of citrus, fig, multiple varieties of bananas, avocados, and pineapple resplendent in abundance and yield. Volunteer starts of Isabell grape plants were trained on trellises, vestiges of the property’s earlier Portuguese settlers who made wine for home consumption. The Kona district in the lee of Hualalai and Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii is known for its rich volcanic soil, sheltered from the erosion of prevailing north-east trade winds, creating fertile growing conditions.
More coffee was planted during the spring and summer’s rainy seasons in the years that followed, on lands acquired by the family upslope of Tutu Margaret’s home, growing to more than 90 acres. A mill was built, along with coffee drying platforms called Hoshidana (a Japanese term borrowed and crediting this ethnic group for their part in the early coffee industry). These lightweight roofs on casters roll over to protect, or away from plywood drying decks keeping the coffee dry in times of rain or exposed to daily sun until drying is complete. Milling equipment was purchased; a wet mill to process the coffee every evening of coffee-picking season; a dry mill needed to slough off the papery parchment skin of the dried coffee, and grading equipment to sort the coffee into the various grades; Extra-fancy, Fancy, No.1, Prime, Peaberry, etc.
In the mid 1990s Kona Blue Sky incorporated, built, and opened a visitor’s center adjacent to Tutu Margaret’s home and orchard, then Christian and Lisa’s home. A Sivetz Fluid Bed coffee roaster was ordered from Corvallis, Oregon along with packagers and sealers, and thus, the business of operating a coffee retail venture began in earnest, taking visitors on informative tours through Tutu Margaret’s orchard many times a day.
Early Coffee Industry Origins and More Forebear Connection
Lisa’s great-grandfather, August Ahrens, arrived in Hawaii in 1879, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the University of Hildesheim in Hanover, Germany. He came at the request of a fellow Hanoverian, and Hawaiian citizen, Hermann Widemann, who was starting the first sugar plantation on Oahu with a 25-year lease of Waianae Crown lands that same year. In the upstart years supervising laborers, then serving as sugar chemist, August was promoted to plantation manager in 1885. He married Louisa Hapai, a Hilo-born woman of Hawaiian and Chinese descent and proceeded to have five children in the growing community of Waianae.
Sharing Widemann’s enthusiasm for new ventures, August planted the first commercial production of coffee trees on the Waianae Coast in 1886, in the cool uplands of the Waianae Valley. There in the sheltered lee of Mount Ka`ala, the 45-acre coffee plantation thrived. It is a fitting connection with his future great-granddaughter’s hand in the coffee business one hundred years later!
The first coffee plants (of unknown origins) were brought to Hawaii by Don Francisco de Paula y Marin in 1817. Spaniard, sailor, horticulturist and advisor to the Hawaiian ali`i, (ruling class) he is known for cultivating Hawaii’s early crops of pineapple, cotton, tobacco, and grapes.
A Brazilian strain brought to the Islands by Governor Boki on a return trip from England via Rio de Janeiro in 1824, grew successfully in Manoa Valley under Marin’s care. It would be the main cultivar in Hawaii for a long while. Slips of these plants started in upland Kona by Christian missionary Samuel Ruggles in 1828 would become the coffea arabica strain and the most successful to adapt in Hawaii until 1892 when Hermann Widemann is credited with introducing the Typica variety from Guatemala, a higher yielding variety.
Englishman Henry Nicholas Greenwell who settled in Kona in the late 1850s, operated a store, ranched, and grew Kona oranges, would later successfully capitalize on this coffee strain, and Widemann’s later introduction now known as Kona Typica. H.N. Greenwell’s descendants are still growing coffee in Kona.
The early Japanese community in Kona is to be credited with the coffee industry's success. Farms grew in great numbers when immigrant laborers left difficult living and working conditions on sugar plantations on the Hamakua Coast, the east side of Hawaii island, in the late 1800s. Some broke their plantation contracts, running away to begin a new life in an ever-developing Kona.
These rogue laborers made up the bulk of the coffee industry at the start of the 1900s. These first-generation Japanese (Issei) men (and their wives and children-(Nissei)) developed advances in processes, and through sheer sweat equity contributed greatly to the success of the early coffee industry in Kona. Many ethnicities also worked together in this very isolated part of the state. Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, mostly all introduced by the sugar industry, along with Hawaiians, American and European settlers. They all lived and worked together with respect and tolerance of their differences.
In 1932 the school vacation schedule in Kona was inaugurated, based on the seasonal coffee harvest needs. Known as The Coffee Schedule, children had their “summer” vacation during the months of August to November to help pick the ripe crop. Historically, whole families in Kona, children included, picked from sunrise during coffee season. Even teachers had to pick their coffee. Every effort went to having a successful crop. This school schedule lasted until 1969.
“I think, at the beginning, there was a real reason for it and I think it worked out very well. I think it strengthened the ties within the family where they all were working together for something. I know it’s been said at times, if you had someone applying for a job that came from Kona, he was a good worker. He had good loyalty and he was a good worker. I think that all comes from that period where everybody in the family worked hard together.”
--Sherwood Greenwell
Kona held the distinction of being the sole coffee grower and producer in the United States until the late 1980s, with McBryde Sugar on Kaua`i in 1987, and Moloka`i Ranch, in 1993, each diversifying their respective operations.