Kona coffee grows only in a narrow belt between 500 and 3,200 feet on the western slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big Island, where sunny mornings, afternoon clouds, and porous volcanic soil suit Arabica brought from Brazil by Reverend Samuel Ruggles in 1828. When world coffee prices collapsed in 1899, plantation owners leased 5 to 12 acre parcels to their workers, mostly Japanese laborers from the sugar fields, creating a family microfarm culture that survives in roughly 800 farms averaging under five acres.

Every tree is handpicked several times from August to January because cherries ripen unevenly, and it takes about 15 pounds of cherry to make two pounds of roasted coffee. Beans dry on hoshidana racks with rolling roofs to a moisture level that keeps ochratoxin A mold away, then are graded from Extra Fancy down to Prime, with anything at Number 3 barred from the Kona name. Farmers fought root-knot nematodes, the coffee berry borer found in 2010, and leaf rust in 2021, but their longest battle was against fraud: Hawaiian law lets a Kona blend contain just 10 percent Kona.

• Grafting Arabica onto nematode-resistant Liberica rootstock produced the Fukunaga, named for researcher Edward T. Fukunaga.
• The Hawaii Department of Agriculture imposed a quarantine on green beans leaving the island in November 2010.
• Kona Kai Farms executive Michael Norton relabeled Central American coffee as Kona and pleaded guilty in 2000.
• A 2019 Lanham Act class action against Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Safeway, and Kroger ended in settlements over $13.1 million.
• The official 100% Kona Coffee certification mark, credited to Mayor Stephen Yamashiro, was registered in 2000.