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What's
New! (December 20, 2009)
Mele Kalikimaka! Christmas is almost here!
We can still do FedEx 2-Day shipping and get a gift to your loved ones. Time is getting short for roasted-to-order. Hawaii has only one FedEx pick-up per day that is at 10 AM. If you need some coffee to arrive by December 24th, please submit your orders before Tuesday morning at 6 AM so we can have some time to roast and pack it before the 10 AM cut-off time.
Mahalo! What's
New! (December 9, 2009)
Just a quick update to tell you about two things. Those you get our newsletter know about our annual holiday promotion. For those who haven't seen it yet, you can get 20% off your entire order by using the following coupon code at checkout. KonaHoliday2009
The other new thing you might have noticed is we now have a SALE section. Since we do all our coffee as roasted to order, sometimes we end up with a half pound or three left over. When that happens we will offer the extras at a very low price. It is always very fresh but might have been roasted a few days ago or last week.
What's
New! (December 5, 2009)
Those of you who read our updates here might have wondered why it took so long since the last update. Well, I (Nancy) had an opportunity to join my sisters and some friends on a cruise of the Eastern Mediterranean and I just couldn't pass it up. Jonathan and I don't usually plan to leave during the harvest season and if we do it is only one of us and for not very long. It is difficult to predict when the coffee will be ripen and ready to pick the next round. So Jonathan has been a trooper over the last three weeks. He has handled processing and drying and raking and roasting and packaging. He did a great job. He put together a great newsletter for the holidays as well.
I returned home a couple days ago and I'm almost over my jet-lag. If anyone is interested in photos from the trip, I have put them online.
The coffee is ripening again and should be ready to pick in about a week. There has been almost no rain and so we have been keeping the trees happy with irrigation. We did get about 0.3 inches the other night. The other areas of the farm that don't get irrigated are getting dry and crunchy. The good news is we don't need to do a lot of weeding or mowing.
Join us on the Social Networking Sites
Become a Makahiki Farms Fan on Facebook and follow our Tweets on Twitter! We will still have our monthly "What's New" updates here on the front page of our web-site, but with Facebook and Twitter we'll be able to provide a more frequent view into the workings of the farm.
Another benefit is that we'll periodically offer limited-quantity specials when we have some extra freshly-roasted coffee inventory that must be sold quickly. Since we roast-to-order, we don't want to keep any roasted inventory, and by sending out notices via Facebook and Twitter we can let folks know in a non-intrusive way that we have a limited-quantity special available.
 
Makahiki Farms Coffee Makes a Great Gift
This holiday season we are offering gift certificates as well as our usual list of great gift ideas. Just click on the link at the top of the this page or click here. If you need corporate gifts or grab bag items, a pack of coffee is a great idea for that.
Actually, our Kona coffee makes a great host/hostess gift for parties, Halloween, or Thanksgiving. We can work with you or your caterer to serve our coffee at your wedding reception, office holiday dinner or other event.
Make sure you have signed up for our email newsletter so you will be sure to hear about holiday specials and promotions.
You can find an online copy here.
What's
New! (October 15, 2009)
We're coming up on another big round of coffee picking next week. We had some very hot and humid weather there for a little while but the last few days we have had some welcome rain. Jonathan just got back from a business trip so this weekend he will be out in the orchard mowing. Rain and warm weather are great for the coffee trees but the grass loves it too. We had an application of foliar fertilizer done and some weed-eating in the orchard as well.
I finished roasting, packing and shipping the middle-of-the-month Coffee Club orders yesterday. Seems like a lot of you are appreciating the 20% off discount. Club orders are great for me as well since it really helps being able to plan out the roasting days so that we can be energy-conscious as well as responsive to our customers. Federal Express shipments must be dropped off no later that 10 AM here on the Big Island or they won't ship out until the next day. USPS needs to be dropped off no later than 3 PM. So it all takes planning.
If you poke around the web site you might notice that we have changed the way that you join the Coffee Club. I hope that the separate order section for the club is easier to understand. You can also choose there what roast level you would like - even unroasted for you home-roasters out there. The initial order discount is now built-in, which is easier for us too. We are working on the site shopping cart software to make the recurring order payments seamless as well. Stay tuned.
Hope Event
Kona Community Hospital is holding its annual Hope Event this Saturday afternoon, October 17th. It is held in honor of all cancer patients, survivors, caregivers and their families and to promote cancer awareness. It is open to the entire community. There will be live music, entertainment, food, information booths, massages , haircuts and more. Instead of a gift basket, this year we are donating individual 8-ounce packages of our coffee so they can give prizes to more folks. I'm having my follow-up tests on Friday so the timing is good to give and receive some hugs of encouragement. I am so grateful that I am cancer-free for four years now.
Makahiki Farms Coffee Makes a Great Gift
The holidays are coming! I know. Too scary to think about it right? (no Halloween pun intended) This year we are offering gift certificates as well as our usual list of great gift ideas. Just click on the link at the top of the this page or click here. If you need corporate gifts or grab bag items, a pack of coffee is a great idea for that.
Actually, our Kona coffee makes a great host/hostess gift for parties, Halloween, or Thanksgiving. We can work with you or your caterer to serve our coffee at your wedding reception, office holiday dinner or other event.
Make sure you have signed up for our email newsletter so you will be sure to hear about holiday specials and promotions.
What's
New! (September 2, 2009)
As usual during this time of year we have been very busy. We just completed a small round of picking last week, but the next round in a few weeks looks like it will be quite large. Harvest has begun slowly again this year. Some folks think it is the increase in volcanic activity at Kilauea since March of 2008. We have had some decent rain lately and the trees are green and strong. The warm days of late summer and the rain have shot up the grass in the orchard as well as the extra foliage growth on the coffee trees. It is time to go through the orchard once again and remove the excess suckers. Jonathan mowed last week.
On Saturday the Kona Coffee Council and the University of Hawaii Cooperative Extension sponsored a workshop on coffee processing. It was held here at our farm on Saturday morning. We served our coffee and coffee spice cookies made using my mom's blue-ribbon recipe from my childhood. Of course, I make them with Makahiki Farms 100% Kona coffee. Nearly 50 people attended. There were hand-outs and several speakers to discussed how coffee is picked, pulped, demucilaged, dried, milled and stored. We showed them around the farm and Jonathan showed our wet mill and explained how it works.
We're off to a wedding on the mainland next week. Please put your orders in by Tuesday, September 8 so we can be sure to get it roasted and shipped. The house/farm sitters aren't trained to roast so any orders placed after Tuesday will be roasted the 16th. Coffee Club orders for the first of the month were mailed yesterday and I will be back in time to take care of the middle of the month orders.
We have replenished the t-shirt inventory so we now have all sizes from small through XXL. You might have already noticed that we can now accept payment through Amazon. You log in to your Amazon account and can access your address book entries and payment methods you have already set up there.
We are still working on landscaping around the farm house and the orchard. I have a beautiful stretch of perennial peanut established by our long driveway. My next project is to begin rooting some cuttings for propagation. It is relatively easy to mow our orchard. The hard part is keeping the grasses and weeds under control within the rows of trees (under and between them) without using herbicides. Our usual attack is with a Shindaiwa weed eater. Perennial peanut ground cover is a pretty plant, very green with small yellow flowers. It is a nitrogen fixer so once established it won't steal fertilizer or nutrients from the trees. It forms a thick blanket that is an effective weed mat. So my plan is to get some of this ground cover established under the trees within the rows so that we can cut back on the weed-eating labor.
Here's a photo of Nancy at our booth at Cream of the Crop in July.
What's
New! (July 26, 2009)
Makahiki Farms Wins Silver Medal!
This past Saturday, July 25th, was the Cream of the Crop coffee tasting event at the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai. We are so excited to have been chosen as the Silver Medallist in the Chef's Choice competition. The Chef's Choice is a blind tasting by renowned chefs. Our Extra Fancy medium-dark roast placed second out of 12 Estate entries. We are very proud of this honor.
It was a beautiful Hawaii day but very hot. We got to meet and chat with many people including tourists and lots of folks who live here on the island. The live music was great and there were lots of desserts to sample along with the 100% Kona Coffee from numerous farms. Coffee-themed art works were on display as well as art and photography by local artisans.
We raffled a Makahiki Farms gift basket won by a lucky woman named Sue (#5) and served up free samples of our Extra Fancy. We had displays of some branches from our trees and coffee at various stages of processing that showed the life of a coffee bean from the flower to the roasted bean.
This free event is in its sixth year and is worthy of attending if you are in the area. The venue is a lovely outdoor amphitheater at the Four Seasons Resort. It is sponsored by the resort and the Kona Coffee Council. If you have plans to visit the Big Island next summer, keep an eye on the coffee council web site or check back right here on our site and we will post the date as soon as we know it.
What's
New! (July 15, 2009)
Coffee Club Now 20% OFF
We've enhanced our Coffee Club to include an even bigger discount of 20% off your standing Coffee Club order. Members who also create a login account here on our web site will automatically get 20% off on any orders they place through our shopping cart. No need to enter a coupon code.
Harvest is here!
The crew arrived yesterday to start our first round of picking for the 2009 harvest season. They will complete the round today. First round is usually small and not every tree has ripe cherry just yet. Having processed the first day it looks like the beans are very big and high quality. Maybe we'll see lots of Extra Fancy this year.
Rain is still not up to normal for a Kona summer but we did get a few days of half inch over night accumulations. We are happy that we can irrigate since not all Kona Coffee farms have the infrastructure to do so.
Jonathan has been working on enhancing the pulping mill. He completely disassembled the equipment in order to clean and libricate everything and replace some bolts and bearings and such. One of the pulpers had a slight engineering problem that was corrected by ordering a new end piece for the drum. These parts come from Columbia and just arrived last week. In addition he has made some adjustments to the flow of beans and incorporated a shaker table. These upgrades will help keep our quality high without as much manual labor as well as decrease our water usage.
Our nephew Adam is visiting from Colorado. He helped with the pulping today. Yesterday, we put him to work getting the milll ready doing things like sweeping and power-washing the drying deck. We have all new materials for the greenhouse covering over the deck, so he will help us put that on as well. It is all one giant sheet of plastic that needs about 6 people and a windless day to get it up and over and secured. He's getting to know the glamorous life of a farmer (haha). But we have let him relax by the pool too.
Cream of the Crop
Free Kona Coffee Tasting
This year's Kona Coffee Council Cream of the Crop event will be held July 25th from 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM at the Four Season's Hualalai at the outdoor amphitheater. We will have our coffee available to taste for the Peoples Choice balloting. Our farm is entered in the Estate category which means we are a member of the Kona Coffee Council's Estate coffee program. All our coffee comes from one farm and is kept separate from the product of other farms. We will be entering the Chef's Choice tasting as well. Come on out and sample some desserts, try some great coffee and watch coffee roasting demonstrations.
What's
New! (June 22, 2009)
Makahiki Farms Stimulus Plan
Hurry! It's not too late for a little stimulus! (as in caffeine). Use the following coupon code for 20% off.
Stimulus2009
Offer expires June 30, 2009. Offer applies to all of our products, including green bean.
Don't forget to include the coupon code when you place your order.
Even in an economic downturn, we still need a little caffeine to stimulate us. And what could be a better way than to drink some of the best tasting coffee in the world? Always roasted fresh to order.
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