Kona is one of the world’s premium coffees. Given its small-scale cultivation on family farms, however, it has been especially susceptible to price swings and market gluts. A Cup of Aloha is a heartfelt portrait of the farmers, millers, landowners, merchants, and laborers who struggled to keep themselves and their industry alive. The author traces coffee’s history in Hawaii—from its arrival in 1828 to Kona’s position in today’s highly competitive specialty coffee market. Through the author’s use of oral history interviews, readers will experience day-to-day life on a coffee farm and the challenges, natural and man-made, that inspired innovations and adaptations to the agricultural, economic, and social life in the Kona Coffee Belt.
