Gerald Y. Kinro

Softcover, 149 pp.

Kona is one of the worldʻs 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 fo the farmers, millers, landowners, merchant, and laborers who struggled to keep themselves and their industry alive. The author traces coffee's history in Hawaii - from 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 an adaptations to the agricultural, economic and social life int he Kona Coffee Belt.