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Big Island Coffee Roasters
In 2010 they found a small coffee farm in a wild, disadvantaged region of Hawaii - Puna - posted on Craigslist. With little to lose they thought, “Why not?” As they integrated with the community of farmers and sampled coffees from around Hawaii, they were surprised by the local diversity that often get overshadowed. The more they learned the complicated steps to produce great coffee, the stranger it became that the final product was a gimmicky souvenir - artificially flavored, stale 10% blends. Worse still, Kona coffees were rife with counterfeit scams. They wanted to change that: to share the diverse, authentic Hawaiian coffees they tasted and the stories behind them. Milled in small batches, roasted to order, specialty grade. Over the next three years, they taught themselves to farm, process, and roast Hawaiian coffee. Theirr end-goal was always the same: the objectively best Hawaiian coffee they could produce from their land. When they found methods that produced great results, they worked with neighboring farmers to do the same and began sourcing their coffees as well. And to their surprise, the obsession paid off. Their Puna coffee earned Grand Champion in Hawaii statewide, becoming the first, and still only, Puna coffee to win the award. Later that year they were awarded a Hawaii Senate Certificate for "putting Puna on the map" and working to elevate the quality of neighboring farms. And as the year closed their Honeyed Yellow Caturra coffee placed in Coffee Review’s "30 Top Coffees of 2013" ...And that became the year Big Island Coffee Roasters was born.