Eating in a box

Ok the Coffee tour and roasting class was so awesome and informative I had to break it out into it's own post. We learned so much about the coffee plant, the process of arriving at a bean and finally roasting, grading and what makes a good cup of coffee. There's a lot of pictures so this will be a long post but hopefully informative. Also note that all of this information is based on Kona coffee specific to this farm, why? At Mountain Thunder they farm at higher altitude, by hand, and conform to organic farming practices. I'll try to call out the info that's specific to this farm but since I've not been to another coffee plantation to compare this information I can't be sure what's specific to Mountain Thunder and practices are different at a commercial producer that's trying to control environmental conditions to produce the highest yield all at one time. Ok it all starts here with the coffee plant and the coffee flower which is part of the gardin...

Day 6 of our adventure. Today's big thing was the coffee plantation tour at Mountain Thunder located in Kailua-Kona south of where we were staying. Before that we had a bit of time to burn. So we started with breakfast. Here's our view from breakfast. We stopped by Island Lava Java Cafe. Nice breakfast joint that features 100% Kona coffee (as opposed to the places that serve "blended" Kona) The view was spectacular and they had a guy singing up front part time ukulele Hawaiian music and part time Christmas melodies. Breakfast was pretty straight forward the only thing unique about my breakfast was that it was served with some Portuguese sausage, it's slightly sweet and red from the paprika (not spicy at all). My wife ordered the "Oatmeal Brulée" (pictured above). Plain oatmeal topped with vanilla yogurt and bananas dusted with brown sugar and sugar burned by a torch. It certainly a unique presentation and very tasty. We went and shopped aro...