Reviews for Kaanapali Estate Coffee

When hot, the cup is light-bodied but smooth, with a touch of levitating floral-toned fruit that turns sweetly chocolate in the finish. As the cup cools the fruit deepens toward wine and even more distinctly chocolate tones.

An interesting coffee that provoked a wide range of reaction. Everyone agreed that it was a soft coffee with medium body. The controversy centered on the flavor complex at the heart of the profile, which elicited characterizations ranging from "delightfully spicy" and "richly chocolaty" to "harsh, burned and disturbing" and "burned seaweed, or something I had in a sushi bar(!)." Scores also varied wildly. The nays didn't outnumber the yeas, but the naysayers nayed with more conviction than the yeasayers yeaed, culminating in a low average score. Readers who like low-acid profiles may want to try this coffee anyhow. At a moderately dark brown or full-city roast I suspect the controversial flavor complex will lose its slightly hard edge and turn definitively complex and rich.

To say this coffee has an atypical profile for a Hawaii coffee is an understatement. Comparing it to the other coffees in the cupping is worse than comparing apples and oranges - more like comparing apples and cocker spaniels. The Kaanapali dry-process Moka is, as one panelist called it, a "Yemen wannabe." The trees that produced it are Yemen varietals, and the coffee has been processed in the simple, put-it-out-in-the-sun-to-dry approach used in Yemen and parts of Ethiopia. Which means that, like a Yemen or dry-processed Ethiopia, it is fruity, winy, complex, with a disturbingly lush, overripe aftertaste that lovers of these coffees call gamy or wild and people who don't like Yemen or dry-processed Ethiopia coffees call fermented.Five panelists labeled this coffee fermented and dismissed it with very low scores; three recognized the Yemen/Ethiopia characteristics and treated it like a middle-of-the-road dry-processed Yemen/Ethiopia coffee, giving it scores in the high seventies. Four didn't call it anything but gave it low scores.If this coffee had been presented to the panel in the context of similar dry-processed coffees from Yemen or Ethiopia I don't think it would have provoked quite the same level of criticism. For this reason we're not publishing its scores. However, it did not fare well in the context of this particular cupping.