About Pohaku Coffee
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About Our
100% Hawaiian Ka`u Coffee
All eyes are shifting from the infamous Kona Coffee District to the Ka`u Coffee District, which is now stealing the show in coffee-cupping competitions. And if you don’t believe us, take it from internationally renowned experts: this harvest, Pohaku Coffee outranked many Kona and Ka`u coffee’s, scoring an average of 82.88, with perfect 10’s in the categories of Sweetness, Clean cup and Uniformity. What does all this fancy coffee-talk mean? It simply means every cup delivers the same deliciously sweet and consistent flavor, free of taints and defects. As a newly established farm in Ka`u, this means we are officially ranked as a specialty coffee! We proudly serve you the very best Hawai`i has to offer.
Speciality Coffee
An ultra-premium, hand-picked coffee from Hawaii’s big island.
Small Batch Roasting
We can roast to order using our cast-iron barrel roaster for the highest quality roasting.
Hand Harvested
Hand harvested with fair wages on our family’s coffee farm.
Natural Processing
Washed in pure Hawaiian spring water, processed with 100% solar power, sun-dried on our greenhouse racks.
Who We Are
About Pohaku Coffee
At Pohaku Farm, we have a unique aim to bring you farm to cup coffee. As a small farm, that is no easy task. Each sweet little bean is hand-picked, washed and sorted then carefully dried and sorted by hand again and again to ensure the highest quality. Although we need a profit to pay the mortgage and fund our next season, our delight is in working the land with the beautiful people God sends our way. We want to build something that matters, and what matters more than a beloved drink is the people who hold it.
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It truly takes a small village to run a coffee and fruit farm. Community and friends have become our extended family and our family means the world to us. Producing high quality farm-to-cup specialty coffee is a labor of love. It involves the strictest of standards and relentless discipline, rising with the sun and getting the work done. Overarching everything like a beautiful Hawaiian rainbow, is our highest aim in life–to honor God and others and to live out the unmatched love of Christ through relationships first. We think you will taste and see just how good this can be.
Who We Are
About Pohaku Coffee
At Pohaku Farm, we have a unique aim to bring you farm to cup coffee. As a small farm, that is no easy task. Each sweet little bean is hand-picked, washed and sorted then carefully dried and sorted by hand again and again to ensure the highest quality. Although we need a profit to pay the mortgage and fund our next season, our delight is in working the land with the beautiful people God sends our way. We want to build something that matters, and what matters more than a beloved drink is the people who hold it.
Read More
It truly takes a small village to run a coffee and fruit farm. Community and friends have become our extended family and our family means the world to us. Producing high quality farm-to-cup specialty coffee is a labor of love. It involves the strictest of standards and relentless discipline, rising with the sun and getting the work done. Overarching everything like a beautiful Hawaiian rainbow, is our highest aim in life–to honor God and others and to live out the unmatched love of Christ through relationships first. We think you will taste and see just how good this can be.
About Pohaku Farms, Na`alehu, HI
Here at Pohaku Farms, faith, family, fun and “do a little every day (or else!)” means everything to us. We are big dreamers. We are still finding our rhythm here on the Big Island. When we visited for a month in 2018, Brenda only dreamed of coming back but Ryan was keeping an eye out. Two years later, he spotted just the right place and we sold everything within a few months.
We left everything familiar, the people and home we loved, to move our little family of five to one of the most back-country towns on the most remote island in world—right in the middle of the 2020 pandemic. We purchased the farm with 683 young coffee trees and dozens of tropical fruit trees. The learning curve was and still is less of an arch and more like a rocket-launch.
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Ryan is a well-known Tech Art Director in the video game world of 22 years, the definition of a self-starter, and has been infatuated with coffee and everything entrepreneur for as long as Brenda can remember. He is full of ideas, works full-time remotely and continues to tech direct at the farm, keeping the weeds down, maintaining the solar and computer systems as well as drying and measuring the beans and storing them at the perfect moisture. He also tries really hard to keep up with Brenda.
As farm (& family) manager, she has her hands in everything from homeschool to wild pig deterrents, coffee tree maintenance to tropical fruit harvesting, and delights in fine-tuning every part of the coffee harvest process to help their extended family work as efficiently as possible. She is a better farmer and foodie than coffee connoisseur, acquiring her taste for coffee only after being introduced to the best (100% Ka`u, of course!) but she thanks God for her long-time love of growing things, and tries really hard to love learning new things so the field and her kids keep flourishing. In fact, the family motto for homeschool which can now be appropriated for all of life is, “Learn to Love & Love to Learn.” The whole Trowbridge family loves to learn new things, but mostly, how to be more like Jesus Christ and love their world like He does.
We aim to do nothing at the expense of our family. Family comes first, then farm. We believe this enhances our quality because it forces us to do a little every day (or else!). Our time is precious with our kids so we prioritize them and their education first. Sometimes we go on adventures way more than we probably should. But we live on the Big Island of Hawai`i! It would be a crime not to enjoy the ever-changing active volcano and gorgeous hikes and beaches as often as we can with as many friends as we can. Sure, the jungle invades before we know it and we might have to spend a few days recovering our farm. Or, sometimes 14 loads of laundry lives many days in baskets before finding its way back to its people. Our front porch may or may not look like a tsunami hit. Farm life is not always glamorous but it is full of life! We make it fun for our kids while teaching them the value of hard work, and more importantly, how to take leaps of faith and follow Jesus, who leads us like a Good Shepherd. We hope they find their purpose in life tied closely to what matters most. We are still learning to do a little every day (or else!).
We value our community—our extended family—SO much that its quite frankly, beyond words. Without people who consistently show up and do their part to help the farm keep running on course, we wouldn’t be here. One acre of coffee might not seem like that much, and it isn’t compared to big operations. But it is overwhelming for one small family! We processed over 10,000 lbs of ripe coffee cherries this last year, hitting up to 700+ lbs in every day at peak harvest. It was full time work for 7 or 8 people! We were blown away that our first year was such a blessing to so many. To provide local families with substantial income for a season was more than we anticipated.