NEWLY UPDATED WEBSITE

The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company has updated our website with new prices, new products and more!  Go to www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com.  Check out our MOKA-JAVA blend of the finest Ethiopian and Indonesian coffees.  Try the new Coconut Spiced CHAI we bring in from Honolulu.  Go to the “Chocolates” page and find our new Cowboy Coffee Choco-Drops, a coffee caramel smothered in milk chocolate and dusted in cocoa powder!  We have new Mescalero Morning Cowboy Coffee Candles on our “Bath Products” page, too.

You will notice that the price has gone up on PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee.  That’s because of the coffee berry borer, a pest plaguing coffee farms in the Big Island's Kona district.  The pest has affected up to 80 percent of coffee farms, leaving some coffee fields in such bad shape that they've been abandoned, creating havens for the beetle.

The insect is smaller than a sesame seed and bores its way into coffee cherries, digs homes and lays eggs. The beans from those cherries aren't usable for making coffee. The pest has reduced the coffee crop and in some cases made farms impossible to harvest for commercial purposes.

Officials plan to distribute the most effective repellent and train farmers to use treatments. They also intend to research new types of pest control that could be more effective at killing the borer and study the insect's genome to find out how it might be similar or different to other pests.

The beetle, known as Hypothenemus hampei, is native to Africa. It was formally identified in Hawaii in 2010 after farmers reported spotting it for a couple years.

No one knows how it arrived in Hawaii, but it's seen in many other coffee-growing regions throughout the world.

So, in a world of supply and demand, less Kona coffee means higher prices and, while prices have been steadily rising over the five years we’ve been in business, we have absorbed the price hikes for our customers.  We just can’t afford to continue that and stay in business.  Thus, Kona is now more expensive…everywhere!

We’re certainly not a large company but we continue to pride ourselves on providing the best coffee available to our customers.  You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that just might be high octane!   We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society! 

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you can type sixty words per minute ... with your feet!  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!