She Gave My Kona Coffee the Worst Score of the Competition. Then She Asked to See the Farm

I waited for her in the parking lot afterward. I’m not proud of that.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Sixty-eight?”

She stopped. She looked at me. For a second, something changed in her face, like she hadn’t expected the farmer to look the way I did. Then it was gone.

“Your coffee is sour,” she said calmly. “There’s a fermentation defect. Something went wrong in your processing. The beans were sitting too long before you washed them, or your drying deck isn’t clean.”

“My grandmother’s been drying coffee on that deck for sixty years.”

“Then your grandmother’s deck has a problem,” she said.

She got into her rental car.

“It’s not personal, Mr. Kahale,” she said through the window. “It’s coffee.”

I drove home so angry my hands hurt from gripping the steering wheel.

I didn’t sleep that night. At four in the morning, I went out to the drying deck with a flashlight.

I’d recently hired a new worker to help with processing. The festival had been so busy that he’d left two batches of cherries sitting in bags overnight before washing. Including the batch I’d sent to the competition.

She was right.

Two days later, I was out on the hillside picking when a rental car pulled into my driveway.