Where to Buy Kona Coffee Online
When I give samples of kona coffee to my friends, one of the first things they ask me is: “where can I get more of this stuff?” While you can purchase kona coffee pretty easily through mega-merchants like Amazon, there’s a couple simple tips to make sure you get the freshest coffee possible when you’re ordering it online. For one, ordering from the farms is the easiest way to make sure you get fresh coffee, although it’s not a guarantee. Koa farms (featured below) states that they will only roast your coffee after you order it.
If you want to order from Amazon.com (to take advantage of shipping perks), make sure the coffee you order says ‘farm direct’. Blue Horse, for example, takes orders through Amazon but ships the coffee directly to you (so your coffee isn’t sitting in a warehouse somewhere).
Make Sure you Buy 100% Kona Coffee
When shopping for kona coffee, make sure the package says 100% kona coffee. If a coffee says ‘kona blend’, it usually means it has less than 10% actual kona beans, with the other 90% made up of inferior-quality beans. Safeway recently settled a lawsuit involving ‘kona blend’, but there currently is no legal protections for coffee farmers at the moment. Until that happens, one thing we can do to ensure that our favorite coffee keeps thriving is to make sure we only buy coffee clearly labeled 100% Kona.
Supply Shortage
Due to a shortage in teh supply of kona coffee this year, larger coffee farms have been purchasing coffee from smaller farms. This means that a lot of the smaller farms have already sold out of their coffee this year, whereas larger farms will be more likely to still be in stock.
These resources are places with proven track records where you can make sure you will get high quality, freshly-roasted coffee (or unroasted green beans if that’s your preference).
1. Koa Coffee Company
Koa coffee plantation is one of the largest farms in the Kona Coffee region and they have an excellent reputation for freshness. We’ve already declared their Kona Estate Medium Roast to be the ‘best kona coffee’. Their coffee is made up of the three highest grades of kona coffee: extra-fancy, fancy and peaberry. In response to the crop shortage this year, Koa has been purchasing high-grade coffee from smaller farms this year in order to meet demand. This means that Koa is a no-brained to be in stock even through this year of kona coffee scarcity.
The coffee you order is roasted the day of (if you order early in the day) and sent out early the next day. Which means that if you order your coffee on a Monday, it will likely be at your door Thursday afternoon.
Whereas Koa Coffee focuses on using high grade kona coffee, Coffees of Hawaii is a great option because of their great variety of coffee regions. In addition to their kona coffee, they have coffee from Maui, Molokai, Kauai, Hilo and even Oahu!
My personal favorite is their Kona Nightingale coffee, which is a more evening friendly coffee. It has notes of black currant and pairs perfectly well with a chocolate-covered fruity dessert.
3. Blue Horse Kona Coffee
Blue Horse thankfully makes their coffee available on Amazon.com, so you can take advantage of their numerous shipping options. The coffee you order is farm-direct however, so you can make sure that you’re still getting the freshest coffee possible. Blue Horse’s dark roast is a milk-chocolately flavored coffee that is almost as smooth as Koa coffee’s Estate roast.
Blue Horse also offers lots of options for their coffee: you can order it unroasted, in bulk, peaberry, etc. Pretty much any way you like it!
There you have it! Be sure to check out our Kona Coffee Shop, where you can choose from hundreds of 100% Kona coffees. You can shop for a particular type of coffee (i.e. peaberry kona), by grade of coffee (i.e. Extra-Fancy, Fancy) and you can even search by Hawaiian Island.
