Worth the Wait

Lorie Obra’s journey through the coffee world has been a complicated one. After purchasing land in Hawaii’s Kau District in 1999 with her husband, Rusty, the couple proceeded to transform the former sugarcane home into a coffee farm. Using Rusty’s background in chemistry, the pair approached coffee farming in a hands-on way, experimenting with various processing methods and roasts to find a product they liked. In the process they helped establish a name for Kau specialty coffee, with Rusty organizing the Kau Coffee Growers Cooperative. When Rusty passed away in 2006, Lorie took the reins of the company, and she has steered it toward success. In June she received the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s 2010 Outstanding Coffee Producer Award, and last month Rusty’s Hawaiian bested a field of 67 competitors to win the Hawaii Coffee Association’s 2010 Cupping Competition.

Q: How did your company start?
A: My husband and I were from the Philippines originally, and we moved to New Jersey in 1972. We lived there for 28 years, and that’s where our two children were born and raised. After they finished college, Rusty was offered early retirement from the pharmaceutical company where he worked, and he took it. His parents moved to Hawaii in 1982, and we had come here to visit a lot. We decided that when it was time for retirement, we were going to come here.  

Q: How did coffee come into play?
A: We came here in 1998, right after his retirement, trying to figure out what we could do as a post-retirement career. He had a friend who already had a coffee farm, and he brought us there. This was in November, and all the trees were loaded with ripe cherries and looked so beautiful. Rusty and I looked at each other—we didn’t even talk—and we decided right there that we had found our calling. It was like love at first sight. Rusty talked to the management of the land and was able to lease 12 acres of land, and that’s how it started, in 1999. Because coffee was not there before, we had to start from scratch. We started from little seedlings that we pulled out of our friends’ coffee farms in Kona.

Q: How was the business affected when your husband passed away?
A: I tried selling the farm after he passed away, but it didn’t work out. So I said, let me try to do it myself. We had started it together, and I know the ins and outs of the farm—running the mill and the wet processing, dry processing, storing coffee, roasting—I know all those like the back of my hand. So I kept it going. And he’s my driving force because when he was here, his vision was to put Kau coffee up on top with the elite coffees of the world. And he never had a chance to do that. I decided that I would continue the dream for both of us.

Q: How did the SCAE producer award happen? 
A: I was nominated for that and I didn’t even know it. The group of SCAE people came to Hawaii in October. They came to Kau, and we had set up a cupping session for them. Each farmer in the cooperative had contributed their own coffee. It so happened that my coffee stood out among them. We got into talking and they asked me about the processing that I do, and I told them about the experiments that I do to nail down the correct processing. I gave them samples of coffee and they brought it back with them, and I believe they roasted it up there and cupped it, and they liked the taste.

Q: Winning the Hawaiian cupping award must have been gratifying as well, right?
A: Yeah, suddenly everybody notices you when you win (laughs). This was the second year of the competition, and in my opinion, this is the best thing that HCA has done for all the growers here in the state of Hawaii. When they called my name as the winner, I couldn’t even speak. All I could think of was Rusty. I said, “We did it.”

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