A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Coffee Go Down!

Coffee is naturally sweet. Ripe coffee fruit has about the same amount of sugar as a wine grape. When coffee fruit is processed well, the green bean maintains its sugar until it is roasted and the sugar is caramelized.

However, the average roasted coffee is bitter. The result is that consumers add sugar, honey, brown sugar or low calorie sweeteners to their coffee. For many consumers the expected bitterness has created an automatic reflex of adding sweetener to their coffee even before they taste it.

The bitterness in coffee can come from a variety of sources: unripe coffee fruit, low grade beans, robusta beans, over fermented green beans, moldy beans, dirty brewing equipment, over roasted beans or over extracted grounds.

Sugar masks the bitterness in coffee. It is no accident that coffee shops selling over roasted beans feature coffee flavored drinks with large amounts of sugar. Many restaurants brew coffee using bitter blends of cheap arabica and robusta coffees, that are only drinkable with large amounts of sugar. Most grocery store coffee bags also contain low grade arabica beans mixed with high acid robusta beans.

Many consumers believe that their only choice is bitter coffee or coffee with sweeteners. However, great coffee isn’t bitter. One of the attributes in coffee judging is “sweetness.” Bitter coffees do not do well in coffee competitions. Great coffees are a pleasure to drink without any additives.

There is no one way to drink coffee, great coffee offers the consumer the widest range of choices. Putting additives in coffee is OK, so long as it is just an option not a mandate. Some of the things you can add to drip coffee are cinnamon, butter, salt, raw egg, cardamom, and coconut oil. My two favorites are ice cream and/or Irish Whiskey

Some coffee pundits argue that adding sugar to coffee masks natural coffee acids which allows them to experience other flavors in the bean. However, they could make the same argument about any of the other additives that are put into coffee. Great coffees don’t need to mask anything, they can stand on their own.

 Hula Daddy Kona Coffee LLC is a boutique farm in Kona, Hawaii that grows, processes and roasts its own current crop coffee beans. We grow 7 different varieties of coffee and process them using 5 different methods. We roast date every bag of our coffee. Hula Daddy Kona Coffee does not sell coffee cherry or green coffee beans to anyone.

Hula Daddy is Kona’s most awarded coffee. In 2019, Hula Daddy won First, Fourth and Fifth places in the Kona Coffee Competition. In 2018, Forbes Magazine picked Hula Daddy as one of the Top 12 Coffee Roasters in the United States. Also in 2018, Coffee Review selected Hula Daddy out of the thousands of coffees it tastes every year as the Number 1 Coffee of 2018. In 2017, we came in Second in the Hawaii Cupping Competition and in the Kona Coffee Cupping Competition. In 2017, Laura’s Reserve SL-28 received 97 points from Coffee Review and was Number 2 in the Top Coffees of 2017. In December 2016, Coffee Review rated our Laura’s Reserve SL-28 as Number 3 in the Top Coffees of 2016