ABOUT US

Welcome To Mountain Thunder Coffee
Plantation!

We are happy to have you visiting our site, and it is our pleasure to serve
you outstanding 100% Estate Kona Coffee delivered anywhere to your doorstep.

Within one week, you should be receiving your coffee, and we know that you will
be satisfied with its smooth bold presence and subtle nuances of chocolate,
nutty hints. It is our goal to make the best Kona Coffee possible, and we have
the state-of-the-art milling facilities to maintain this high quality standard.
So without further ado, let us introduce our farm to you.

Gevalia
Cupping Contest official Mill and Roastery

We are the official mill and roastery for the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Gevalia
Kona Coffee Cupping Competitions. The event is sponsored by Gevalia of Sweden
and run by Trent A. Bateman of Mountain Thunder. We mill and roast all of the
entries to the contest so that the panel of expert judges can determine the
best cup of Kona coffee. This requires expert roasting skills and meticulous
attention to detail that is displayed as we mill all the entry's parchment coffee.
Each entry submits a bag of Parchment, and then we mill the coffee. Next, we
put the coffee on the gravity-density table for a once-over sorting of good
and bad beans. This sorting allows the best beans to be represented in each
entry's coffee. Next the coffee is bagged and numbered so the judges can not
see the name of the farm. The master number list is kept private by the event
director, Trent A. Bateman. Two bags of green Kona coffee are made and each
is numbered with the entry's farm number. One of the bags remains for the judges
to examine, and the other bag is sent to the roaster be roasted. Roast master
Trent A. Bateman then heats up the roaster, and then roasts each sample to match
the roast profile provided by the judge's specifications. Once each batch is
roasted, the samples are set out to de-gas, which is a process whereby the CO2
gas in the coffee beans is let out to mix with the atmosphere. At this point,
the samples are sent over to the Ohana Keahou Beach Resort, which is the hotel
where the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival is hosted. From there, the panel of
judge's tastes, smells and examines each coffee for the best tasting Kona Coffee.
There are several elimination rounds where different coffee samples are ruled
out as better than others. Finally, there comes a winner, and then the Director
of the competition releases the name in a celebratory ceremony, where the winning
farm gets the koa wood bowl and a name plaque inside the bowl. Currently, there
is a new bowl and an old bowl with all the names of the winning farms for the
past decade.

Discovery
Channel

Recently, we were featured in a Dirty Jobs spot with Mike Rowe. In the summer
of 2005 a three-man film crew of two cameramen and a sound technician, plus
a producer and a producer's assistant arrived on the Farm. And of course, Mike
Rowe was present to work on our farm for the filming. Mike is a very lively
man, with a great personality that makes him so popular on the widely viewed
Discovery Network. Mike starts off in the composting yard, where all of our
coffee cherry is composted with wood chips, seaweed, and manure. It had rained
the day before, so there were juicy pictures that showed where the ground was
muddy. Mike makes a lot of jokes about our two Donkeys, which he rode to the
coffee field. Mike rode our Donkey Lucy which likes to be an ass and kick you
if you are not looking. Mike handled Lucy just fine.

The next segment of the show which was filmed last summer was the coffee tree
care. Mike learned how to spread fertilizer and compost around the coffee trees,
so as not to burn the tree trunk. And our Tropical St. Croix sheep were really
interested in Mike sitting down around the trees, which Mike, of course makes
out to be a joke. I am sure that Mike was really humbled by our number one picker,
Lolo, who can pick three hundred to four hundred pounds per day, opposed to
Mike's humble effort of a few pounds. Really, it takes a lot of practice and
experience to become a number one picker.

Next Mike Rowe went over to the wet mill, where the coffee is stripped of its
outer cherry cover. Mike was wondering at this point how many steps there are
to process coffee, and really there are quite a bit when you take the coffee
all the way to a mocha latte, maybe eight or nine, depending how you look at
it. Mike jumped in our huge fermentation pool, almost up to his knees to push
the beans out of the pool. We put the beans into a rolling dump cart and Mike
then raked the beans across our bright red drying decks. Mike and I switched
over to a dryer batch of coffee on the deck and then scooped it up to make a
few bags of coffee. Mike just couldn't believe that we were going to need to
process the coffee one more time before we roasted the coffee.

At the dry mill, everything was a little complicated for the normal viewer,
so we just hoped that "one of the buttons" were going to get him a
little closer to a cup of coffee. Really, the coffee was milled, and stripped
of its outer parchment covering, and then sorted by size, gravity density, and
color. Yes, we have a color sorter, which sorts the beans based on their content
of white and black. Six cameras on the color sorter do the job, and it is really
quite amazing to see the machine at work, because it works so fast and sorts
every bean. Mike was happy to finally re-bag his beans into yet another burlap
sack, where he then moved over to get his bag of coffee roasted.

To his surprise, Mike had to re-open the bag he had just bagged so he could
roast the coffee. (We had to bag the coffee so Mike could move it from the milling
room to the roasting room.) Mike finally got to work with Brooke Bateman. As
Mike and Brooke go through the roasting process, Mike cracks jokes and gets
excited to see the flame heating the beans to over 450 degrees in our Dedrich
drum roaster. Mike got to drop his first ever batch of coffee at Mountain Thunder,
and I am sure he will not forget how to do it.

Finally, Mike took his 1 Lbs. bag of roasted coffee to Lisa Bateman. When Mike
asked Lisa if he could get a cup of coffee, Lisa said, "...in about fifteen
minutes." Mike was tired of waiting so he went down into the coffee orchard,
where we have a gazebo, and waiting while he was watching the sunset. After
about twenty minutes, Lisa walked down with Mikes cup of Mountain Thunder 100%
Kona Coffee and Mike, finally got to drink his cup "...a hour before bedtime".

This spot on Dirty Jobs will be aired on the Discovery Network over 60 times,
so check your local listings for a chance to catch the Bateman's and Mike Rowe
in action, while they make a cup of coffee.

Food Network

In November 2004, the film crew of the Food Network showed up to film at the
Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation in Kaloko. And they filmed everything that
has to do with making a cup of 100% Mountain Thunder Kona Coffee. The Food Network
film crew was more modest, with a single cameraman and a producer. We filmed
for a segment of the ever popular show called Unwrapped, where Mark Summers
takes you through the various steps and processes that our American foods must
go through before we eat them. You can check to see when the episode will be
on in your area by looking for the episode named Aloha Edibles.

Part of Aloha Edibles was filmed on the Big Island of Hawaii, and Oahu,
and on mainland California. Our 100% Kona Coffee was shown among the likes of
macadamia nuts, shave ice, and luau-style food. We were a little sad we did
not get the meet Mark Summers, because he narrated the whole shooting from the
Unwrapped 50's-style restraunt-studio with red and white checkerboard tablecloths,
but we agree that he did a good job narrating the tour of our farm.

The day of the shooting was one of the most beautiful and sunny days that Mountain
Thunder has ever seen, and the photography exemplifies this. Our facilities
were freshly painted after an off-season cleaning and paint job. And our Organic
coffee trees were glimmering in the sun. We hope you enjoy this episode of Unwrapped
as much as we do!