98THE EXCHANGEI
T’S NOT UNUSUAL, within a certain 24-hour
period, for Ben Fitt to touch nearly every step
in the complex process that allows you to enjoy
a morning cup of coffee. An afternoon tending
orchards in the rolling hills above Kauai’s northern
beaches—where he grows tall, skinny Typica coffee
plants with red berries and squat Catuai trees with
yellow fruit—often gives way to an evening spent
roasting beans on the island’s east side. The next
morning, Fitt might drive north to place some of
those roasted beans in a La Marzocco GS3 espresso
machine that he repaired himself, before pulling
shots for customers at a farmers’ market in Hanalei.
As far as Fitt, 34, or anyone else knows, no one in
the vast universe of coffee obsessives has pulled off
the same feat: a coffee operation in which the same
person farms the trees, ferments the berries, roasts
the beans and then takes a turn as a barista to serve
the coffee. His pursuit of this unlikely dream was
enabled by local landowners willing to partner with
a rookie farmer and developments in nano-roasting
that allow his tiny operation to apply computer algo-
rithms to the elusive task of pursuing the perfect
roast, as well as a growing customer base willing to
pay the steep prices that Hawaiian coffee commands.
The key to Fitt’s one-man farm-roast-brew hat
trick—a fantasy I’ve heard echoed by coffee aficio-
nados around the world—is his location. Most of the
world’s premier coffee-growing environs, whether
the highlands of Ethiopia or the hills of Congo, don’t
have many customers willing to fork over six bucks
for a latte, or $89 a pound for top-end roasted beans.
On Kauai’s north shore, green mountains blan-
keted in rain clouds meet soft sand beaches fronting
coral reefs where, in winter, 30-to-40-foot swells
roll to shore. This steady ocean pipeline, set against
a lush backdrop of taro fields, wandering nene birds
and cascading waterfalls, has made this stretch of
Kauai coastline a mecca for surfers. The road east
from Ke’e Beach—through Hanalei, the largest town
in the area, to Kilauea, the farm town where Fitt now
grows most of his coffee fruit—might be the ideal
place to launch the world’s first single-handed small-
batch bean-to-espresso venture.
Before he settled in Kauai, Fitt had worked and
surfed his way around the world. His love of cof-
fee was ignited in Kaikoura, New Zealand, where in
2009 he took a job as a bartender in a place with an
espresso machine no one knew how to operate. He’d
already been wowed by coffee in the Antipodes; even
the brew he discovered in small surf towns blew
away anything he’d tasted back home in England.EPICUREAN TRAVELRealizing he had a chance to try his hand at making
real espresso, Fitt watched and learned from baristas
at a nearby cafe and gradually became more inter-
ested in pulling shots than in serving cocktails.
“I found coffee to be this amazing blend of science,
craft and culture,” he says. Carrying this newfound
fascination with him, he went on to find jobs at cafes
in Australia and Kauai. Having studied environmen-
tal science at the University of Plymouth, he also did
a stint teaching immersive environmental educa-
tion on California’s Catalina Island. That aspect of
his background made Fitt aware that most coffee is
farmed at an industrial scale using vast amounts of
chemical fertilizers. He became curious whether
organic farmers, growing in a way that respected the
long-term future of the land, could compete against
the conglomerates.
After learning brewing techniques and how to
repair machinery, he also learned to roast on Kauai,
first at a cafe, Java Kai, then on his own. In a tiny
structure next to his house, he set up a drum roaster
connected to his laptop, allowing him to experiment
with factors that affect flavor, such as the rate of rise
(how fast the temperature of the beans increases as
they roast). Roasting began as a hobby—Fitt enjoyed
brewing the results and giving bags to friends—but
he soon realized that in order to properly fund the
operation he’d need to sell what he made. Outpost
Coffee was born.
Fitt discovered that many Hawaiian cafes have
a surprising aversion to brewing the local harvest.
Even serious coffee shrines tend to serve non-Hawai-
ian beans, typically from Latin America and often
pre-roasted on the mainland. Much of the resis-
tance has to do with price. Pedigreed beans from the
Big Island’s Kona region, the most valuable coffee
real estate on the islands, might fetch three to four
times what comparable beans from Central or South
America cost. Kona had also moved from a position
of global dominance, which held from around 1890
to 1970, to its more recent status as a region that
also churns out a souvenir-grade product aimed at
tourists, usually mixed with non-Hawaiian beans to
create affordable “Kona” blends lacking any distinc-
tive traces of the island’s terroir.
And yet, Fitt saw an opportunity in a subset of
Kona farmers growing exceptional beans in small
batches, the same farms whose harvests he now
roasted. There was also a successful venture on
Oahu, Kona Coffee Purveyors, started by Raymond
Suiter and his wife, Jackie, which emphasized the
provenance of the beans it roasted and sold a rangeof 100 percent Kona coffee drinks.
When Fitt learned, in 2018, that a friend of a friend
had found hundreds of old, abandoned coffee trees
on her property in Kilauea, he made a deal to bring
them back to harvestable condition in exchange for
use of their beans. After clearing out the jungle that
had risen around the trees, he imported organic fer-
tilizer from the Big Island and adopted a sustainable
approach to cultivation. Last September, two years
after he began to farm, Fitt started to see his first
usable berries, a small yield that he expects will be
bigger next year. In November, he made a deal to open
a permanent, brick-and-mortar Outpost Coffee Café
in Hanalei, slated to open this March. A key part of
Fitt’s vision is for him to be one of the baristas at the
cafe so he can tell customers how he raised, picked
and roasted the beans they are about to sample. In
addition to his own coffee, he plans to offer a rotat-
ing selection of small-batch Hawaiian coffees in both
filter and espresso form, as well as more affordable
blends for regular weekday customers.
Though some large industrial operations, like
Kauai Coffee Company, likewise own the entire
coffee-making process from plant to cup, such outfits
typically employ dozens, if not hundreds, of people.
There are a few smaller coffee farms around the
world that might offer visitors a cup of filter coffee
on-site, but Fitt has never found another individual
farmer-roaster who also runs a public cafe.
Fitt has begun experimenting with fermentation,
using wine yeast to help extract the most flavor from
his beans. One of the criticisms of Hawaiian coffee,
especially from third-wave coffee snobs, is that it
doesn’t have the intense acidity they valorize. Fitt
wants to enhance the fruit notes through fermen-
tation, but he also believes that the preoccupation
with ultrahigh acidity is more a reflection of coffee
experts’ own obsessions than of typical consumer
tastes. “Most people want to drink their coffee in
a milk-based drink,” he says. “And the truth is that
very high acidity does not go well with dairy.”
At his cafe, Fitt also hopes to tap into his back-
ground as an environmental educator. “I want to use
Outpost as a platform to support sustainable farm-
ing and more ethical practices for the whole coffee
value chain,” he says. “Customers know cafes; they’re
starting to know roasters. Now I want them to start
to value farmers in the same way. Eventually I want
to be able to offer the same kind of immersive educa-
tional experience that a winery can, so visitors can
start to appreciate all that goes into the cup of coffee
they drink every day.” •CAPTURING COFFEE’S HOLY GRAIL
In Kauai, Hawaii, the elusive dream of a small-batch artisanal operation that does it all—farm,
roast and serve—has become a reality for one coffee-obsessed entrepreneur.
BY TOM DOWNEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY NACHO ALEGRE