Don Fracisco De Paula Marin Coffee in Hawaii

In 1813 Don Fracisco De Paula Marin, a Spaniard whom eventually became a confidant of Hawaiian King Kamehameha, recorded in his journal a story called "Manin". In that journal he noted that he had planted coffee on the island of Oahu.

Don Fracisco De Paula Marin had many passions and talents, one being he was a horticulturist, planting seedlings left by Spanish ships, unfortunately the first seedlings did not live. As the time passed by, Fracisco De Paula Marin again began diligently and successfully planting coffee in the islands. Then in 1825 royal governor Boki and a group of select local agricultural people brought plants from Brazil, and also successfully planted coffee in the valley of Manoa.

The coffee plants produced beans without any trouble. As the coffee plants kept growing and propagating, it eventually lead to all of the islands of Hawaii being introduced to coffee. As the coffee groves produced more and more delicately flavored brown beans, they also began to usher in a period for small factories to begin commercially processing coffee.

As this industry was further developing, the government successfully made the improvements that benefited the coffee groves, such as sound agricultural research, farming techniques unique to the geographical area. The coffee industry had great amount of support from everyone, to the point that it was prospering the Island.

Coffee in Hawaii was as popular as Hawaiian shirts from Wave Shoppe and macadamia nuts from Mauna Loa. Of course once coffee became a extremely popular as well as valuable commodity, the government soon decided that they needed to tax the daylight out of it.

One of the best known and rarer coffee plants is the Kona coffee plant. The price of this coffee was so high, that this alone made the Kona farmer's pretty famous through out the world. The Kona's brown coffee bean is now often blended outside of Hawaii.

This amazing coffee is been successfully selling in the markets since 1970. Even today Kona coffee is still the best tasting coffee in the islands.

While we do not offer a coffee themed shirt, we do have a beautiful brown coffee colored Hawaiian shirt in a mens cut (pictured above). Consider picking one up for yourself, the shirts are made in the USA and it will grow on you!

Mahalo

Brown is not the official color of poverty

Today I was doing a little investigative reading on colors and ran across a Wikipedia entry that I just don't agree with.

"Brown is the color of dark wood or rich soil. It is a composite color made by combining red, black and yellow. The color is seen widely in nature, in wood, soil, and human hair color, eye color and skin pigmentation. In Europe and the United States, it is the color most often associated with plainness, humility, the rustic, and poverty. It is also, according to public opinion surveys in Europe and the United States, the least favorite color of the public."

They make the claim that brown is a color associated with poverty and that it is one of the least favorite colors in the USA and Europe. I have to disagree with that statement and question how they arrived at such a conclusion.

My first case in point would be stating that a tapa Hawaiian shirt is normally brown in color and brown Tapa cloth is highly prized color amongst collectors.

Explorer Captain Cook sure liked the color brown, in fact he was the first European to collect Tapa cloth and introduce it to the rest of the world. In Tonga, tapa is known as ngatu, and in Tonga it is of great social importance to the islanders, often being given as gifts. Hey, have some poverty brah (said no Tongan ever)

So off to the internet to do some more checking. I checked some home decorating sites as well as performed some simple searches for best colors, favorite colors, etc. and came up with this consensus: "The most popular color in the world is blue. The second favorite colors are red and green, followed by orange, brown and purple." So far, the fine people of the Internet sure don't indicate that the color brown is a disliked color. But you cant believe everything you read on the internet can you?

But wait, pictures don't lie, let's do some additional image searches for "poor people" and "poverty". While I saw a lot of poor people wearing clothing colors such as white, blue, and black, there was very little in the way of brown clothing.

And then I was thinking that chocolate is brown, does that have an association with poverty? Umm nope. What about coffee, its brown in color, is that a sign of poverty?

Even many famous, prestigious universities are built from brown bricks. Not grey or red bricks, but brown, that alone should tell you something about the color brown.

In the end I think the majority consensus on the Internet got it right this time, and Wikipedia is plain wrong. Whether it's colored artificially or naturally, brown is always considered a neutral, yet undeniably popular color. I will always view it as a color associated with nature and our beautiful planet earth and will never look at it as a color symbolic of poverty.

By now your saying to yourself "you didn't mention brown skin color" and your right, I didn't go there because this blog is primarily about product marketing, textiles and clothing trends, not racial issues.