Ale, Aloha, and Authenticity
The delicious contradictions of Kona Brewing Company
Pregame: A tropical pilgrimage
A herd of salmon pink sunburnt Iowans lumbered down Ali’i Drive, seeking shaved ice. Honeymooners in floral prints took selfies at waterfront restaurants while waves crashed into rocks with enough force to splash into nearby Mai Tais. Car traffic ground to a halt as the schools of pedestrians from a newly docked cruise ship flooded the oceanside artery that slashed right through the throbbing heart of downtown. Frustrated tourists in air-conditioned rental cars piled up as a group of carefree college students in swim suits and sarongs jaywalked in chaotic zig zags. A bachelorette party darted diagonally down the street between bars, like clownfish seeking protection from a new anemone. The distinct chemically smell of coconut scented sunscreen wafting through the air and gave me brief hope that perhaps the Iowans had realized the carcinogenic error of their ways.
A sonic tsunami of Top 40 music pulsed from a two story bar to our right. On the second story deck, day drinkers swayed in the trade winds like palm fronds. The people watching on our walk had been spectacular so far, but this brewpub was to people watchers like me what the Great Barrier Reef is to fish enthusiasts. I saw a dozen different stories up there by the railing: three newlyweds, two second honeymoons, and one breakup in the making. Oh to sit amongst them, drink locally-brewed lagers, and dissect the juicy chaos of a Hawaiian vacation with the gleeful intensity of a White Lotus screenwriter. Then I realized that these deck drinkers quite literally had the high ground on that front. The watcher had become the watched. What impression did I give off in my OluKai flip flops and Chubbys shirt festooned with tropical birds?
I self consciously averted my eyes and looked at the sign, depicting a cartoon whale. Of course this rollicking waterfront bar was called Humpy’s.
I pointed it out to Alexis and Lauren who giggled and kept walking. Lauren made one of her confident proclamations that we were going there later. I believed her. A similar proclamation in a Redwood grove in Mendocino had made this friends trip go from an idea to a reality, spreadsheets and all, in a matter of a few weeks. She was the type of friend who was dead serious about her commitments to have fun. It was one of many qualities I admired about her.
For now Humpy’s would have to wait. We were on our way to drink somewhere much more iconic and important. The conversation turned from our dive bar options to whether a passing Scuba instructor had been checking out me or Lauren. I opted out of being the tie breaking vote with a “por que no los dos,” which Laureen greeted with a good humored “Ayo!” followed by her characteristic cackle.
I spotted the jaunty pirate of the Raiders flag fluttering outside of a bar painted ocean blue called “Da Shark Shack” and made a mental note to check it out later, perhaps after a round at Humpy’s. We turned right and walked uphill away from the cacophony of vacation conversations and the various ska covers of pop songs wafting through the warm air.
A friendly man in an aloha shirt sat beneath the corrugated tin roof of a check in kiosk. If the minimalist Gecko on the sign didn’t give it away, the fact that the kiosk had beer on tap did. Half a dozen hours and 2,000 miles after leaving home, we had arrived at Kona Brewing Company.
“Welcome. Are you three here for the tour?”
Tapping the keg: We dream of tasting paradise
While masochists travel to the big island of Hawaii for a grueling triathlon in Mordor-esque conditions, the rest of us head there for the usual tropical suspects. Taking a night swim with 12 foot Manta Rays, they glide just feet from your snorkel mask and gracefully barrel roll while snacking on the plankton drawn to your boat lights at night. It’s an awe-inspiring and hauntingly beautiful sight. The white sands of Hapuna beach beckon you to linger there all day. It’s probably one of my top ten beaches I’ve seen. Visiting the Volcano National Park and seeing the glow of the enormous crater at night makes you feel small in the best possible way. It’s the type of tequila shot of humility that only mother nature can dish out. If your lungs and car can get you there, the surreal, snowcapped peak of Mauna Kea offers what some believe is the best star gazing in the world.
Many of the main draws of the Big Island are stunning nature experiences spread out across its massive surface area, large enough to hold all of the other Hawaiian islands inside of it. Yet the bigger cities of Hilo and Kona have draws of their own. As Lauren and I mapped out our itinerary on a Google Sheet, I realized there was one urban experience I knew we ought to do on our first day.
On the surface, the tour of Kona Brewing Company is a no-brainer for all the reasons you’d expect: visiting a micro-brewing Mecca of sorts, tasting the wares, and trying some beers you can only get on site. Ultimately, you end up experiencing the type of self-indulgent buzz that makes you briefly wax poetic about tropical terroir before deciding where to get pizza afterwards, only to gleefully realize they have pizza on site, too. Brewery tours are appealing for the same reasons that trivia, or wine tasting are, you get an excuse to dabble in binge drinking under the guise of intellectual curiosity. I’m not here to knock this experience, though. After showing us the factory floor, they brought us out onto a scenic patio with cozy benches beneath lazily twirling ceiling fans and poured us tasters of Mai Time, a tropical wheat beer brewed with orange, pineapple, and lime. As it touched by lips, my contented sigh was audible and delighted. I couldn’t have imagined a better cheers to inaugurate our friends vacation. Half way through the tasting, the fact that we were all between jobs for the same magical week in May no longer felt like a coincidence. It felt like destiny. Nothing adds gravitas to camaraderie quite like beer.
Yet the further we got into the tour I was surprised by how quickly the experience unraveled the image of the brand it’s supposed to venerate, right in front of your eyes. For an armchair sociologist like me it felt like an immersive case study in beer marketing. A more cynical person might say that it only takes a soft puff of tropical trade winds for the entire house of cards of Kona Brewing Company’s mythology to come tumbling down. Both takes have a grain of truth in them that reality smashes together and ferments into a delicious and messy concoction.
You visit Kona Brewing Company because it’s marketed and sold as the most famous Hawaiian beer brewed in Hawaii. It’s the same reason people visit the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. The best, most authentic pint must be at the source. While I can attest that the beer is astoundingly fresh there, having done the tour I can also share that a lot of what you drink elsewhere on the island is ironically not brewed in Kona. It’s not even brewed in Hawaii.
Most Kona beer you’ve ever drank, including a lot of what you drink on the Hawaiian islands is brewed on the mainland. Oh, and did I mention that the whole operation was founded by a white dude from Oregon after he struck it rich with a potato chip company? I’m not making this up. They straight up told us on the tour. It’s time to chug some facts.
Flip cup: Most Kona Beer you’ve ever drank was not brewed on Hawaii (for a valid reason)
The trip that followed our Kona Brewing tour was punctuated by a few rituals, none more constant than Lauren’s Big Waves. Every night with dinner Lauren would order a Kona Big Wave ale, crushing enough big waves over the course of the trip to make Kelly Slater jealous. These beers accompanied spicy Furikake chicken plate lunches as well as late night conversations about frisbee, friendship, and family. These beers also facilitated a rite of passage for me: my first viewing of Twilight. Sitting in a yurt with coqui frogs serenading the starlit sky outside, a soup pot filled with ice and Big Waves kept us hydrated and had us pausing the film and heckling Robert Pattinson along with the screenwriters late into the night.
Big Wave ale comes in an iconic blue bottle. The first eye opening thing we learned on the tour is that all of these bottles had been brewed on the mainland. While all of the beer you get on tap or in cans has been brewed in Kona, anytime you’re drinking Kona beer in glass, it’s come from the mainland.
The reason why is one of those revealing supply chain anecdotes that likely makes explanatory Youtubers like Johnny Harris turgid with excitement. Simply put, all of the US’s glass bottle manufacturing infrastructure is on the mainland. Many beers are now made in Hawaii, but the state does not make the glass bottles the beer goes in. This creates a weighty problem. Since glass is so heavy, it simply wouldn’t make financial or environmental sense to pay to ship empty glass bottles by boat to Kona HQ in Hawaii to then fill them up and ship them back to the mainland full.
Kona solved this problem by setting up satellite operations on the mainland. Their beer is bottled in these far flung outposts, and then shipped to its final destination (whether that’s Hawaii, California, or beyond) from there. So when you order a Kona beer in a bottle, no matter if you’re sitting in Kona, Seattle, Denver, or New York, it was not brewed on Hawaii. Depending where you are, it was brewed at the Widmer Brothers Brewery in Oregon, or the Redhook Ale Brewery in Washington, or Portsmouth New Hampshire. Kona Brewing has access to these mainland brewing facilities as part of their membership in the Craft Brewing Alliance with Widmer and Redhook.
To be fair, it’s not like the mainland facilities are doing their own thing and then slapping Kona’s gecko label on it. They brew Kona under the very strict recipe specifications established by the Hawaiian location, and even try to match the chemical profile of the water to the mineral-rich volcanic water that goes into the Hawaiian brews.
This strategy also isn’t unique to Kona. It’s quite common for breweries to establish a satellite location to increase distribution and also ensure that beer drunk thousands of miles away is still fresh. This is why Sierra Nevada has a brewery in North Carolina and why Lagunitas has an outpost in Chicago. To scale beer distribution alongside growing demand, you inevitably have to decentralize beer manufacturing, or else you risk a crisis in freshness, supply, or both. Say what you will about Budweiser’s taste, but it’s hard to argue it isn’t the most consistently made beer in the world, thanks in large part to strategically located brewing operations outside many major US cities that brew for that market. The drive to my small liberal arts college and my moms house both pass right by a Budweiser brewery.
For Kona, this distributed approach to brewing has been essential, as it cuts down on the miles the glass bottles have to travel and solves the puzzle that’s key to turning a microbrewery into a national name. The very reason Lauren and I felt our lanky limbs drawn to Kona Brewing in the first place is the marketshare that this savvy distribution strategy has enabled them to attain overtime. Without it, Kona would simply be much less available on the mainland, meaning fewer pilgrims like us visiting the mothership on Hawaii.
The glass bottle conundrum is a microcosm of the larger issue that Kona has faced from the beginning: what’s the right way to run and scale a brewery located in a remote tropical island chain? The very thing that makes you unique, your location, is also in direct conflict with the already headache inducing supply chain struggles of every other microbrewery. Knowing all this, what kind of crazy person would want to take on such a quixotic endeavor in the first place?
King’s cup: Kona Brewing was founded by a white guy from Oregon who also founded Kettle Chips
Kona Brewing was founded in 1994 by the father-son duo of Cameron Healy and Spoon Khalsa. It truly reads like a Portlandia sketch. Originally from Oregon, they’d fallen in love with Hawaii on a surfing trip. So they moved to the Big Island with “a vision to reflect the spirit, culture, and beauty of Hawaii in a collection of local island craft beers.” From there. Kona Brewing Company began to make a name for themselves, one batch of beer at a time.
Healy had the startup capital necessary to build a brewery on the Big Island thanks to the runaway success of first entrepreneurial venture, a natural potato chip company you may have heard of called Kettle Chips. After getting his start selling roasted nuts to natural grocery stores in 1978, he started making potato chips in 1982. His muse was allegedly a batch of homemade potato chips at a Hawaiian beach barbecue that had left him wondering why store-bought ones weren’t as crunchy.
This burning, crispy question sent Healy on a lifelong journey to perfect the potato chip. From humble beginnings in Salem Oregon, he grew Kettle chips into the largest natural potato chip brand in the US. Healy sold Kettle Chips to a British private equity firm for between $280 and $320 million in 2006.
Despite making his fortune perfecting an indisputably unhealthy and indisputably crunchy snack, Healy made several laudable contributions to the business landscape with Kettle Chips that he would later bring to brewing. The first was his insistence on quality over efficiency, which has improved the potato chip landscape for better and for always. The big difference was Healy’s choice to batch cook his chips. Most huge brands like Lays make their chips in a process called continuous fry. Continuous fry is Henry Ford’s assembly line but for chips. Chips are fed into a hot oil conveyer belt, which fries them for a set period of time, and then pulls them out to be dried and packaged. There’s always some chips starting to be fried and some finishing in the same oil. It’s efficient and creates uniform chips, but the resulting chips are thin and fragile. Healy insisted on batch cooking his chips in a kettle of oil, which results in thicker, heartier chips with a more caramelized flavor. This cooking method means the oil temperature drops every time a new batch is added, which makes them take longer, and also requires employees to stir the chips so they don’t stick together. It’s labor and time intensive, but has proven so tasty that now dozens of other potato chip brands offer chips cooked the same way. The next time you visit the snack aisle, tip your hat to Cameron Healy for giving us the dose of Vitamin-Crunch (the other Vitamin C) that’s our God-given right as Americans.
Healy’s second contribution is a zealous “Patagonia-esque” commitment to the environment. This is embodied by their headquarters in Salem Oregon. Visit this temple to crunch and you’ll spot some 600 solar panels which help power the operation. You’ll also smell that the used safflower oil from frying becomes biodiesel which powers company vehicles. You may hear some migratory birds, since the company has even bought and preserved the 2 acre wetland next to their offices and encourages employees to take breaks via nature walks. Some of their facilities are powered by wind power, and they’ve been honored with a LEED Gold award for their commitment to energy efficient buildings. On the agricultural front, they’ve added a new level of transparency to their supply chain via the “Tater Tracker.” This nifty feature lets you enter the QR code from your bag of chips to find out where the potatoes in it were grown.
These bells and whistles can be dismissed as slick marketing or praised as an earnest commitment to the environment, depending what circles you run in. Yet the cynicism that makes you want to write all this off is also evidence of how common these practices are now. Healy and Kettle chips played a role in popularizing this approach to business long before it was hip or ubiquitous. All said and done, it’s hard to argue that Kettle didn’t set a new, higher standard when it comes to making the snack food industry get more seriously committed to crispiness and having an environmental conscience.
I saw a similar commitment to the environment when I toured the Kona brewery. It’s thoroughly documented in the narrative of the tour and beautifully designed placards throughout the brewery. Like their Kettle chip crunching cousins, the Kona brewery has more solar panels than the International Space Station. They’re looking for ways to incorporate circularity into every aspect of the brewing process. Some spent grain from the brewing process ends up in the brewpubs pizza dough. Some of it is sent to feed cows on the island. What they can’t turn into pizza or feed to cows gets turned into methane producing mulch that in turn produces heat to power the brewing process. Sophisticated CO2 capture systems recover and clean over 700,000 pounds of CO2 from the brewing process each year to use in carbonating the final beer. This sounds small, but forced carbonation is a big part of brewing process and Hawaii does not manufacture its own CO2, meaning that breweries normally have to import it from the mainland. CO2 capture therefore reduces the emissions of brewing and the emissions of their overall supply chain.
Don’t let the slick placards fool you, however. While the palm-front setting may look like idyllic, the logistics of running a brewing operation on a remote tropical archipelago are incredibly demanding. Ordering more malt or hops shipped to Kona requires a six week lead time. Grain has to be stored very carefully since the islands have active populations of insects, rats, and mongooses. Not to mention the ambient humidity that makes everything spoil much faster. To make things even spicier, one Oahu-based company runs all shipping in Hawaii, so to ship a keg from the Big Island to Maui, it must first get shipped to Oahu, even though Maui is right next door.
With the supply chain question mostly figured out, and the aforementioned tropical quirks ironed out over time, the most salient problem for Healy and Kona Brewing eventually became how to create demand where most of the beer drinking population actually lives: the mainland.
The keg is kicked: When marketing spills into reality
One of the main marketing efforts that put Kona on the map was a clever campaign called “Dear Mainland.” Dreamed up by California based ad agency Duncan Shannon, “Dear Mainland” is a series of laid back sketches about learning to slow down and enjoy life that first aired in May of 2017. These sketches star “Da Braddas,” two stereotypically laid back Hawaiians played by Hawaiian actors David Bell and Blake Brutus LaBenz. Each vignette is structured as a warm-hearted letter to the mainland about how to savor the little things, with beer at the center. They’re bookended with the recognizable “dear mainland” framing device and the hopeful outro of “One life, right?” Some of my personal favorite TV spots were “how to catch a big wave” with surf legend Kelly Slater, a playful take on tailgating, or their idea of a beer bullpen phone to call in a “relief pitcher” during baseball season. This last one spoke to me since the only thing that would make watching baseball on TV palatable for me would be the presence of a pitcher of Kona beer.
This campaign solidified Kona’s strategy to aggressively and intentionally market itself as liquid Aloha. Yet to achieve the distribution necessary to get market share on the mainland, much of the brewing process had to move there, too. No amount of slick marketing can overcome the weight of economics and supply chains. In the words of Hawaiian beer expert Andy Baker. “it is generally cheaper to bring a smaller quantity of finished product to the islands than it is to import all the necessary raw materials.” This brings up an obvious but tough question that’s been brewing this whole time.
Can a beer that’s largely brewed on the mainland, that’s marketed and sold as a taste of Aloha truly be called a Hawaiian beer? This isn’t a rhetorical question either. In March of 2017, Kona Brewing Company was slapped with a class-action lawsuit regarding whether its beer was actually brewed in Hawaii or not. When it was settled, purchasers of Kona Beer between February 28, 2013, and June 14, 2019, received up to $20 each (with receipts) or $10 each (without receipts). I’ve never been sadder to have missed out on good clean, all American fun of a class action lawsuit.
How has Kona Brewing responded to this scrutiny of their Hawaiian identity? Is their pint glass half full or half empty at this point? Tellingly, they plan to try to escape the tangled web of tropical supply chains by eventually moving away from glass entirely. Moving from glass to cans may help with quality, authenticity, and the “beer miles” traveled. This is a change that, according to Forbes, “they believe raises the quality of the beer anyhow, seeing as cans let in less UV light, have less chance of air leakage, and have less of an environmental impact.”
Part of the reason they imported glass from the mainland in the first place was, ironically, to keep up with the demand for the beer on the islands. The runway success caused by their devastatingly effective marketing ended up hamstringing their supply chains for the home market. So the only way to rebalance the equation was to build more brewing capacity where things started in the first place: back in Kona. The big, shiny, new brewery Alexis, Lauren, and I toured in May of 2022 had opened to the public just months prior. This larger facility was, in part, an effort by Kona to finally be able to brew more of their beer in Hawaii.
Kona Brewing elicits strong reactions, causing loyal fandom, class action lawsuits, beer pilgrimages, and unsolicited 4,000 word essays from a blog you thought was mainly about Spikeball. There are dozens of takes on it and most of them are valid, even if they’re not 100% correct. In this way it’s a sort of a Rorschach test for beer people. You bring your baggage and biases ultimately how you react to it says as much about you as it does about the beer. For many of the sunburnt masses swarming Hawaii every day, it’s like Dave Chapelle’s Samuel Jackson beer: it’ll get you drunk. For new converts and true believers it has the unimpeachable, alluring halo of vacation vibes about it that other brands like Corona have spent millions trying to create. Jaded anti-capitalists can see Kona Brewing as yet another example of a quirky microbrewery losing its soul in order to grow, fatten up, and sell out for the right price. An intersectional analyst might observe that this dynamic of having Hawaiian culture erased so that white settlers can export a valuable commodity out of Hawaii and then import it back into the islands as a “taste of paradise” all for the financial benefit of privileged foreigners is a clearly offensive form of neocolonialism that’s sadly older than Hawaiian statehood. This last point could likely be its own essay but smarter, more qualified minds than mine have written about the nightmarish miscarriage of constitutional law that was Hawaiian annexation better than I ever could.
The ice cold truth is likely this: if Kona Beer is one you enjoy, you likely don’t care where exactly the batch you’re drinking was brewed. Ask most drinkers, and the top criteria for what they drink will be taste or ice cold temperature if you accidentally asked the Coors marketing team. Where a beer is from simply doesn’t matter to many people, even in today’s self-conscious and globalized world. For whatever reason, the concept of “beer miles” just hasn’t caught on the same way “food miles” has in environmental circles. Even the zealous environmentalists I know still drink imported beer, despite there being a more local “beer shed” they could likely be sourcing from. Ironically those that care most about beer miles are’t the climate change activists, but the beer snobs since they can taste when a beer has spent too many weeks languishing in trucks, shelves, and fridges. Beer connoisseurs like these are also the least likely to drink a mass-distributed beer from far away out of a bottle anyway, likely filling up a growler or two at their local micro or nano brewery. I honestly wonder if the people for whom Kona not being truly Hawaiian was a deal breaker were ever that into it in the first place.
For all of the ink spilled over the authenticity of their products, it’s hard to argue they haven’t invested a lot in brewing in the state of Hawaii. Even if all of it can’t be brewed there for logistics reasons, a lot of it still is, and they seem to be taking an active interest in prioritizing Hawaiian-brewed beer. The Kona I tasted on tap on the Big Island tasted great. If you can go to the source and try it, you should do it and draw your own conclusions on how much the providence of a beer matters.
Nightcap: Where are they now?
The Craft Brewing Alliance, the group of craft breweries who helped Kona establish a foothold on the mainland, was bought by Amheuser-Busch, the massive conglomerate that owns Budweiser along with beers like Shock Top, Rolling Rock, Goose Island, and many more.
Kona Brewing Company was sold to PV Brewing partners, a private equity company, in part to retain some autonomy from the beverage hydra that is Amheuser Busch. Rather than be being gobbled whole by the same big fish that ate the Mexican Grupo Modelo beers like Corona and Pacifico, Kona broke away from AB to chart a different course. Amheuser-Busch retains the rights to Kona Brewing outside of Hawaii, while within Hawaii, it’s the domain of PV Brewing Partners. This transaction raised some eyebrows in the beer world and resulted in an an unsuccessful anti-trust investigation by the DOJ. PV claims this purchase gives Kona the leeway to focus on brewing and distributing beer for the Hawaiian market once again.
Kettle Chips is now owned by Campbells soup. Their black truffle flavor is particularly tasty.
Alexis put up with many unsolicited monologues about beer marketing before the creation of this blog. She started a new environmental consulting job and business school shortly after returning from this trip, and bought a commemorative poster to memorialize their nocturnal swim with the manta rays.
Lauren did not meet up with the sexy scuba instructor, though she did go scuba diving and met up with an enviable variety of sea life. Shortly after returning home she began dating a great woman on her ultimate frisbee team. She reunited with Reilly and Alexis to watch the final Twilight film at her apartment in San Francisco. Big Wave was served.
Reilly did indeed visit “Da Shark Shack” later in the trip. They introduced him to the best shark-themed cocktail he’s had to date, a marriage of rum and blue-curacao called “The Shark Attack,” with a splash of grenadine in the ice to look like blood. He also posted his first ever Instagram Reel in a futile attempt to capture the majesty of seeing a volcano at night.
Humpy’s was visited right before going to the airport to fly home. The service was terrible but the beer and people watching were unforgettable.
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