Medium Roasted

RIPE CHERRY, BRIGHT TANGY ACIDITY

Aloha Kona Coffee’s Extra Fancy Beans are the cream of the crop of coffee beans – Extra Fancy is the highest grade of Kona coffee with the largest beans with the highest moisture content. Their coffee beans are handpicked with a slow ripening process allows the beans to absorb more nutrients from the trees, resulting in significant bean size and flavor.

William Jameison grew up in Rhinebeck, and worked much of his life in restaurants: first in Rhinebeck and Kingston, and later down in Florida. 

He and his wife, Alexandria, met while opening the Flying Fish Café, a restaurant in Walt Disney World. They married, had two kids, and lived for a decade-and-a-half in Florida, before moving back to the Hudson Valley about 10 years ago. William now manages Rhinebeck Wine & Liquor, while Alexandria works as a teacher with immigrant and refugee children in the Albany area.

The couple had purchased their morning cup o’ joe from JB Peel, a long running, small batch coffee company in Red Hook (favorite brews: Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and the Tivoli Roast). So when Alexandria noticed a tiny for-sale flier last winter in the store, the Jameisons reached out. 

Owner, roaster, and proprietor Gil Klein, it turned out, was very sick, and in the last stages of a battle with cancer. Klein, a roaster and flavored-tea maker in California, had founded the company in 1989 with its namesake, Jeremy Peel, a Kenyan-born Englishman who had grown up on a coffee plantation and who wanted to move into full-time roasting. Peel passed away in 1991, leaving Klein to develop and grow the business into what it is today, making custom blends for local restaurants and generally pioneering house-roasted coffee at a time when such things were not terribly common on the east coast.