Book excerpt: Kona is one of the world's premium coffees. Given its small-scale cultivation on family farms, however, it has been especially susceptible to price swings and market gluts. A Cup of Aloha is a heartfelt portrait of the farmers, millers, landowners, merchants, and laborers who struggled to keep themselves and their industry alive. The author traces coffee's history in Hawaii--from its arrival in 1828 to Kona's position in today's highly competitive specialty coffee market. Through the author's use of oral history interviews, readers will experience day-to-day life on a coffee farm and the challenges, natural and man-made, that inspired innovations and adaptations to the agricultural, economic, and social life in the Kona Coffee Belt.