#Onomeatea

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Tea in Hawaii: The Most Beautiful Tea Garden I’ve Ever Visited

I’ve been wanting to share this special trip and tea encounter for a while and so happy to finally do it. Not only did we get to experience the unique natural beauty of Onomea Tea gardens, but we learned about the history of tea growing in Hawaii, and about low-elevation tea growing.

A couple of years ago, after the KCRW Good Food segment I did on Chinese and Japanese green teas, I got an email from the tea growers of Onomea Tea on Big Island Hawaii who heard the segment and reached out.

I had learned about tea grown in Hawaii earlier with great interest but now with a specific tea grower in mind, the idea of visiting Hawaii lingered more heavily in my travel daydreams.

Fast forward three years, and Tony and I were actually in Hawaii and made our way to Big Island. We got back in touch with Rob, and were pulling up to a beautiful growing estate on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean when I started seeing some those familiar tea plants, camellia sinensis, we’ve been encountering in all our tea travels around the world.

We were welcomed warmly at Onomea Tea by the proprietors Rob and Mike who have been growing tea in this spot since 2002. Rob provided a great introduction to the grounds with lots of knowledge about not only growing the tea plant in this specific terroir, but the surrounding biodiversity of both native and non-native plants.

Not only did we get to learn about the indigenous Ohia Plant and the Nalpaka Plant, he regaled us with the traditional folk tales that accompanied each plant. Like the tea plant, these plants have become more than a plant but intertwined in history, culture, storytelling, meaning, and illuminating vehicles for understanding a society’s values.

Big Island is, as the name suggests, the biggest island on the right

History of Tea Growing in Big Island

The rich volcanic soil, steady rainfall, and tropical climate of the Big Island has been a rich growing environment for a wide range of agriculture. The current crops most associated with Big Island nowadays are coffee (Kona Coffee) and macadamia nuts, but in the past, Big Island was a big cane sugar producer like other Hawaiian islands.

Cane sugar and pineapple farming in the past and for the majority of coffee grown today on the Big Island, are grown as large scale plantations selling the items as commodity crops.

Photo Source

Commodity crops mean the crop is typically grown with a focus on volume and speed, easily traded and stored for a long time, and grown specifically for the purpose of sale on the commodities market (as opposed to direct consumption or processing).

Since the Big Island’s climate is ideal for tea growing and there has been much success with other commodity crops, various industrialists have toyed with the idea of tea growing on the Big Island since the 19th century but abandoned it for a few key reasons.

Tea pickers in 1890 Sri Lankan Tea Plantation (Photo Source)

Coffee was cheaper to plant and could be harvested on a shorter timeline, and commodity tea production was already more competitive in Sri Lanka, India, and East Africa.

The majority of tea grown in China, Japan, and Taiwan is not as a commodity, but a specialty artisanal food product.

Tea growing on the Big Island started gaining traction in the last 20 years, however, only when it was re-visited no longer as a commodity large scale crop, but as a small batch specialty artisanal crop similar to how tea is grown in China, Japan, and Taiwan.

With sugar plantations no longer operating on the Big Island, government institutions were hoping to help stimulate the agricultural sector with a new industry. The USDA and University of Hawaii researchers made the tea plant available to anyone willing to experiment with tea production in a move to promote tea growing on the Big Island.

Rob and Mike saw an ad in the newspaper about the University of Hawai'i College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources tea research project giving away tea seedlings and were intrigued.

1.5 acre of tea plants and 15 years later, we were all enjoying the tea that resulted from this intrigue and the various historical factors that brought a tea plant into their hands.

Low-Elevation Growing

As a small specialty tea grower, Onomea Tea operates on a scale similar to many of the small family farms Tranquil Tuesdays works with for our tea collection: picking by hand and carefully crafting the leaves into finished tea in very small batches.

Watching the process Rob and Mike use to craft their teas was so familiar and reminiscent of our many tea travels in China.

One distinctive feature of Onomea’s tea growing process is that they are growing tea plants at sea level. Usually, teas are grown at higher elevation (at least 1500 feet or higher) and often on terraced hillsides. Usually, the higher the elevation the tea is grown at, the more prized the tea.

I took this photo while traveling through the high elevation tea mountains of Taiwan.

Higher elevations are preferred for tea growing for a number of reasons. At higher elevation the plants get more mist and fog creating a humid environment for the plant. More temperature variations and less oxygen at higher elevations also create more stress for the plant which affects the flavor. And lastly, plants take longer to grow at higher elevations which help the flavors develop more slowly in the leaf.

One thing I did notice though in their tea gardens that seemed unique to the locale, was how the tea plant was growing in a similar shape as one of the indigenous trees we saw around the island: the same broad round canopy:

Onomea Tea has found success creating a distinctive flavor in their teas grown at sea level, however, and no doubt the unique terroir of a volcanic soil overlooking the ocean and how the tea plant has adapted to this environment is a big part of that.

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