SS Guest Post: Jamie Russo (1/3/21)
Hey Friends,
Happy New Year to all of you! There’s nothing quite like the unfiltered optimism that comes with a new year, and I think 2021 is that feeling to the max. I hope you all feel a fresh injection of hope as we roll ahead.
This week we have another guest post before we get back into the regular content of the newsletter.
You’re going to hear from Jamie Russo, author of the newsletter Goodnote, as well as the recent Amazon bestseller The Underdog Paradox. Jamie is a fantastic writer and has enthusiasm and positivity that spreads to everyone around him. Goodnote is a weekly newsletter that focuses on business as a force for good. Each week, Jamie spotlights a different company and what they’re doing to make a positive impact with the brand they’ve created.
Please enjoy Jamie’s recent piece on Kona Brewing Company.
Hawaii is an island of extremes—the dry deserts of Kaʻū and the lush forests of Kohala, the soaring cliffs of Hamakua and sandy beaches, the snow-capped peak of Maunakea, and the raging volcanic fires of Kilauea. These diverse landscapes are parts of ancient legends. The locals will tell you that gods and island spirits designed these shapes.
Poliahu, the goddess of snow, held her domain atop Maunakea. She embraced clouds and mist, wore a mantle of snow, and fed the streams of the fertile landscape below. The Hamakua Coast on the eastern flank of Maunakea was her playground. She would slide down the mountain on a wooden sled at great speed and launch into the ocean.
One day, another goddess named Pele, challenged Poliahu to a race down the mountain. Pele was the goddess of volcanic fire and she often traveled across the islands looking for a suitable place to live and play. Poliahu welcomed the challenge and the two climbed atop the mountain before rushing down towards the sea.
The race was neck and neck before Poliahu took the lead. Frustrated, Pele summoned her great volcanic forces and fountains of fire erupted from the volcanic summit. The entire island quaked as an epic battle raged on. Pele sent steam and molten lava down the side of Maunakea, while Poliahi called on snow.
Today, the landscapes formed by Pele and Poliahu’s battle are seen along the Hamakua coast: the soaring cliffs, the jagged shoreline, and the jutting peninsula of Laupahoehoe. From each act, we can generate a form of beauty.
E hele me ka pu’olo.
In 1927, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company published a small booklet written by Marion Mason Hale entitled The Kingdom that Grew Out of a Little Boy’s Garden, which tells the story of a boy from Maine who sowed the seeds that “blossomed into one of the most romantic stories ever known.”
James Dole founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in 1901. Over the next 56 years, he built it into the world’s largest fruit cannery. Key to his success was the canning of pineapple, as it enabled the fruit to survive the long voyage to markets in the eastern United States.
In those early years, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company produced 45,000 cans per season, which climbed to nearly 5 million cans of fruit and juice per day by 1957. This massive growth earned Dole the title of “The King of Pineapple.” But the depiction of Dole as a twentieth-century American success story obscures a deeper history of violence and imperialism.
Missionaries, like Dole’s grandfather, had a significant impact on Hawaii as they imposed western notions of land and property. These efforts resulted in a massive land grab from the Hawaiian people as stolen land was sold to Anglo-American business people and investors.
An influx of foreign business transformed not only the Hawaiian landscape but also the economy and demography of the islands. The production of sugar began as a small enterprise alongside a variety of export crops, but the U.S. increasingly came to depend on it during the Civil War.
To keep up with labor demands, workers were recruited from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Portugal. As a result, a plantation system developed, in which workers were often trapped into cycles of debt.
After WWII, the pineapple industry began to shift to places like the Philippines and Thailand, and Hawaii lost its market superiority. Between 1950 and 1960, the Hawaiian pineapple industry's annual growth rate stagnated at about 1.6 percent, while the growth rate of tourism increased to 18.4 percent.
By the 1980s, canned pineapple dropped in market value, causing the company to return to the sale of fresh pineapple in local markets. In 1989, just two years before the closure of the last Dole cannery in Honolulu, the plantation opened its doors to the public as the “Hawaii’s Complete Pineapple Experience.” Today, it is the second most visited attraction on Oahu. It’s a museum of sorts, an ode to pineapple, that fails to depict the true story of what happened.
Destruction, displacement, and the dismemberment of Hawaiian values and traditions. Not very Malama 'Aina.
Today, local businesses in Hawaii work hard to make a difference.
With the ocean as their office, Hawaiian Paddle Sports takes great pride in caring for Maui’s environment, community, and island culture. Since its inception in 2010, they’ve encouraged visitors to love and protect Hawaii’s beaches, oceans, and waves. Each tour at Hawaii Paddle Sports starts with a beach cleanup. They teach others to leave the beach cleaner than they found it. Not only is Hawaiian Paddle Sports a Certified B-Corp, but they’re also a member of 1% for the Planet alongside Patagonia’s stewardship.
At Skyline Hawaii, the team is conservationists at heart. Since 2002, they have planted over 8,000 native trees, hosted hundreds of community reforestation and ocean cleanup events, and given over $1.7 million to environmental and community nonprofits. Since 2006, Skyline Hawaii has been a carbon-neutral company, working with carbonfund.org to reduce and offset their carbon footprint. Skyline uses solar panels at their corporate office and electric vehicles for their tours.
For Kona Brewing Company, green beer has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day. The 25-year-old craft beer outpost—beloved nationwide for its crisp, easy-drinking Longboard Island Lager and equal parts floral and crushable Big Wave Golden Ale—has maintained a commitment to progressive environmentalism since day one. It’s tough to ignore Mother Nature in a state so prized for its breathtaking, remote, and unpredictable natural landscape.
Living in harmony with the earth is essential to the “way of aloha.”
Sipping a light, refreshing Big Wave Golden Ale on the lanai at Kona Brewing Company, overlooking the Koko Marina on Oʻahu, it is hard not to feel like you are in paradise. Meanwhile, on Hawaii Island, the brewery is busy building a new 30,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Kailua-Kona, a short walk from their original location built 21 years ago.
Kona Brewing Company enlisted local and national engineers that are experts in building breweries to pull off their ambitious vision. Building anything on Hawaii already comes with its own set of challenges. Add to that a pandemic and it is nearly impossible due to travel restrictions.
Challenges aside, the team is focused on one goal: to build the largest brewery in Hawaii as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible.
Kona Brewing Company, which has already dramatically reduced its carbon footprint in their mainland operations, will start canning beer in Hawaii to eliminate shipping for the first time since they opened. Their new technology will reduce water usage, increase renewable energy, and generate their own CO2.
Kona Brewing Company, founded in 1994, was first to the craft beer scene in Hawaii.
Founders Cameron Healy and Spoon Khalsa, a father and son team from Oregon, moved to Kailua-Kona after falling in love with the island during a surfing trip. Khalsa noticed a lack of breweries and had the idea that craft beer should reflect the spirit, culture, and beauty of Hawaii.
Today, Khasla applies Hawaiian values and traditions like Malama 'Aina in four ways at Kona:
1. Reduced CO2 Emissions: Beer brewed in Hawaiʻi for Hawaiʻi
The new brewery will have the capacity to brew 200,000 kegs per year, eight times the amount of their former Hawaii brewery, and every drop will stay in Hawaii. All beer brewed and bottled on the mainland will stay on the mainland. The brewery is most proud of its new canning line, which means they can now purchase cans manufactured right in Hawaii. Since there are no glass bottles manufactured in Hawaii, Kona will switch entirely to cans.
2. Reduced Water Usage
The Kona Resource Recovery Center will allow the Kona to treat all effluent water themselves instead of it going into the sewer. Run-off water will be filtered through a bioswale, which will water their landscaping while treating the water so that it can be used for washing floors, kegs, and delivery trucks. By doing this, 50 percent of the water they use annually will no longer come from the city.
3. Renewable Energy
The entire roof will be covered in solar panels to power the brewery. Additional power will come from the beer-making process itself. After the brewers run hot water through malted barley to extract sugars, they are left with a mass of husks and other barley materials called spent grain. Some of the spent grain goes to local cattle ranchers for feed, while others will be used in the pub’s pizza dough. The remaining will be turned into mulch and the methane generated from that mulch will be captured through heat that can be reused in the brewing process through a renewable energy loop.
4. CO2 Reclamation
The new brewery will be CO2-independent, which is crucial because CO2 is not manufactured in Hawaii. CO2, which is responsible for making beer fizzy, is also a byproduct of the brewing process. Kona will capture CO2 before it enters the atmosphere and put it into tanks for propelling draft beer. Any surplus will be shared with neighbors.
Small, limited runs of beer highlight seasonal ingredients brewed and sold exclusively in the islands. Local pineapple, cacao, coffee, lychee, vanilla, lavender, and wild jaboticaba have all been showcased in Kona’s “backyard batches.” Kona’s #2 local bestseller, Gold Cliff IPA, expertly balances bitter hops with sweet pineapple.
The native Hawaiian people practice the value of Malama 'Aina as part of everyday life. While some try to destroy it, those close to Hawaii’s precious land work hard to preserve it. No matter where we are on earth—from Brooklyn to Maui—I hope we all practice Malama 'Aina.
Let’s leave this place better than we find it.