Kevin's Farm-Distillery

Yup- I'm on the Big Island. I've got 20 acres near Mountain View in Puna. I'm just starting and learning to grow bananas, but hope to expand into a few acres, rather than a few plants. The plan is to open a craft-distillery where the bananas will be turned into a vodka and locally flavored appeterifs and the figs will go into both a vodka and a brandy. It'll be the first craft-distillery on the island and one of the few farm operated distilleries, which will guarantee a quality, local, and organic product.

I just got done doing a master-class on brandy this weekend in South Africa, where there is a strong tradition of orchard distilleries kept alive; something we lost with prohibition in the US. I'm hoping to bring that back to Hawaii by training local hobby farmers in the practice, but allowing them to do it on my premises and pay the excise tax.