Maui Pineapple Tours: Maui Gold and Haliimaile Distilling Company
883 Haliimaile Rd Makawao, Maui, HI 96768
808-665-5491
I’ve done the pineapple tour with this company now 3 times. Each time has been very different and I still would do this tour again in the future. It was a must do when we decided we were going to Maui. The tour has add on options. One add on is lunch at the General Store, which is actually a restaurant now. My family and I have done this option in the past and it was a neat experience and the food was good. The second add on, which is newer, is to the distillery that was built to capture the overripe pineapples and use them to create different types of liquor, which I truly appreciate since there’s always new ways to minimize waste and create something new.
We arrived at the location of the tour, which was a warehouse across from the General Store. Previously the tour started on a plantation house up the road a ways, so I was surprised to pull into the warehouse that was previously used for another purpose. After my initial confusion, we parked and signed in, grabbed our bus number, piled onto the buses, and we were off.
Tim was our excellent tour guide and he drove us out to their fields which is around 800 acres now. The tour is very informative and I won’t spoil everything here, but I will share some fun details. The fields here are all hand planted and the crew is very small. The planters are considered the top of the pyramid for their work crew and is coveted job. Very neat to see that it is still a smaller operation and majority of the work is done by hand with the help of some machines.
We were able to see multiple stages of the planting process on our tour this time: ground prep, slipping, freshly planted crop, multiple ages of the crop, and finally a crew picking the pineapples that were ready for consuming. It was quite a process. Slipping is when they take the slips, or additional tips growing on the peduncle with the pineapple, vs the crowns and use a truck to spray them out into the prepped fields. They dry out here and then are planted by hand. There are generation 1, 2, and even 3rd generations of pineapples. Each generation is a little bit smaller and sweeter.
The unique part of these Maui Gold pineapples is that they are 90% sugar and 10% acidity. If you try this fresh pineapple, you’ll be ruined. I had my first exposure over a decade ago and I have never forgotten the taste difference between Maui Gold pineapples and what you may find in the local supermarket on the mainland. My dad doesn’t like pineapple, but he’ll eat pineapple here, every time, and quite a bit of it.
Once we arrived at the field that was being harvested, we parked and exited the bus. This is the best part of the tour besides seeing the entire operation work, it was the taste testing part of the tour. In previous tours they’d harvest the fruit directly from the field and you’d be able to learn how to harvest a pineapple at the perfect ripeness vs a slightly riper or underripe pineapple. Now they bring pineapples that were harvested that morning and had been tagged already. The answer provided for the switch wasn’t entirely clear, but the pineapples were still delicious and were said to have been picked that morning. We were able to try several parts of the pineapple as different parts of the pineapple have different levels of sweetness. Usually the bottom portion of the pineapple is the sweetest part. Spears of pineapple vs the side cuts, provide both top and bottom parts and are a good way to tell the difference in sweetness.
As we finished up our pineapple, our tour guide provided us a song and ukulele performance. It was pretty entertaining and as he wrapped up his performance the workers who were picking the pineapples got back to work and we got to watch that process as well. We loaded up the bus and drove back through the fields and as we drove back, our tour guide was informing us of how the company has scaled back over the years and the different parts of operations that have been developed or changed due to the changes in the business.
When we got back to the warehouse, the neighboring warehouse was where the distillery was housed and where our next tour would take place. As our group was led into the distillery the fans and machines were fairly loud. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear hardly anything our tour guide said. I did get some pretty neat pictures of the process. What I gathered was they wanted to prevent further waste of the pineapples that were overripe so they tried to create different types of alcohol from it. After a long time and many failed attempts with their vodka process, since they weren’t using grains, the individual who created the recipe named it Pau, which means finished or done in Hawaiian. For their line of alcohols they ended up with vodka, a spiced rum, gin, a whiskey blend (they imported a 3 year old whiskey as their base), and some flavored vodkas.
We went into the tasting room to finish the tour and it was interesting to hear the story of the inception of the distillery. They had a table lined out that showed all of the spices that went into their gin as it was quite intense. Their rum was a spiced sweet rum due to the pineapple and they didn’t want to be like a rum you could buy off the shelf at the local super market. It would seem that they’re still trying to find their market as several of the options are being discontinued and they’re product line is small but unique.
The history and interesting facts of both the Maui Gold company and the Haliimaile distilling company are both interesting and fun to learn about. I would absolutely go on the pineapple tour over and over again. The distillery tour I would need a much louder and stronger guide to be convinced to do that one again. It was a great morning spent enjoying some local and fresh products while also learning more about Maui and some of the companies that call it home.
