Liquor Commission Secrets: Has Kamehameha Schools entered the marijuana business?
by Andrew Walden
Does the Chair of the Honolulu Liquor Commission have an undisclosed interest in the Hilo-based ‘Ola Brew’ distillery?
If he does, then Kamehameha Schools is secretly involved in a marijuana dispensary.
Chairman Jeff Hong did not respond to our request for comment on the distillery-related allegations contained within an August 5, 2026, complaint filed with the Liquor Commission by Honolulu resident Rob Sobieralski.
Akamai readers may remember long-running conflicts with Liquor Commission enforcement eventually led Sobieralski’s Chinatown club ‘Scarlet’ to sue, leading to a 2025 Federal Court settlement. More recently, another Federal lawsuit challenges the Liquor Commission’s failure to comply with the terms of that settlement.
Involvement in a liquor business would create an obvious conflict of interest for any Liquor Commissioner.
Hong openly identifies himself as Board Chairman of ‘Hawaiian Ethos,’ a licensed marijuana dispensary on the Big Island, which, according to its website, also sells products via Oahu-based dispensaries.
Sobieralski alleges, “Ola Brew and Hawaiian Ethos have functioned as one venture from the beginning, not two companies that happen to share personnel.”
KSBE owns the land under numerous of Oahu’s notorious ‘hostess bars’ and therefore has an interest in avoiding any shutdown of these bars by the Honolulu Liquor Commission.
Kamehameha Schools’ part-ownership of Ola Brew is not easy to find, but it is public record.
Ola Brew’s annual reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that the ‘Trustees of the Estate of Bernice Pauahi Bishop’ hold a significant equity stake in Hawaiian Ola Brewing Corporation, aka “Ola Brew”, a state-licensed liquor distillery producing and selling alcoholic beverages including the revitalized historic Hawaiian “ʻōkolehao” moonshine.
Ola Brew SEC form C-AR filings (SEC EDGAR, CIK 0001674519), including the FY2024/2025 annual report, list Bishop Estate holding 333,333 shares of Ola Brew Preferred Series B stock — 39.8% of that share class. These reflect an investment of $1M at the ‘Series B’ price of $3.00 per share. The Series B round closed April 10, 2022, after selling 836,001 shares for $2,508,003. This information is disclosed only in Ola Brew's own SEC Form C-AR crowdfunding annual reports. It does not appear in the Bishop Estate's Form 990, and no independent SEC filing exists from KSBE. The investment appears likely to have been made through the Estate's $10 million ‘Food Systems Fund’, established in 2021. Ola Brew leases Kamehameha Schools-owned agricultural land at Paukaʻa for a ti-root farm supplying ʻōkolehao brew stock.
Where is all that KSBE trust money going? In 2022, Ola Brew paid $7M for the 12,000 sq foot C Brewer House on Hilo Bay.
Meanwhile, according to Sobieralski’s complaint, Chairperson Hong was a Director of ‘La‘au Pono Inc.’ a ‘grow-op’ entity which was merged into Hawaiian Ethos. Laau Pono, and by extension Hawaiian Ethos, is subject to two federal tax liens due to unremitted employment tax withheld from its own agricultural workers' paychecks for federal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare, totaling approximately $132,110.
Sobieralski’s complaint explains:
…Ventures operating this close to an unclear statutory line do not get the line moved in their favor on the strength of their business plans alone — they need someone with the political skill to make that happen, and the insider's knowledge of exactly how far Hawai‘i's statutes can be pushed. … Petitioner found no record of a registered lobbyist for either Ola Brew or Hawaiian Ethos. What these companies have cultivated instead is a relationship with a known insider: Chairperson Hong. And this is not a new role for him — the record shows the same pattern predates both ventures. Each new venture in his history is paired with a title — official or quasi-official — that lends it institutional weight.
In 2012, he founded Techmana LLC and was elected to the ACLU National Board of Directors, the first person from Hawai‘i to serve in that role, a seat he held for over a decade. In 2015, he helped lead a lobbying effort that produced Act 158, exempting Hawai‘i technology workers from non-compete enforcement — clearing the way for Techmana to hire the talent it needed to grow, talent that competitors' non-competes had otherwise kept locked in place; a national outlet later named him as one of the effort's leaders. The dual-identity habit was already well established by 2022: a September 22, 2022 news report on his HLC nomination described him, in the same breath, as both a “lay leader” of the ACLU's 13-person National Board Executive Committee and a board member of a Hawai‘i Island medical cannabis dispensary.
Between 2021 and 2022 — the same period he was nominated to and confirmed on this Commission — he became a Series A investor and board member of La‘au Pono, a Hawai‘i Island medical cannabis dispensary. Following its December 2022 merger into Hawaiian Ethos LLC, he became that company's Founding Board Chair in 2023, the same year he chaired the coalition formed to repeal Hawai‘i's constitutional same-sex marriage ban. By 2024, he was personally testifying before the state legislature — on the same dual-identity basis reflected throughout this pattern — in support of cannabis legislation benefiting Hawaiian Ethos, and by 2026, in support of brewpub legislation benefiting Ola Brew — a liquor manufacturer with an unknown owner — submitted on this Commission's own letterhead.
That same year, the Hawaiian Ethos role Chairperson Hong had reported to the Honolulu Ethics Commission for three consecutive years — most recently as its "Board Chair" — disappeared from his sworn financial disclosure, and it has not reappeared since (see Paragraphs 27a–27b, Exhibit 38)…. (pg3)
C. Chairperson Hong's Legislative Advocacy — Serving His Outside Business Interests
15. Chairperson Hong’s advocacy for expanded liquor-commission authority touching cannabis and hemp did not begin in 2026. On March 28, 2024, testifying before the House Committee on Finance on SB2461 SD2 HD1 (subsequently enacted as Act 204, SLH 2024, “Relating to Medical Cannabis”), Chairperson Hong identified himself as “the Board Chair of Hawaiian Ethos, a medical cannabis licensee on Hawai‘i Island” and, in the same breath, “the Chair of the Honolulu Liquor Commission,” testifying “in a personal capacity” in support of the bill’s cross-dispensary sales provisions. …
16. Less than a year later, on February 11, 2025, Chairperson Hong submitted written testimony … to the Senate Committees on Commerce and Consumer Protection and on Health and Human Services in support of SB1064, again identifying himself as “Board Chair of Hawaiian Ethos” and “Chair of the Honolulu Liquor Commission,” testifying “only in a personal capacity.” The same contradiction repeats here, more explicitly. Immediately after disclaiming personal capacity, Chairperson Hong told the committees, “as Chair of the Honolulu Liquor Commission, I have heard complaints of the sale of intoxicating cannabis products at places that sell alcohol” — citing information he obtained through his official Commission role as the factual basis for legislation expanding that same role’s jurisdiction, in the same breath he claimed to speak only for himself. That testimony proposed amending HRS §281-17 to grant County Liquor Investigators express authority “to investigate violators of hemp and cannabis laws that serve liquor” — an expansion of the Commission’s own jurisdiction into the regulatory space adjacent to Chairperson Hong’s Hawaiian Ethos and Ola Brew connected interests (see Exhibit 26)….2
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BACKGROUND:
PDF: complaint
2017: Rail Stations Designed to Profit KSBE, HECO, First Hawaiian
2021: One Year After $4M Insider Cacao Loss--KS to 'Invest' in More Food-Related Schemes
2023: Donna Kim’s Ex-Husband Tangles with Gay Nightclub, Gets Media Attention
2026: Dope in Vending Machines? Complaint Alleges Honolulu Liquor Commission Does Nothing to Shut Down ‘ballsiest drug op in recent memory’
2026: Kakaako Shooting is Latest Problem at Multi-Violation Club on HART Property