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Steve Benitez, chief operating officer of the Philippine coffee shop chain Bo’s Coffee.
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Philippine Gourmet Farms Display.
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Coffee grower Jennifer Rimando has received much higher premiums for her Arabica beans after today helps other growers in the Sagada region with advice on how to improve agriculture practices.
Coffee production in the Philippines goes back an extraordinary 280 years. But started out as a story of many new small growers in the mid-1800s evolved into one of the most exciting coffee origins in the world. What this Southeast Asian today lacks in total production numbers, it makes up for in a unique profile: Philippines is the only country in the world that is home to all four main Coffea species and at the same time holds the position as the second largest consumer in Asia.
Trekking along a narrow muddy dirt road that becomes increasingly slippery as the light drizzle turns into full blown tropical rain, new, young, and bright green arabica plants start to emerge here deep in the mountains of the Sagada highlands, the northernmost coffee region of the Philippines located on the main island of Luzon. Arriving at the final destination after the slow final two kilometer journey by foot, coffee grower Jennifer Rimando greets visitors with a freshly brewed cup of coffee from her small Ola Organic Coffee Farm located just outside the tiny mountain village of Aguid in Sagada in the heart of the Philippines’ ethnic mountain province, home to the Igorot tribe’s long history of rich culture and traditions.
Rimando’s many years dedicated to learning how to improve agricultural practices and improve quality is paying off, as visitors are rewarded with an outstanding cup based on Mundo Novo and Bourbon beans which grow at 1,800 meters altitude and under heavy shade producing an elegant cup profile with a balanced acidity and flavors of chocolate and nuts and a touch of sweet wild orange. Farmers here like Rimando are tiny and it’s a constant struggle to earn a living from growing coffee, but the increasing attention to the top-quality beans starting to emerge from regions like Sagada help her and others to get a better price.
“In the lowlands in the Philippines the coffee growers talk about hectares, but here high up in the mountains we talk about the number of trees,” Rimando told STiR coffee and tea during a visit to this remote region. Although she has been around coffee her whole life, it was first when she started taking over her 75-year-old grandfather’s farm that she started looking at farming practices, yields, and quality issues. She got particularly excited to learn that most of the varieties cultivated here are old heirloom varieties including Typica, Mundo Novo, and Bourbon.
“Most of the people here only have tiny parcels of land, some as small as 50 square meters,” said Rimando. “I have one hectare of land of my own and a total of 850 coffee trees but even if it’s small, the altitude of region here together with the varieties help us produce very good quality coffee.”
Sagada is one of the coffee regions in the Philippines that recently is making its mark on the world map as a new exciting source of single origin beans, all going back about a little over 15 years when the Philippine Coffee Board (PCB) first started working on a dedicated program to improve the quality of the coffee produced here. In addition to arabica, the Coffea species of Canephora (robusta is the name of a variety) as well as commercial volumes of Liberica and Excelsa coffee is grown across islands from Luzon in the north which is home to regions including Sagada, Benguet and Atok, Cebu island in the middle and all the way to the southern island of Mindanao. Liberica and Excelsa beans, known as “barako coffee” in native Filipino, are primarily grown in the provinces of Batangas south of the capital Manilas.
“Sagada mountain coffee has become very popular because it’s very well rounded and has a very nice and balanced acidity and a lot of different flavor profiles, but it’s actually only one of the many great coffees we today are able to offer consumers in our cafes across the Philippines,” said Steve Benitez, Chief Operating Officer of the Philippine coffee shop chain Bo’s Coffee, which since first opening its doors to coffee lovers in 1996 has grown to become one of the biggest café brands with over 100 shops across the country today.
“I already started getting interested in the coffee business as a law student when I had to drink a lot of coffee to be able to stay awake to study, but when the international coffee chains started to come to the Philippines I got the idea that I could differentiate a brand by focusing on the coffees of the Philippines and add a local detail to blend with the business,” Benitez told STiR in an interview, showing how Bo’s Coffee incorporated a number of ethnic tribal textiles from Sagada into different parts of the products, from the coffee bags to other artisanal craft work.
The rise of quality beans equal to the top grades found in specialty markets across the world provides the highly diverse coffee growing regions of the Philippines with a new exciting market for customers in the local market. At the upscale restaurant and food store Gourmet Farms, Inc., located about one hour’s drive south of Manila an impressive section of single origin beans from across the native coffee lands showcase not just the impressive number of different flavor profiles based on variety, but include samples of all four different Coffea species grown in the Philippines along with specialty selections such as robusta peaberry, wild civet coffee, and women-grown coffee.
Initially founded by coffee exporter Ernest Escaler one of the key visions for Gourmet Farms was to give the Philippine coffee growers a voice of their own and show the local population that despite its booming demand based mostly on soluble coffee locally produced that brewed beans were far superior in flavor, said Len Reyes, head of the company’s coffee division.
“All the way through the 1980s there really wasn’t much appreciation for roast and ground coffee in the Philippines and the market was dominated by instant coffee made from imported beans, but Escaler really wanted to find a way to help the farmers who produced coffee as their main crop and that’s why he wanted to go into roast and ground coffee,” Reyes told STiR coffee and tea.
From production of over 1.0 million 60-kilo- gram bags in the early 1990s, the impact of grow- ing industrialization and low prices started taking a toll. By the late 1990s the Philippine coffee crop started to shrink, first to 622,000 bags in the 19992000 cycle, and then to all-time lows of just about 200,000 bags in the years following the 2009-2010 global financial crisis, historical data from the International Coffee Organization shows.
In recent years production slowly climbed back to between 450,000-475,000 bags, up from just 300,000 bags five years ago, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), but it’s the figures for consumption that provides one of the most surprising insights to the Philippine coffee industry with consumption solid at between 6.2-6.5 million bags a year, USDA figures show.
In the early years of the Philippine coffee boom and well before even Starbucks opened its first store in Manila, local entrepreneur Pacita Juan founded the Figaro Coffee Company in 1993 and by mid2006 Figaro grew to 53 outlets, mostly within the capital area before expanding the small empire of the popular Asian coffee shops to markets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Papua New Guinea.
“More than anything I wanted to help the farmers to earn better returns for their crop and I got inspired from early on because I could see the results even after just a few years of work when we were able to raise the prices farmers would receive simply by teaching them how to sort coffee,” Juan told STiR in an interview, adding: “My vision was always to promote Philippine coffee in our local coffee culture and to help farmers become sustainable by helping them to add value to their crop.”
After handing over the Figaro coffee chain to new owners in 2008 she dedicates ever more time toward the local industry, today working as co-chairwoman of the Philippine Coffee Board and Juan’s ultimate goal is to find a way to see the Philippines being able to meet the entire local demand with locally grown coffee. Even though the continuing boom in consumption makes that an unlikely dream for now, the growing recognition as a quality producer has already achieved to raise the profile of Philippine beans in the world of specialty coffee and consumers.
“By the end of the day it really comes down to quality, because it’s thanks to the way the quality of the Philippine grown coffee has improved over the last 15 years that has opened up for social entrepreneurs such as Bo’s Coffee to use it and promote our own coffee much more in stores,” said Benitez.
Few coffee producing countries can claim to have it all but with production slowly increasing in volumes and quality rising along with the booming local market, the caffeine buzz in the Philippines is all set for further growth!