The fresher the coffee beans, the better it tastes

Do you like your coffee fresh? Then make sure your coffee is not only freshly brewed but freshly brewed with just roasted coffee beans. With this guiding principle, Bo’s Coffee, the country’s premier specialty coffee chain with more than 30 branches all over the country, has embarked on bringing its world-class homegrown coffee beverages to the discerning palates of Metro Manila coffee habitués.

Sourcing 90 percent of its beans locally from the peaks of the Cordillera and Benguet to the mountains of Bukidnon and Sultan Kudarat, Bo’s Coffee prides in the freshness of its beans.

From these coffee-growing locales, the green beans are brought to Bo’s Coffee partner roasters in Cavite, where they are roasted and blended to coffee perfection before they are vacuum-sealed to ensure they arrive at the shops as fresh as it came out from the roastery.

"We roast, pack and deliver the coffee beans to our stores fresh from the roastery. And we consume the beans as fast as we deliver them to ensure that our beverages are made from just roasted coffee beans. We dispose the coffee beans that do not make it to our standard holding time," Steve Benitez, founder of Bo’s Coffee Club, said.

These Philippine Origins, according to Benitez — whose love affair with coffee was borne out of traveling and sipping espressos in European cafes and downing cappuccinos in American coffee shops — are being sold in Bo’s Coffee to show the diversity of Philippine coffee and their ability to compete with the best Origins from the coffee-growing regions of the world.

"Coffee is a passion for me. I love the taste, the aroma and most of all the experience that comes in enjoying coffee. In 1992 when I traveled to the US, I sat down at a café by the street and thought to myself, how I wished I could recreate the experience in my own place back home," Benitez recalls.

This passion for coffee was translated two years later in 1994, long before international coffee franchises set foot in the Philippines, and has since become a tempestuous but largely gratifying love affair between Benitez and coffee.

Its network in the key cities of the Visayas and Mindanao has since grown to 30 stores, and now adds five coffee shops in Metro Manila — Glorietta, Robinson’s Galleria, SM North Edsa, SM Mall of Asia, and the Greenhills Shopping Center — to its growing family. Also in the planning stage are and targeted to open before November this year are stores in De la Rosa Street in Makati, Taft Avenue across De La Salle University in Manila, and Katipunan Avenue across Ateneo in Quezon City.

But Benitez is quick to add that the secret of the freshest brew doesn’t end there, as the espresso machines and baristas concocting the brew are equally important.