Celebrating a rich Philippine brew

MANILA, Philippines - Imagine mornings without coffee. Having cranky people everywhere would be terrible.

So, next time you buy a bag of roasted coffee beans, take the time to examine them closely. You will find only whole, finely shaped beans. Ever wondered why?

Take a trip to Amadeo town in Cavite province, about an hour and a half drive south of Manila to visit a coffee mill, and you will find out.

At a warehouse topped high with bags of green harvested coffee cherries, workers dump bag after bag of cherries into machines to remove the hull covering the seeds – the ones that make up the enchanting brew.

The beans spill out of a chute and collect in a pail. Once full, a worker pours the beans into sacks. After that comes the tedious part.

In a large shed next door, women manually sort through a pile of milled coffee beans and remove gnarled beans or beans that have been crushed or beans that didn’t grow to perfection. Imagine picking through rice for wayward grains of sand before you wash and cook it and you’ll get the idea.

One woman in her 50s spreads several beans at a time on the table in front of her and removes the bad ones and puts the rejects into a plastic container. Her eyes and hands are quick. The good ones she sweeps up with her palm and puts in another container. Only after that can the beans be roasted into coffee.

Philippine coffee advocate Chit Juan has been giving what she calls “coffee tours” for the last 10 years as part of her advocacy encouraging people to plant coffee. She relates with a laugh that she once left one field trip participant at a gas station during a stop.

Last Tuesday Juan was in her element when she brought several journalists for a tour of her farm in Amadeo that included a trip to the mill. She makes it a point to emphasize the hard work it takes to bring coffee from the farm to the cup.

Growing a coffee tree is a test of patience. Not all the cherries ripen at the same time. Coffee cherries are green when they grow and turn red when ripe. “Who wants to go back to a coffee tree three or four times,” Juan points out.

 She knows that for a fact. Aside from lettuce, celery and other vegetables, Juan has several Liberica coffee trees, whose cherries won’t be ripe for picking until a few more months.

Most of the people who check the beans are women. “The beans have more value if they are all carefully chosen,” Juan notes with a noticeable gloat. “The men will just harvest everything. Maybe it’s a guy thing.”

An advocate of women empowerment, Juan has been busy banding women coffee farmers in Benguet province. Women are empowered and the coffee industry benefits. Everybody wins.

The slow return on investment is the main reason why more and more coffee farms are being sold to land developers. If there is no harvest, farmers have nothing to sell. That means farmers have to live on something until the harvest.

Amadeo is coffee territory. You get the feeling that the locals equate their cash crop with the Philippine flag.

Perched on the welcome sign bordering the town is a large concrete replica of a cup and a kettle, the white paint faded by the elements. The town’s champion brand is Café Amadeo, which comes in bags of attractive brown sack cloth.

Along the town’s main road are quaint coffee shops whose rural ambience cannot match the snootiness of Starbucks. But the rustic atmosphere is enough to remind visitors why they went on a road trip in the first place and invite them to have a taste of the local blend.

Neighboring Silang town, a few kilometers south of Amadeo, is also coffee country. Along the main Aguinaldo Highway that connects Manila with Tagaytay City, Gourmet’s restaurant, a popular stop for weekenders, proudly touts its brew as the “national coffee”.

 “We are proud of Gourmet Coffee because we support our Filipino farmers and believe that our coffee is at par with the world’s best,” says marketing manager Warren Madrid. Gourmet’s commissary at the back of the restaurant roasts about three tons of beans a day. Its 1950s-vintage roasting machine cooks beans in batches of 100 kilos at 250 degrees Centigrade.

Juan believes the local coffee industry’s future lies in niche marketing. “Specialty coffee is the way to go. That way you can add so much value to the farmer. If we will sell to the mass market, that’s what the farmers have been doing. That’s why they’re not encouraged to plant coffee, because the value of the work they do is so little,” she says, hoping that her coffee tours will result in more coffee disciples.

So, every time you savor a cup of coffee, imagine how your morning would be without coffee – and silently thank the farmer who grew it.