Coffee From On High

On a mountaintop one Saturday, a group of city folk raced to fill baskets with coffee cherries, moving from one leafy tree to the next, singling out fruit that were bright red up to the stem end and leaving unripe cherries for future harvests. This labor-intensive exercise is just one in a long and exacting process to give us one of the world’s most popular legally addictive stimulants.

We had come a long way, from Manila up to Baguio, past La Trinidad, Benguet and another six or so kilometers of rough road—a 20-minute hike or a dusty jeepney ride from the main road up to the Coromina farm in Tublay. It was 17 degrees Celsius in the shade with a chill breeze at high noon. We stood on ground 1,700 meters above sea level, since Coffea Arabica requires this altitude to bear fruit.

We were invited by Guadalupe Coromina Garcia, a gracious, soft-spoken lady with a career in Metro Manila and part of her heart back on this farm. Nearly half a century ago, her father Ramon Coromina fled the crowds of Baguio and bought this mountain-side property. A naturalist, Don Ramon transformed the bare grassland into a forest abode with help from an elderly Kankana-ey tribesman who shared his vision. They planted thousands of oak, pine and coffee trees. The family also raised poultry and grew sweet peas and strawberries.

The mother trees of coffee had been abandoned. "There was a minimal market for coffee when my father acquired this farm," Lupe recalls. "There were no cafes the way there are now, and coffee bean prices were very low."

Persistence and optimism drove Don Ramon, his sons and Lupe to cultivate more Arabica coffee trees beginning in the ‘60s. The farm now sustains about 4,000 trees within the 24-hectare estate and is one of the few remaining watersheds in the mountains of Tublay.

Family lore tells of how a resident bat with a fondness for the ripe cherries helped with coffee tree propagation. At the harvest, I popped a few of the ripe cherries in my mouth, and it was a revelation: I split the skin, sucked the sweet pulp off the coffee seed, and understood why bats and civets like it.

In Benguet, coffee cherries are ready for harvest from December to February. Arabica cherries take several months from flowering to ripening, and each cherry holds two coffee beans. The tree reaches its peak yield in a few years and remains productive for decades. It takes as little as three years from planting to its first faintly jasmine-scented flower. Arabica coffee cherries are firmly anchored to the branches, and hand picking requires a sharp tug or a quick twist. Harvest cannot be mechanized since the trees grow on slopes and the cherries do not mature uniformly.

Steady sunshine is unreliable in the region, so Coromina cherries are wet-processed, not sun-dried along the roads like lowland coffee. These are first run through an ingeniously simple hand-cranked mill to remove the pulp. "I guess you could call it a Kankana-ey de-pulper," Lupe describes the device.

She smiles as we take turns at the mill. We each pour about a gallon of harvested cherries into the well, noisily work the crank and—in true city-slicker fashion—have our pictures taken!

Milled cherries are stirred with a paddle into a vat of water and handled manually to fully separate the pulp from the seed. Unripe cherries, skins and pulp sink, and good coffee beans still wrapped in its parchment float obligingly to the top for easy collection.

"We’re trying to see how discarded pulp works as mulch, because it’s a bit acidic," Lupe volunteers.

Once dried to a moisture level of about 12 percent, the beans can be stored as "parchment coffee" for about a year, and then hulled, polished and sold as green beans prior to roasting.

Arabica beans account for 90 percent of the world’s coffee output. This type of coffee is found mainly in the Cordillera mountain ranges and partly near volcanoes and mountains in Mindanao. Its smoother flavor makes it the most traded kind of coffee, costing more than Robusta, Excelsa or Liberica. Arabica has half the acidity and caffeine levels of Robusta, from which instant coffee is made.

At Kape Umali, a coffee-bean stall at the Baguio City market, Sagada-grown Arabica is higher priced than other beans and blends. They say it’s because it has the highest export demand. The stall is right beside Garcia’s Pure Coffee, where the best-selling but misnamed "Benguet Barako" comes from Batangas.

The Coromina family also has lemon orchards and other citrus groves, yet "this is a good area in which to grow coffee," Lupe notes. "The ones that do best are those we grow in hollows."

This is part of the farm’s secret to growing chemical-free coffee. The tree’s root ball is planted slightly below topsoil level. Rainfall and a mulch of the forest’s decaying organic matter turn into compost and funnel straight to the roots for labor-free, year-round natural fertilizer application.

This coffee plantation is also a model for what is called three-tier companion planting. Low-growing coffee trees coexist with leafy, deep-rooted alnus trees and passion-fruit vines that clamber up the alnus for its share of sunshine. It seems like magic, but soil and light are used so efficiently that weeds stand little chance of rooting in the undergrowth, give or take a few hardy ferns and coffee plant volunteers sprouted from fallen berries. The area’s high humidity also prevents spider mites. Pesticides, fungicides and herbicides are not necessary.

Coromina’s earth-friendly coffee also benefits the health of the farmers and farm hands, none of whom handle or are even indirectly exposed to harmful chemicals. Happily, locally grown organic coffee commands premium prices as an incentive for farmers to resist the lure of cultivating higher-yield, chemically fertilized coffee.

The Coromina estate produces a good amount of green Arabica coffee beans annually, supplied to Figaro Coffee Company since 2005. FCC is a 100-percent Filipino-owned chain of specialty coffee shops, and its Figaro Foundation promotes "Wild About Organic" that ties in perfectly with Coromina’s propagation and processing. Figaro offers Arabica beans from this farm as part of its Special Reserve product line.

Farming coffee or anything else organically, says Figaro CEO Chit Juan, "fosters environmental awareness and promotes stewardship." She travels to coffee-growing regions in the country to find coffee farms at high elevations, remaining forest sanctuaries and natural watersheds.

"Many farms were abandoned when coffee market prices stayed low," she adds, "and the trees have been free of synthetic agrochemicals for years. We provide technical assistance and offer free-trade prices for coffee-farming cooperatives to grow and process its crops organically."

The company works with the German Development Service (DED) to set up an Organic Coffee Quality Control System, and grows coffee according to standards set by Naturland, a German-based international certification body for organic products. The stringent and time-consuming certification process ensures the beans are grown and processed without contact with synthetic chemicals.

"If more coffee drinkers even occasionally buy organic, shade-grown, flavorful fair-trade coffee, there are benefits for wildlife and the environment, farming communities, the economy, and the consumer," she says. "All that goodness comes from your choice of coffee."

On the Coromina farm, established trees of the Bourbon cultivar are newly joined by plantings of San Ramon, a bushier and more compact variety expected to yield dense fruit soon. There is the prospect of greater diversity, and the potential for seeds as well as clone material from the mother coffee trees.

These towering heirloom trees have over time developed a resistance to plant diseases and pests that arise from disrupted rainfall patterns or rising temperatures. In this time of climate crisis, we must prepare for anything as devastating to the industry as the coffee blight that occurred back in colonial times.

It is a good thing that Arabica beans, like wine grapes, take its flavor from the soil, climate and altitude in which it is grown. The Coromina coffee plantation is such an ideal for organic farming that it remains a habitat for the increasingly endangered dun-colored giant bushy-tailed cloud rat, and the white Northern Luzon slender-tailed cloud rat. A study by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center reveals a shaded coffee farm plays host to up to 150 species of birds, compared to five to 20 on a conventional coffee farm.

We trooped back to the old farmhouse, and when we were served coffee from last year’s crop, we realized the harvest gave us an appreciation for coffee that goes beyond its consumption. Hand picking and milling the cherries, learning how much care and work goes into each cup of coffee made me loathe wasting a single drop, and introduced an element of the sacred to my daily coffee ritual.