Around Lipa: Cafe de Lipa

Now this is far more homegrown and speaks volumes of the city's rich coffee heritage. It's refreshing to see there is a brave local businessman who's willing to take the risk and measure up to imported coffee chains now altering Lipa's cityscape. They proudly call themselves a Filipino Coffee Company, and rightfully capitalizes its flagship products on the local favorite, the Baráko.

You'll find it in a free-standing coffee shop right outside Robinson's (ironically behind Starbucks), in SM City, in the Petron Station along Star Tollway, and a pilot branch in Metro Manila; in Market! Market! in Bonifacio Global City.

Around Lipa: Coffee Shop Chains in Coffee Country

Nothing is more paradoxical and strangely inorganic than alien coffee chains sprouting around downtown Lipa. In a city whose heritage is strongly identified with coffee farming, trade and export, it is practically sacrilegious to be promoting "Kona" and "Java" blends or beans grown in Guatemala or Bolivia within hearing distance of the cathedral's bells.

Figaro (left) is not that bad; after all, it is a locally-owned chain and kudos to them for giving imported brands a run for its money. But still, it's sad to see that our own local coffee, as it is, is actually far more superior, bean for bean, than most that are popular around the world. Local coffee is just not packaged and marketed creatively, and the industry has absolutely no government support.

Coffee Picking

The coffee trees are HEAVY with cherries and they are red ripe for picking! The baráko (Liberica, above) ones look especially daunting since their beans are way larger than Robustas and Excelsas. Those too will soon be ready for harvesting, and even though the fruits are smaller, they are just as tedious to pick as they have to be manually done (or at least, we do) and the picking requires some arbitrary, split-second decisions.

Not all cherries ripen at the same time (right), you want to pick them only when they are fully mature, with a vivid red hue or just about the time they start drying up. It is a waste to comb through a branch to short-cut collecting them since some are younger than the others, like the yellow or green fruits. When I first did this some years ago, I picked one tree just like how everyone does it but after some minutes, I started wondering just how I should be able to do this faster: maybe do a swift, piano-like glissando 

through the cherries and put a basket on the end to catch my loot. Quite predictably, my harvest had multi-colored produce (read: mixed-up ripe and wasted unripe cherries).


On the left photo is one of our staff, Diko who is picking a barako tree the proper way, just how everyone else does it: by hand, one by one. He even has on a takúyan, a hip-strung basket that is the most convenient and practical to contain the picked cherries.

From one tree alone, Diko picked practically three-fourths of a sack! And there are still some fruits left on that tree. Awesome...

From a Coffee Expert

Not me, but Robert Francisco who sent me a link to give readers better information about my blog entry on alamid coffee. Robert was among some friends I consulted before I bought the farm three years back, and he's also hooked me up with farms and people from whom to source quality coffee seedlings.

He's passionate about coffee and definitely walks his talk: he's even written a book about it! Click this to read more about his take on alamid coffee.

Alamid

Practically everyone who comes to the farm will inevitably ask in the first three minutes about the notoriously-expensive Alamíd coffee (usually the first question is: "How big is your place?"). It's become an urban legend of some sorts and has spawned the curiosity of many, which, pardon the pun, will hopefully not lead to killing the "cat."

Alamid is a civet which is more raccoon-like than feline. It is similar to a músang (but I cannot tell the difference) and a binturông, the Palawan "bear cat" (as I said, they are not cats and definitely not bears!).

Photo by Ryan Fernandez

I'm no longer going to expound about the coffee since I'm no expert in it. But we do have it, we find the beans scattered around the farm, especially near the river (top photo).

Compared to Silang, Cavite, I guess we in Lipa find more alamid droppings because of our proximity to Mount Malarayat. I've read there are even organized hikes to the mountain with side attractions to track their poop.

I think it's fascinating! It's the nature of the alamids to hunt for the sweetest beans, a skill  something we humans will never develop, not in a million years. Since they only digest the pulp and not the beans, it does make sense to harvest them and try it out, at least. Now to what extent does it differ from the rest of the beans they did not choose?

I have yet to try.

Coffee

At its very core, 1784 has been and will always be a coffee farm. We grow three of the four commercially-grown varieties in the Philippines: Robusta (shown above), Excelsa, and Liberica (the other is Arabica which is best grown in high elevations).

Usually triggered by the tropical winter solstice, the coffee trees (as with a lot of other flowering and fruit-bearing plants) instinctively pro-create and flower after it experiences a profound change in weather. Apparently, the change shocks them enough to jar their complacent nature and in an inherent desire to survive, the trees willfully preserve their line by flowering.

In time, these same flowers become the cherries that are initially colored green and will become red when ripe. The cherries take anywhere between eleven to twelve months to mature before it is ready to be manually picked from the tree (Tag. pagpupúti). In fact, we don't necessarily pick an entire tree in one go as sometimes, some cherries even from the same branch mature ahead of the others so they have to be selected with keen eyes and a good sense of touch.

Liberica is another variety (shown above) with unusually-bigger cherries than Robusta and Excelsa (and Arabica). Some cherries are twice the size of the rest, thus it is locally nicknamed Barako, the Tagalog for "stud" and connoting an Alpha characteristic among a group or breed. Undoubtedly, it has a richer and more intense aroma and flavor than Robusta, at least.

Our Robusta trees are neatly planted on a grid between coconut trees. When we acquired the farm, the trees were scrawny, extremely tall and overtaken by ants. We let the season pass and after harvesting, we pruned them meantime to keep the trees low, easier to maintain, and hopefully prolific.