A Heavenly Drink Called Barako
During the 1950s, a Japanese straggler who refused to believe that the war was over, was finally convinced to come out from his forested hideout somewhere between Batangas and the highlands of Cavite. In the cave, which was hidden by thick brush and wild coffee trees where he lived for more than a decade, members of the search party who escorted him back to civilization discovered a sack of dried coffee beans stacked in a lofty niche of the cavern.
When the former soldier returned to Japan, he wrote a book on his war experience in the Philippines, which became a bestseller. He devoted a chapter on the “dream” coffee he was drinking every morning. He wrote that when he drank it, he felt he was in heaven! Its heady aroma and unique bitter taste gave him a kick and catapulted him to dreamland when he drank it!
The “dream” coffee he was referring to is barako (Liberica), which thrives well above 300-meter elevations and is noted for its distinct strong taste. It is one of the four varieties of coffee that grow in the Philippines. The other three being Arabica that grows 1,200-1,800 meters above sea level like in Benguet and Bukidnon, Robusta that is grown in lower elevations like the Liberica between 300-800 meters above sea level, and Excelsa, which has a distinct jackfruit flavor that grows in the same areas as the Robusta.
Coffee was first consumed in the 9th Century, when it was discovered in the highlands of Ethiopia in Africa. From there, it spread to Egypt and Yemen, and by the 15th Century had reached Persia (Iran), and Turkey. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Today, it is one of the most popular beverages worldwide.
“According to oral history, a Franciscan friar may have been responsible for bringing coffee to the Philippines in the 1740s,” says in the folklore and history chapter of the book Barako, the Big Bean, authored by Chit Juan, CEO of Figaro Coffee Company and executive director of the Figaro Foundation Corporation (FFC), and Alejandro Mojica, PhD, the country’s leading authority on coffee. The FFC espouses the cause of
helping save the Philippine Liberica or Barako industry and help coffee farmers to make coffee a major dollar earner for the country. “On his journey to the Philippines, he brought with him three gantas of coffee beans on a Manila galleon in a voyage from Mexico and planted them somewhere in Laguna.
“When the friar died, his servant boy dug up the coffee plants and replanted them in his father’s land in Lipa, Batangas,” continues the book. “These plants grew well and were presumably the source of planting materials for the majority of the land in Lipa.”
Considered one of the high-value crops in the local and foreign markets, coffee is among the top ten agricultural products in terms of value. In 1980, the Philippines became the fourth largest coffee exporter in the world. The country produced 70,000 metric tons of coffee at that time, with 15 to 30 percent of this volume going to the export market.
“Prior to the mid-1997 Asian economic meltdown, Cavite had 15,000 farmers,” explains Dr. Alejandro C. Mojica, Sr., a member of the Philippine Coffee Board (PCB) and executive director of the Cavite Coffee Development Board (CCDB). “Now, the province has only 8,000 coffee farmers. But, the finai blow came in 2001 when Vietnam overproduced coffee that brought the world prices down.
“So, from 13,000 hectares in 2001. coffee farms shrunk to a mere 6,000 hectares when coffee farmers shifted to planting pineapples and sold their farmlands to golf course developers.” says Mojica, who is also the director for research of CvSU and at the same time the national program leader for coffee R&D for the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Agricultural Research. “Now, multinational companies making instant coffee here are importing coffee from Vietnam because we can’t cope with their demand.”
“From 70,000 metric tons per year production in 1980, our annual production is only 29,000 metric tons while our consumption is estimated at 60,000 metric tons,” says Mojica inside the new sterile coffee tissue culture laboratory at the Cavite State University (CvSU) in the highland towns of Indang. “That’s why they don’t have a choice but to import.”
“What’s good about the Philippines is we are both producer and drinker of coffee, a P3 billion industry, while Vietnam only produces it because they are tea drinkers,” enthuses Mojica. “That’s why coffee here has a sure market,” he continues. “The good thing about coffee compared with other crops is that you can stock it up to two years, provided it is properly dried, and wait for its right price in the market. Now, it is P430 per ten-kilo can compared with P120 in 2001.”
Liberica or barako (a Tagalog synonym for a tough guy), is a deep-rooted plant that thrives in deep surface soil rich in sulphur and potassium. Its harvest season is between November and February. Bigger than other coffee varieties and has bigger berries, a tree could generate an average of two kilos of milled green beans or eight to ten kilos of fresh berries.
In lieu of the more expensive conventional fertilizer, which eats up 25 per cent of the total production cost of’ a coffee farm, Mojica, together with Liberato DV. Perez, program leader of CvSU’s National Coffee Research, Development and Extension Center, which is situated right in the middle of the biggest coffee producing province in the country, introduced vermicompost organic fertilizer which the coffee farmer can produce himself:
“Vermicompost uses worms and farm waste like grass, leaves and small tree branches that were shredded and mixed together with manure,” explains the coffee expert, whose coffee nursery could produce two tons of vermicompost a month. “Worms are then introduced to the compost bed which eat it. Their excreta, called vermicasting, have high nutritional content and is a good substitute for the more expensive fertilizer.”
A few months ago, a representative of Taiho - a big Japanese heavy equipment company - which is planning to diversify into the food and coffee shop business, and two coffee specialists. went to CvSU to meet Mojica to look for that proverbial “dream” coffee that his bosses read in the bestseller book by the war lagger.
“Here, they had a cup taste of barako and exulted that it is indeed the “coffee they have been searching for,” exclaims Mojica. “Initially, they ordered two metric tons of coffee monthly, which we failed to deliver due to lack of supply,” he added.
“Robusta is the dominant coffee variety now in the Philippines, which is turned into instant coffee by big multinational instant coffee makers,” continues Mojica. “Our total annual coffee harvest of 7,000 metric tons here in Cavite consists of 95 percent Robusta, two to three percent are Excelsa, while only one per cent of the 6,000 MT, are Liberica!”
Aside from Cavite, other barako-producing provinces are Bulacan (Dona Remedios Trinidad), Bataan, Quezon, the Bicol Region, and Negros Island.
“Barako has the brightest future (among the other coffee varieties) because the Philippines could be known worldwide by having a Philippine coffee that has an excellent aroma, which has a distinct smell on its own,” says Mojica, who is just waiting for the Department of Agriculture’s High Value Commercial Crops (HVCC) to release the second tranche of P2 million (out of a P5 million grant) for him and Perez to transfer the barako plantlets in the acclimatization nursery where misters are to be installed to maintain a low humidity.
Aside from Japan and the Middle East, Canada is also interested to import barako from the Philippines.
In 2004, Perez, who decided to retire in nearby Mendez, his wife’s hometown, met Mojica and learned about the latter’s plan to put up a Barako tissue culture.
“We started the tissue culture using the international formula protocol, which we modified and used in different parts of an award-winning, high-yielding barako tree,” explains Perez, a UPLB agriculture graduate who immigrated to the US in 1972. “After perfecting it, we decided to mass propagate this superior variety which could yield up to 54 kilos of fresh beans per harvest.”
Using embryogenic method, the duo grew minute coffee leaves in vials in a temperature-controlled darkroom from seed embryos. From this culture, lumps of callus cells grow within six months. These callus lumps are then put in a shaker to separate them from each other. One callus can produce 200 planting materials. Now, they could produce one million planting materials in a period of three years in CvSU’s 10-hectare coffee farm nursery.
After five to seven years from planting these super barako plantlets, the Philippines will have one million high-yielding trees that will propel our very own “dream” coffee into the discriminating taste buds of millions of coffee lovers worldwide.