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We are a coffee-loving country, no doubt about it. From the minute we wake up until the hour we get off from a long day at work, coffee is part of our routine.
Reading our favorite newspaper isn’t complete without a cup of steaming hot coffee. At the end of each workday, we get together with friends or co-workers over coffee. We meet dates or lovers at the coffee shop of our choice. We probably propose marriage or even break up with them at the same coffee shops.
Flipping through Kapihan: A Celebration of Coffee in the Philippines by author and Paris-based food critic Noel Sy-Quia is like stepping back and watching our entire history unfold before our eyes.
Coffee, turns out, is a Franciscan friar’s legacy, brought from Mexico to Lipa, Batangas, in 1749. What happens over the next two centuries we don’t know (and Sy-Quia doesn’t say), except that in 1944 when the Americans first landed in the Philippines, Nescafe–yes, the coffee brand most of us grew up with and whose jars we recycled into drinking glasses–was introduced to us Filipinos.
Nescafe commercials anchor many a childhood and adolescent recollection. To remember fondly the celebrity of a past Nescafe commercial is to mark one’s age. Nescafe’s glass jars found all manner of uses beyond coffee . . . It is part of the national fabric: one expects to see Nescafe in kitchen cupboards, on supermarket shelves, in restaurants, kapihans and sari-sari stores, even in the remotest parts of the archipelago.
Tracing the “journey from bean to cup,” Sy-Quia takes the reader to where the action is. First, to the Nestle Experimental and Demo Farm in Mindanao, where farmers are given three-day training courses for free, including accommodation. Part of the course is learning how to identify coffee trees best suited for production.
“It’s like choosing your spouse-to-be while wearing a blindfold,” says agronomist Zenon Alenton.
Next, Sy-Quia takes us to a buying station in Cavite, where, he observes, “sacks of coffee were being unloaded. A metal probe was punched into each bag, extracting a coffee bean sample with a rasp, and dropped into a metal bin. One hundred grams were scooped out, and taken into the office.”
The results of sorting, tasting, and moisture content are entered into a sheet. Farmers are then paid out according to the grade and weight of the coffee beans they bring in. Imagine the quality control that coffee beans go through before they even get to the factories!
A coffee celebration
More than a beverage, coffee has also found its way into recipes and even as an ingredient in body scrub, lotion, and dye.
Aside from unraveling coffee’s history in the Philippines, Kapihan provides coffee-based recipes created by Chef Gene Cordova, president of American Hospitality Academy Philippines, and Chef Jam Mendoza.
What’s amazing is that the simple act of drinking coffee, says Sy-Quia, makes you a part of “the circle of life.” With one cup, “a farmer with a high school education can send his kids to college . . . who in turn can make a living, build careers, and send their kids to school.”
Sy-Quia, looking back on the yearlong odyssey of writing the book, says he leaves “with a deeper appreciation” of coffee and the industry behind it. “I formed new friendships and learned a lot from the people I met. The greatest moment that stayed with me was meeting the farmers–that’s where the coffee starts.”
Featuring stark, stirring images by Neal Oshima, Kapihan is published by ArtPostAsia.
Photos by Neal Oshima from ArtPostAsia Website
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All Things Brown and Beautiful
[...] and arteries of this Archipelago. I agree to the truthfulness of the things mentioned in this ( Coffee: A Celebration of Life from Pinoy Centric-www.pinoycentric.com) essay. The essay is well written and the things [...]
On Coffee and Coffee-drinking
By Denver E. Torres
Truly, Coffee is the blood that runs in the veins and arteries of this Archipelago. I agree to the truthfulness of the things mentioned in this ( Coffee: A Celebration of Life from www.pinoycentric.com) essay.
The essay is well written and the things mentioned in it bring me back to the days of my Childhood. I remember my own personal experiences regarding Coffees. I recall the morning glory-filled-eyes mornings seeing my Mama and Papa conversing silently over cups of coffee early in the morning at our kitchen while the rest of my brothers and sisters are still snoring.
Also, I am transported back to the Mornings at Sta. Cruz, Claveria, Misamis Oriental, my Mother’s natal town. I visit my grandparents on most summers when I was a kid. In Lola’s house, mornings are the busiest because people prepare Coffee and drink them with much enthusiasm and ceremony. I watch them from the long table in the kitchen. I sit down there at the edge of the long bench busy watching my Tiya making fire to boil water. Coffee, in fact is stapler than rice to them, I guess. I see big jars of Coffee. And, yes they are labeled Nescafe. The hot cups of Coffee are always taken with bread they call patatas among other kinds of bread. I learned later that the patatas they call and we are eating is actually the galletas (egg bread). I do not know if it is a wrong naming by them. Or if simply, patatas is a linguistic variety of galletas.
I am twenty-four now, and I am a lover of Coffee and all about it (maybe, this explains why I have to read Coffee: A Celebration of Life and write something about it). Even when I need to spendthrift, I cannot help but splurge on 100+ a-cup specialties at Coffee Works, Bo’s Coffee Club or Gazebo, and frequently before at the now-non extant Skizzo Specialty Coffee, all of these shops are in Cagayan de Oro City. When Skizzo closed few years back, I am saddened. I miss the place and still missing it up to now even after two years plus. Such was a nice place to hang out at. Quiet. Not crowded. Affordable. These three were its best traits. Plus, the goer gets to see some authentic paintings of local sceneries by local artists. I remember seeing a replica image of the façade and entrance of the St. Augustine Cathedral on a Sunday. The painting is so nice and I wanted to buy it then except that I could not afford it. It is expensive. But I think it was priced right.
Going to coffeeshops, in my case, is more than just spending or the love of the taste of coffee but, more of a social activity. I think that I spend a lot of money drinking coffee in these shops because I see many nice people around, not to mention the cute ones. Coffee houses are the best places to flirt around. It’s my flirting place.
Coffee-drinking at the Coffeeshops are not necessarily all for flirting with hot and cute guys though. Coffeeshops are best places for serious talk with friends and a great place for business meetings. In fact, I and my literary friends would meet up in these places to workshop our new poems or fictions. They are a perfect place because they are quiet and comfortable.
I have observed that for both the city-dwellers like me and the boondocks people like my grandparents, Coffee or Coffee-drinking is not just a meaningless sipping of something but more of a ceremony to start the day right. It is truly a ritual or an offering of sort to-asking the Deities of the Nature to bless the day with lots of suns and smiles.
Indeed, Coffee or Coffee-drinking is a celebration to most Filipinos. We are a culture of festivities and merriment. And such is a reflection of the type of people we are: Happy and Optimistic!
Enjoy your Coffee!