Coffee is not native to the Philippines. It arrived with Spanish rule, in a planting whose exact story has been retold so many times that the details have blurred, and from there it did something few imported crops manage: it briefly made this country one of the largest coffee exporters on earth.
That period lasted less than a lifetime. What came after took a century to recover from.
A friar's planting
The commonly told version has a Spanish friar bringing the first coffee tree to Lipa, Batangas, sometime in the 1740s, more as a curiosity than a crop. What is certain is that Batangas took to it. By the middle of the nineteenth century the province was thick with coffee, grown as Liberica, the same hardy lowland species later sold locally as Barako.
The Batangas boom
Global demand did the rest. Coffee rust reached Ceylon in the 1870s and worked through Asia's coffee regions over the following decade, cutting supply just as demand from Europe and the United States kept rising. Batangas filled part of the gap. By the 1880s the Philippines had become one of the world's four largest coffee exporters, and Lipa's growers were wealthy enough to build a theatre and pave their streets before Manila did the same.
The blight
The same rust that had cleared the way for Batangas eventually reached it. Hemileia vastatrix appeared in the province around 1889 and moved through the plantations within a few years, helped by how densely the trees had been planted. By the early 1890s the boom was over. There was no treatment for the disease at the time, and many growers pulled out their coffee rather than keep fighting it.
What replaced it
The twentieth century rebuilt around a different, more resistant plant: robusta, grown at lower altitudes and sold mostly by weight rather than by name. It suited instant coffee, and instant coffee suited a country recovering from a blight, an occupation and a war. Within a few decades robusta was the coffee most Filipinos knew, and the arabica once grown across the highlands had shrunk to small plots kept going by individual families rather than an industry.
A slow return
The return has been quieter than the boom and just as slow. Government replanting programmes and a new generation of specialty buyers have drawn growers back into arabica in the Cordillera and around Mt. Apo, where the altitude that once grew almost nothing for export now grows some of the country's best cups. For how we buy into that today, see Choosing Philippine coffee.
What we sell belongs to that return rather than to the Batangas era — Lourdes's Typica from Sagada, Apo Sandawa's Catimor from Mt. Apo's shoulder. The closest surviving link to the old lowland trade is Adarna, an Excelsa grown at a similarly modest altitude in Quezon by a single farmer, Erna D. Balmes. It is not the coffee Lipa once shipped by the ton. It is what that tradition looks like now: smaller, slower, and named.