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I didn’t know that De La Salle made their own
coffee until I received a nicely wrapped pack of Café De La Salle
for Christmas from my friends Benjie and Bambi. I was informed that
it is a blend of Arabica and Liberica coffee beans and specially
roasted for them.
According to the coffee table
book, Forged in Fire, the Philippine coffee industry originated in
Batangas particularly in the municipality of Lipa which nurtured
those first plants and harvested the first crops. Coffee was brought
to the Philippines from Mexico in 1740 by a Franciscan friar but it
was the Augustinian priests, Fathers Elias Nebreda and Benito Varas,
who propagated the crop. Augustinians encouraged its cultivation in
the towns of San Jose, Ibaan, Tanauan, Taal and Lemery.
After the American Civil War in
1865 there was a sudden demand for Philippine coffee because it was
cheaper to import coffee from Manila and ship it to San Francisco
than buy cheap coffee in Brazil and ship it to San Francisco.
In that year, California alone
bought half of the Philippines’ coffee exports, while a third went
to the tasteful French. Exports reached over 2,000 metric tons, more
than five times what it had been a decade before. Barako coffee was
sold at more than five times the price of the best Java beans.
The opening of the Suez Canal in
1869 linked the huge European market to Philippine produce and
England became the biggest buyer of local beans. By the 1870s,
coffee exports exceeded 3,370 metric tons and reached its peak in
the following decade when the coffee plantations of Brazil, the
world’s largest producer then and now, were destroyed by a viral
disease. By the late 1880s the disease had spread to Africa and Java
thus, from 1887 to 1889 the Philippines were the only source of
coffee beans in the world. In 1887, Lipa alone produced almost
10,000 metric tons of coffee at double the 1865 price, thereby
realizing over P2.5 million in gross receipts, a sum equivalent to
P1 billion today. The last quarter of the 19th century was the
golden age of Lipa and signaled the construction of huge mansions,
some of which still stand today.
The residents flaunted their
wealth and drove around in magnificent decorated carriages drawn by
superb horses with silver harnesses. Diamonds from the newly
discovered mines of South Africa were in such demand that Estrella
del Norte, the leading French jewelry store in Manila, opened a
branch in Lipa. Even the most ordinary objects like writing pens,
prayer books and the insteps of ladies’ slippers or corchos were
studded with diamonds! Many families had resident gold—and
silversmiths to fashion jewelry and objects which, when completed,
would be the talk of the town. Pedrong Kuba, a hunchback was the
most famous goldsmith of Lipa.
The richest families adopted
European manners and spoke only Spanish. People who did not live in
Calle Real (during the Spanish period, this street was exclusively
for the rich) were not welcomed in the houses of those who did,
unless they were relatives. However, foreigners were welcomed with
open arms as they were targeted for husbands. Grand balls were
commonplace, and picnics in Balete were popular. Balete is a barrio
beside Lake Taal and which was the site of the old Lipa that was
destroyed by a volcanic eruption of 1754.
Sadly, by the last decade of the
century, the dreaded viral disease came to Philippine shores and
destroyed the coffee plantations. It is said that in 1889, one of
the planters’ daughters traversed the length of the cathedral nave
on bended knees, clutching a coffee branch in her hands, asking God
to lift the scourge that was destroying Lipa and her family’s
fortunes. That ended the coffee boom. Traveling across Batangas, one
will notice that although natural causes may have led to the demise
of the industry at the turn of the 20th century, the modern-day
scourge is now real estate development that is sweeping the
province. orgsus@haribon.org.ph 
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