Follow the beans

MANILA, Philippines - The color I would better associate with Tagum City is gold. Tagum is Mindanao’s fastest rising city and Davao del Norte’s provincial capital, and its fortunes are being made through the industries of gold mining and agriculture in northern Davao. Gold catapulted the progress of this municipality in 1988 as it drew throngs of miners seeking quick fortune. Ten years later, the once struggling town became a city.

However, not many people know that Tagum is also a treasure trove to that other globally in-demand commodity: coffee. Devoted coffee drinkers consider this beverage their own “black gold”- and who could blame them?

Since 1994, the Nestlé Experimental and Demonstration Farm (NEDF) in Tagum City has been at the forefront of coffee education, research and technology in the Philippines, helping make sure we all have our golden moments with coffee.

NEDF facilities include spacious lecture centers, numerous plant nurseries, prototype coffee production facilities, and demonstration farms, among others, where farmers learn about the latest and most effective coffee planting methods.

My task of documenting the colorful journey that yields the perfect cup of Nescafé begins here.

Sowing The Seeds

Standing on the hill where the NEDF office is perched, you get a sweeping view of a dense and lush coffee farm. But more than the scenic view, it is the NEDF’s deeper industry perspective that earns my sublime applause. Here, coffee farmers can acquire high-quality and high-yielding Robusta coffee planting materials at cost price.

Aside from planting materials, the NEDF also provides free technical training and assistance on plant care and sustainable farming methods and distributes coffee farm educational pamphlets.

In the last two decades, the NEDF has distributed over a million coffee seeds and seedlings and in turn, has generated over 20,000 direct jobs within the coffee industry, making it the biggest source of Robusta cuttings and seedlings in the Philippines - statistics truly worth a toast.

Planting Coffee Trees

A quick walk along the marked path around the NEDF’s 10-hectare premises is truly insightful: each stop is a veritable window to various stages of a coffee plant’s life; it’s easy to make-believe you are a host in a segment of Food Network or Discovery Channel.

I catch Eddie Baylin, NEDF’s resident agronomist, while he is about to sow coffee seeds in the nursery. After driving a giant comb-like tool on the seedbed which left a row of tiny holes spaced evenly apart, he carefully inserts the seed in the opening.

Eddie explains that seeds germinate in about 45 days after sowing in the plant nursery. By the third month, they grow into seedlings, ready to be planted in the farm.

The process of seedling to flowering takes about nine months, and from flowering to harvesting, another nine months. A coffee tree is a 50-year crop plant. With good cultivation and maintenance such as fertilizing, pest control, pruning and rejuvenation, it will yield a lifetime of good coffee berries.

Eddie is quick to stress that while anyone can buy coffee seeds or plantings at NEDF, his office strongly suggests that first-time coffee farmers undergo three-day or 10-day coffee specialist training to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in planting coffee

Labor Of Love

Coffee harvests are pretty straightforward: there are no dances, no festivals, no rituals, no offerings to wooden gods made fashionably chic in recent years by upscale tropical resorts. However, chemist and coffee farmer Gina Mangalindan of Orani, Bataan makes it a point to haul her whole family together to the farm for a picnic.

“Coffee flowers are just so fragrant,” says Gina.

The flowers of a coffee tree bloom in long clustering strands, painting streaks of white in fields of green. If it were not for the coffee, Gina reveals she would rather cut the flowers as home decoration and freshener.

Coffee berries do not ripen or mature simultaneously so there is a need for farmers to selectively handpick the yellow and red ripe ones from the cluster, leaving the green or immature ones behind for future harvest.

It’s a slow process and truly a labor of love, says Gina, but this is the only means of ensuring harvest of good quality Green Coffee Beans (GCBs).

Berry Promising

After harvest, the ripe coffee berries undergo several processes to ensure that every bean that goes into Nescafé is free from defects that may affect quality and taste. Harvested berries are poured into a flotation tank to separate the “floaters” from the “sinkers” — as what they do at Ragos Farm in Bukidnon.

Floaters are often insect-damaged, hollow coffee berries, and so they float. The good coffee beans (the “sinkers”) are then dried immediately within 24 to 48 hours after harvest through a variety of means. The most common method is sun drying but for wet areas, a direct firing dryer or gas-fired mechanical dryer may be more suitable.

In the heart of Silang, almost all households maintain coffee trees however few. That’s why come harvest time you will see concrete roads, basketball courts, plazas, sidewalks, open garages all covered in sun-dried cherries.

The next process involves dehulling or the separation of the hull or seed covering and the parchment from the GCB. The GCB is used in trading raw coffee beans to differentiate these from roasted coffee beans sold in groceries or coffee shops.

Then the tedious process of sorting takes place. This involves the selection or taking out of undesirable materials such as defective beans like black beans, broken beans, immature beans, moldy beans and other foreign matter (admixture, husk fragment, etc.) from the rest of the good beans.

For instance, Jolan Lamoste, a farmer from Compostela Valley, and some family members manually sort out the coffee defects for weeks before delivering GCBs to Nestlé. He even built his own gizmo made of plastic screen and wood frame that filters out coffee bean impurities. As a result, his GCB deliveries merit Grade 1, the highest according to Nestlé standards.

From Farm To Factory

GCBs in jute or plastic sacks are then brought by coffee farmers to any of the Nestlé Satellite Buying Stations in Davao City, Iloilo City, Dumaguete City, San Francisco in Agusan del Sur, Tuguegarao and Solano in Nueva Vizcaya, and Silang in Cavite where they are then shipped to the Nestlé Coffee Factory in Cagayan de Oro. The GCBs are graded according to defect count, cup taste, and moisture content.

I am quite amazed at how a Nestlé Green Coffee Buyer can detect around a dozen GCB physical defects — immature bean, broken bean, foreign matter, etc. They can detect the slightest nuisance in taste as fruity, moldy, bitter, and so forth.

As good procurement practice, Nestlé follows the current world market price of GCB in all transactions — from big truck deliveries to a small bag — and releases check payment within eight hours upon delivery to any of the Nestlé Satellite Buying Stations.

The Brewing Begins

With its rich 70 years’ experience in making the world’s first instant coffee, Nescafé has mastered the art and science of roasting to perfection. I get a whiff of it as soon as we took a sharp turn from the highway toward the Nestlé Coffee Factory where I got to witness how instant coffee is made.

The process of making instant coffee begins with roasting. Roasting is an important and integral part of the process because it is here where the flavor of coffee is developed. Experts at Nescafé ensure consistency and quality of the roasted beans each time.

After roasting, the beans are then ground and brewed. Spray drying then follows. Here, the concentrated brew is sprayed through a nozzle from a high tower into a hot air chamber after which dried coffee powder is left at the bottom of the chamber.

The spray-dried coffee powder is then collected and packed in variety of jars and sachets. After which these are boxed and shipped nationwide to groceries, supermarkets, and sari-sari stores.

The journey of the beans ends, for now — yours, though, has just begun: start by savoring your perfect cup of Nescafé.