ACCORDING to a popular legend, coffee was accidentally discovered by Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd in 850 AD while his normally docile goats were nibbling bright red berries of a certain bush. Soon after, Kaldi was shocked to see the animals jumping and running like crazy. When he chewed the berries, he felt euphoric which he never felt before.
Filled with excitement, Kaldi brought a handful of the strange red berries to a sufi, an Islamic monk in a nearby monastery but, the monk, thinking they were “fruits of the devil,” threw them into the fire from which an enticing aroma billowed after awhile. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world’s first cup of coffee.
In the Philippines, the first coffee tree was introduced in the town of Lipa in Batangas in 1740 by a Spanish Franciscan monk. By the 1860s, Batangas was exporting coffee to the US through San Francisco. When the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, a new market was opened–Europe. Seeing the success of the Batangueños, Cavite followed suit by growing the first coffee seedlings in 1876 in the highland town of Amadeo.
In spite of having another coffee-growing town in Amadeo, Lipa still reigned as the center for coffee production in the Philippines and Batangas Barako (Coffee Liberica) was commanding five times the price of other Asian coffee varieties. In 1880, the Philippines was the fourth largest exporter of coffee beans in the world. As luck would have it, the coffee rust disease hit the big-time coffee producers in the world–Brazil, Africa and Java (Indonesia). Since then, the Philippines became the only source of coffee beans worldwide!
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