How Do You Share What Makes Philippine Coffee Special?

When I started advocating for Philippine specialty coffee, I knew what coffees I liked but struggled to communicate exactly what it was that I liked about them. 

These last few months have felt exponential in terms of building my coffee vocabulary. I’ve had opportunities to visit farms, have deep conversations with farmers, cafe owners, roasters, and try coffee grown at all Philippine altitudes, from well-known origins to newer ones. The quest has been to understand what makes Philippine coffee special. However, the deeper I go, the more apparent it becomes that communicating what makes our coffee ‘special’ to the general public is not so easy. 

‘Specialty coffee talk’ is real. It’s the language coffee people speak to one another. And while it's a language that might sound familiar to most, words like ‘juiciness,’ ‘acidity,’ and ‘weight’ have different meanings. ‘Specialty coffee talk’ can feel inaccessible in a culture which for centuries has equated ‘good’ coffee with intensely dark and bitter flavor. I know this to be true because it was my experience. 

I attended a coffee masterclass from the 2021 World Brewers Cup Champion, Matt Winton, and we went into all the variables that affect extraction: temperature, grind size, time, number of pours, agitation, ratio, and the amount of water bypass on our equipment. H Proper Coffee Roasters marketed the event as a masterclass. Honestly, I was intimidated because I felt like I wouldn’t be able to follow along. Learning brewing techniques has always been my biggest learning curve. Yet, it’s a skill I know I need to master in order to defend the quality of Philippine coffee from people who claim Philippine coffee is bad but use the wrong brewing techniques. 

We tried one of the hottest beans on the market, a Panama geisha anaerobic natural, brewed two ways. One was under-extracted and the other was over-extracted. The difference was night and day. The lesson: your brewing recipe should match the bean and your equipment. Farmers, producers, and roasters put years of work into getting us our beans. When we learn how to brew in a way that gives justice to the bean, we have an opportunity to present just how great the quality of our coffee really is. It often takes a few tries to dial in a recipe just right, but I now feel embarrassingly convicted that using a generic TikTok recipe does a great disservice to all the parts of the coffee value chain that come before my V60.

Brewing is the best way to discover what makes our coffee special. The deeper we get, the better we will grow at communicating just how special our beans really are. Matt Winston was excellent at this. His lecture put to ease my anxieties about whether I could keep up, and before I knew it, 3 hours had passed and I had a notepad full of notes. I’m feeling really confident that there’s even more to explore, and that makes me so excited.

This is Timdrinkscoffee, where coffee meets contemplation.