Category Archives: Videos

This is the second video from our trip to Cavite and the small family coffee farm. We enjoyed walking through the dense jungle-like land and learned a lot about small coffee farms and how they operate.

This video shows the maximizing of the land with more than 5 crops growing in the same fields.  The Coconut and Banana trees  provide shade for the coffee trees and notice that many mixed fruit trees abound… some I’ve never seen before.

The main coffee crop was already harvested… that happens from December through February… but there were plenty of beans left on the trees that hadn’t been picked because they weren’t ripe at the time of harvest. The entire crop is spread out over a concrete slab and dried in the sun.  When dry, the beans are then bagged and sold, as is, … the purchasers do their own processing.

These small coffee farmers sell to buyers who travel around from farm to farm buying and loading the dried beans as they make purchases. The farmer can also process the beans by hand in a large wooden apparatus (Halo and Lusong in  Tagalog) … shown in upcoming videos… but it is tedious work and almost never done, except for personal use. The green coffee beans for personal use are roasted by hand in a shallow pan over a wood fire in the kitchen… and the grinding of the roasted beans is done in a wooden tool that looks like a mortar and pestle… all by hand.  Coffee is brewed over the wood fire in a simple aluminum water kettle. All of the things I describe here are shown in this video and in upcoming videos that will be posted as I complete them. Enjoy!