The Giving Cafe (TGC), a social enterprise that works with coffee farmers to make the value chain more equitable and transparent, launched Proud Liberica, four syrups made from byproducts of the Liberica (aka barako) coffee tree.
“It’s called Proud Liberica because we should be proud of our Liberica,” TGC owner Michael Harris Conlin said.
The syrups were created because Conlin was looking for a way to encourage coffee farmers to continue cultivating their trees in between harvests. “We decided to buy… all the waste from taking care of the tree… and we were able to extract the flavors from the leaf to make a leaf syrup,” Conlin said. “We were able to take the shell of the coffee and turn it into cascara syrup. We took the flowers and we turned it into a flower concentrate, and we took the wood and… extracted the smoke and turned it into a syrup that tastes kind of like whiskey.”
The Proud Liberica line was launched in Japan last September 2022, and has been receiving a lot of attention around the world. As of the interview, the syrups are used in two coffee shops in Japan and a couple of local hotels have agreed to start using them in their food and drink as well.
This bodes well for coffee farmers. “All that stuff is stuff that’s thrown away, but coffee farmers are making money on wood…. So it’s another way to make sure that they can make ends meet… in between ,” Conlin said.
Not only is the world slowly learning about the Philippines’ very own kapeng barako, coffee farmers are also realizing that they don’t have to wait for a harvest in order to make money.
Photos courtesy of Michael Harris Conlin