Paradoxically, a global coffee pestilence catapulted Lipa in Batangas from an unknown town to an affluent city, simply because it survived the global coffee epidemic of 1887 to 1889. In three short years, Lipa had its Golden Age, a phenomenal rags-to-riches story, while coffee magnates abroad grew hungry.

Coffee was the magic commodity that gripped the world in the mid-19th century. Coffee was brought to the Philippines from Mexico in 1740 by the Franciscan friars on the galleons that plied the Acapulco to Manila trade route. It was propagated by the Augustinians in the Batangas towns of Lipa, Lemery, Ibaan, and Taal. The Augustinians chose these four towns to propagate coffee because of their cool mountain weather conducive to coffee production.

If you go to Lipa City today, or to any of the other three towns, you will see remnants of its Golden Age in the ornate Spanish-style ancestral mansions along its narrow streets. (The wide streets came much later on the outskirts.) The thick metal grills of their gates and windows have resisted the test of time, the so-called Materiales Fuertes of the coffee boom of Spanish colonization. The “windows below the windows” — the small wooden sliding doors underneath the two-inch-thick narra window sills — were opened on special occasions, such as the Flores de Mayo after the Quaresma (Lent) and the colorful processions during the Fiesta.

The rise and fall of Lipa’s coffee empire, the moment of its glory, was like a lotus flower that blooms at dawn and recedes by mid-afternoon, or like Japan’s cherry blossoms which explode today and wilt within a few days. Such is the nature of the rise-and-fall of empires that have come and gone — like the Madjapahit, the Ottoman, the Byzantine, the Roman empires — only Lipa was on a much smaller scale.

In the 1870s, Brazil, the largest producer of coffee in the world, was hit by a deadly coffee infestation called Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR), a type of fungi. This spread quickly to other coffee-producing nations worldwide, in Africa, Sri Lanka, and Java. Batangas was insulated from this global infestation somehow, and “from 1887 to 1889, the Philippines was the only source of coffee in the world.” (Wikipedia, “Coffee Production in the Philippines”).

During this period, Lipa alone produced about 10,000-million metric tons of coffee exclusively for the entire global market at about 20 times the 1865 world prices, making its Barako coffee variety (scientific name: Liberica) famous worldwide. This fantastic windfall was estimated at P2.5 million — equivalent to one-billion pesos today — concentrated in one place.

Modern-day international traders claim that this is a gross underestimation if we talk of one town virtually supplying the whole world. They say it was more like five-fold or five-billion pesos, if you consider the extreme global coffee shortage, making Lipa coffee as good as gold.

Thus began the short-lived Golden Age of Lipa, with its majestic mansions and with its carriages with silver harnesses plying Calle Real. The decadent coffee magnates had their personal silversmiths and goldsmiths. The most famous goldsmith was the legendary Pedrong Kuba. The French diamond trader Estrella del Norte in Manila put up a branch in Lipa.

After three years of splendor and opulence, in 1889, CLR finally reached the Philippines, and the decline was as quick as the ascendency. Almost all the coffee trees in Batangas were decimated by the insect infestation.

By 1891, coffee production was reduced to one-sixth of its 1889 bounty. There was the story of the daughter of a coffee magnate “walking” the entire length of the Lipa Cathedral aisle on her knees, clutching a coffee branch, begging the Lord to restore their fortune — in vain. By that time, Brazil had started recovering from the CLR and was quick to claim its former glory. The surviving coffee seedlings were moved to Cavite and the Batangas coffee farmers reverted to other crops.

Of course, the coffee industry of Batangas did not die. It also recovered, like Brazil. Today, there are inconspicuous stalls at the back of the Lipa market selling coffee in bulk.

Coffee persisted, but there was a new enemy as deadly as the CLR fungi, namely, foreign multinationals. The advent of instant coffee, introduced by Nestle, gave rise to a great demand, which broke the market clout of Lipa. Nestle coffee would eventually be replaced by various new brands.

A revival would come much later when instant coffee was displaced by the traditional brewed coffee that had launched the Golden Age of Lipa.

(Main source for this article is “Coffee for Life” by Annabelle Plantilla of Haribon.)

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