The birth of artisanal cafes

The artisanal cafe is slowly gaining ground all around Manila, bringing with it an altogether new culture on how we Filipinos enjoy our coffee.

Perusing history’s pages, cafes have been a place for artists and dreamers to spend their days fixated in their own crafts and business. The first few coffee shops ever built were made for people to engage in conversation, discuss relevant political matters, and hear tales, and until now, coffee and cafes are an elemental part of the hustle and bustle of the city. Professionals and minimum wage workers alike seem to hold on to coffee–be it 3-in-1 or especially brewed–as if it were the invisible buzz that drives everyone to their work and through their lives. It’s as if more than just biology, or love, it’s coffee that keeps the world turning.

It’s no surprise, then, that amidst the busy streets of Makati, artisanal cafes are changing the coffee culture bit by bit through the sweet aroma of specialty coffee they serve. I sat down with both Rosario Juan, owner of Commune Café, and Kevin Tang, co-owner of Yardstick Coffee, to discover the glories and woes of running their own artisanal cafes.

Soulful, calculated beginnings

It is not an easy task to choose what type of business to open, but ever since graduating college, Rosario Juan has had a nurtured love for coffee. She worked for a coffee brand in Beijing for a few years and was a witness to how cafes flourished there.

During her stay as a branch manager, she observed how expatriates in Beijing made the cafe a kind of communing place, where people who didn’t know anyone could join events and socialize with fellow expats. At the same time, it became something like a hub for English books that either weren’t sold in Beijing, or were sold at a very hefty price. Some expats would drop off their collection of books in the cafe for other travelers to read.  “About 95% of the books were just brought in by strangers,” says Juan with an easy smile.

Cafes in Beijing weren’t just a place to get coffee, but were also a way to exchange cultures from all around the world. During her travels, Juan made sure to make a list of artisanal cafes to visit, going through every little cafe in Melbourne, Paris, and other similar cities. Commenting on the prominence of coffee chains and the lack of artisanal cafes here in the Philippines, she says, “Each cafe has its own character. So that’s what I wanted to see here in the Philippines, na hindi puro chain.”

Since opening her cafe here in the Philippines, she has had that vision in mind. Being a social media enthusiast, she has also wanted Commune to be a place for online communities to meet-up. “That’s why I call it the Commune. Because it’s really a place for communities to get together. It can be formal or informal, for meetings, for dates, it’s nice and casual.”

On the other hand, Kevin Tang, having studied in Singapore, saw this as an opportunity to bring in quality coffee in the Philippines. “This whole third wave or specialty coffee scene started happening in Singapore and we thought ‘Oh, maybe this could also happen in the Philippines.’” He underscores the third-wave coffee culture that aims to redefine coffee as an artisanal drink and not just as a commodity. “More than just showcasing what we have, we also want to promote and to tell people that the way you serve coffee can be better.”

Behind the coffee and the cafe

Artisanal cafes, in order to produce quality hand-crafted coffee, rely on well-trained staff and a hands-on owner to monitor every step of the drink’s creation. Tang comments that in order to keep the staff motivated, they hold day to day coffee tasting and trainings. Meanwhile, Juan adds, “You should know how to run all aspects of the business. Kailangan marunong karin mag-waiter, mag-barista, mag-cashier.” She retells a story in which one morning, she had to hurriedly go to the cafe at 8 AM to fill in the shoes of a barista who was absent for work.

They also boast of their exotic and unique blend of coffee beans. “One of our main thrusts is that we only use local coffee. All our coffee beans are sourced and roasted in the Philippines. Our own blend is mostly Benguet Arabica with a bit of Robustas from Cavite. And we feature ever so often single-origin Arabica from different places,” Juan says.

Delving into the plight of our Filipino coffee-bean farmers, she adds, “We really have good coffee, but we have to work on consistency. It’s like this year masarap, pero the next parang hindi masyado. If the farmers have a system, they can be more consistent… On the other hand, a lot of the farmers are really poor. They dont have the right tools. If you’ve been to a place na pinapatuyo yung beans sa kalye, they don’t even have sacks that’s why it’s on the street. Sometimes they can’t sell their beans, because even riding a jeepney would cost them money. They don’t have enough for that.”

Tang, on the other hand, roasts specialty grained Arabica overseas from South America and Indonesia. “We only source for the top and specialty grain Arabica. It goes into roasting, and then when we start with coffee, we don’t roast it too dark. We roast it in a certain way that the flavor is still there.”

He adds to what Juan had to say about lack of development in our local coffee-bean agriculture, “There [is] no specialty grain coffee in the Philippines yet. Although, the coffee scene here is improving. The farming practices here are still not up to par with other countries.”

He says that by opening up Yardstick, he hopes to raise awareness in the potential of our own coffee beans to be recognized globally. He wants his customers to ask, “Why don’t we get it from the Philippines? How can we help our local farmers and improve our local coffee?” The third-wave coffee culture then, besides its beguiling concept of coffee put on a pedestal, has a more reactive cause lying at its heart.

The Filipino coffee scene

Tang describes one of our trademarks as a coffee-drinking nation. “Since we are a coffee growing nation and since coffee is part of the Filipino livelihood, most people experience dipping pandesal into coffee.” Taking kape and pandesal in the morning to prepare for the day ahead is a very familiar picture for most of us, one that rings true of who we are as a nation: eager to get started with a day’s work.

It’s almost a common trope for coffee-enthusiasts who also travel constantly that part of experiencing a country’s culture is to seek out their cafes and discover how folks there take their coffee. It is always a different experience. On one of Juan’s travels to Stockholm, she had to share a table with a couple who were clearly wrapped in a world of rose-colored lenses, very far from our own conservative ways. A café is a place to “make friends or to sit alone, either to relax or to work”, she says. Even from different ends of the emotional spectrum, from having the most awful or best day at work, coffee is the unified form of catharsis.

Be it quality or community or both, the artisanal café is forging a new path for our local beans and local farmers. According to Tang, “The exposure that we’re getting is creating awareness and a demand for concepts that are local and beautiful.” Even then, it manifests in the enriching of our own culture—that we are starting to grow out of our very humble routines of kape and pandesal, to a kind of coffee culture that begs soul and refined taste. A cup of coffee not just for the buzz, but for the beauty of the taste and the act itself.