Local Coffee!

A few weeks ago I went up to Baguio with my family. It was unusually warm (for Baguio weather--but still cool by any other Philippine standard) and humid, I actually sweated a little. Still, it was fun, and after a weekend of waiting around at the club veranda for my parents to finish playing golf, I went to the Baguio market for the first time.

Bad ass lolo on a bicycle buying rice in the market! Biking around Baguio. All those hills. Auughh the thought makes my thighs cry. So many people at the market, hustling and bustling and whatever else you might think happens at a market. My mom even hired a little boy to carry around what we bought. Loads of stuff.

Particularly, coffee.

We got twelve kilos of the stuff. TWELVE KILOS. That's a lot of coffee for a family of six. And only my parents really drink a lot of coffee. Well the seven kilos were gifts to other people but still. You could smell the roasted coffee from fifteen meters away.

They sold flavored coffee, but all we got was the darkest roast of Benguet coffee. Benguet is in the Cordillera mountains, somewhere in the middle region of Luzon.

I'm not a big coffee drinker, but they make amazing coffee. Ever since my dad tried Benguet coffee, he stopped buying his imported Arabica and would just get from Baguio instead. It looked like a lot of people felt the same way, 'cos I noticed a lot of people from Manila stocking up at the stall.

With the deliciously dark smell of roasted beans being ground wafting in the air, I couldn't help but hang around and take big, deep breaths. Soooo good. I like the smell of coffee better than I like drinking it.

Apart from the wonderfully smooth taste, it has the added advantage of being local. Maybe I'm generalizing, but it would be good to support our local farmers and buy local coffee, especially since it's so good anyway.

This guy's one goofy walis seller. We bought a bunch of those too. The walis, not the guy.