Why Barako Tastes Bitter: And How One Farmer Changed That

Time. Something we all know.

I've been thinking about it a lot lately. How fast this year feels. As of this writing, it's already the fourth month of 2026. Didn't we just flip the calendar?

And then I started thinking about the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. The kind you finish in less than thirty minutes. If it's an espresso, it's gone in five. Five minutes. For something that took years to become what it is.

That stayed with me.

The soil in Baungon, Bukidnon had been waiting a long time. Centuries, really. The highlands around it are built on volcanic material, basalt and pyroclastic deposits that broke down slowly over generations into something rich and mineral and generous. It wasn't waiting for a crop. It was waiting for the right person.

It waited through the Spanish colonial era. Through the coffee boom of the 1880s and the rust epidemic that ended it. Through all of it, the soil in those Bukidnon foothills kept building itself, patient and unhurried, into something that could hold a life's work.

And then, eventually, a man named Boy showed up.

His name is Boy Javier. The coffee I want to tell you about is his, Bukidnon Liberica, from a smallholder farm in Baungon, at roughly 400 meters above sea level. It is a story almost entirely made of time. The time it took for a species of coffee tree to travel from West Africa to a Philippine hillside. The time the soil spent forming from volcanic rock. The time a single cherry took to ripen on a branch. And the time someone named Boy spent growing up, living his life, and eventually finding his way to those trees.

Let's slow down. I promise this is worth it.

I. First: Why Is This Coffee Called Liberica?

Most people who drink coffee know two types: Arabica (bright, fruity, the specialty world's darling) and Robusta (strong, earthy, the backbone of your instant 3-in-1). A smaller number know that there's a third. And it's the one Filipinos have been drinking for generations.

Coffea liberica. Liberica coffee.

The name is Latin and geographic. Liberica means "from Liberia," the country in West Africa where this species originated. And Liberia itself? That country takes its name from the Latin word liber, meaning "free." And so liberica simply means "from the free.” 

II. And What Exactly Is Barako?

Here is where it gets good.

Barako is not a different coffee from Liberica. It's a name, a Philippine name, a Tagalog name, for Philippine-grown Liberica. Specifically the Liberica cultivated in the volcanic soils of Batangas and Cavite, the heartland provinces of kapeng barako.

Here's an important distinction worth getting clear in your head: all Barako is Liberica, but not all Liberica is Barako. Liberica is grown in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia too. None of those are called Barako. Barako is the Filipino version, the Philippine-cultivated, culture-carrying specific expression of the species. Think of it the way Cognac works: all Cognac is brandy, but not all brandy is Cognac. The name tells you where it's from and what it carries.

So where does the word "Barako" actually come from?

This is my favorite part.

The word barako comes directly from the Spanish word verraco, which the Real Academia Española defines as a male pig kept for breeding. In Tagalog, barako refers literally to a boar, and colloquially to a man who is brave, strong, and capable of facing any challenge.

Spanish colonial influence on the Philippine language runs deep and is still alive in everyday words. Verraco became barako. The meaning crossed over whole: a breeding boar, something powerful and untamed.

And the name has a literal dimension too. The Slow Food Foundation notes that wild boars are known to feed on the leaves and berries of the coffee plant. The animal and the coffee share the same name.

III. How Did Liberica End Up in the Philippines?

The story involves a Franciscan monk, a century of coffee, and a collapse nobody saw coming.

The Philippine Coffee Board notes that the full story of how coffee first arrived in the country is not completely documented. One famous account, which the Board itself describes as myth, tells of a Franciscan monk who brought a small quantity of coffee beans to the country and planted them in his garden, from which the trees were eventually transplanted to other areas. What the records do show is that by the 1800s, trees were already growing in Lipa, Batangas, near Taal Volcano and its crater lake. Augustinian friars encouraged their spread. By the mid-1850s, Batangas coffee was making its way to markets in America and Australia. When the Suez Canal opened, European buyers followed. By 1886, the Philippines had become known as one of the world's four largest coffee exporters.

Then came the collapse.

Insect infestation came first, then the rust. The Philippine Coffee Board records that within two years of the collapse, coffee output across the country had shrunk to around one-sixth of what it had been. Landowners pulled up their coffee and planted other crops.

What happened in the decades that followed is a story the records tell only partially. What we do know is where it stands today: globally, Liberica accounts for around 2% of all coffee produced and consumed. To understand how much ground it has lost, consider that as recently as the 1980s, Liberica still made up around 3 to 4 percent of total global coffee output. That figure tells you something about the distance between what this coffee once was and what it became. The Slow Food Foundation has added Barako to its Ark of Taste, a global catalogue of traditional foods with deep cultural roots and a distinct character. And in recent years, something has shifted. Local coffee shops are serving it again. Farmers are growing it again. The conversation around it has changed.

IV. Liberica in the Philippine Setting

Liberica makes up around 2% of all coffee produced globally, grown commercially in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, mainly for local consumption. Outside these countries, it remains largely unfamiliar, what the same paper calls a species yet to be discovered by the wider world.

The Philippines is one of only a few countries where Liberica is commercially produced. Two sub-species are grown here: C. liberica liberica, known locally as Barako, and C. liberica var dewevrei, known as Excelsa. According to data from the Department of Agriculture cited in a peer-reviewed study from De La Salle University, Barako accounts for around 1.1% of national coffee production and Excelsa for 5.7%.

Production is concentrated in Batangas and Cavite, driven by historical ties, a strong domestic following, and growing interest from specialty importers. Researchers have also noted that the species' larger beans and deeper root systems give it the potential to perform well as the planet warms, a quality drawing attention beyond its flavor alone.

V. Where Liberica Grows

Malaysia is by far the largest commercial Liberica producer proportionally. Within that group, the Philippines is where Barako carries the most specific cultural identity, a name, a history, and a growing specialty market built around a single species.

VI. The Liberica Tree Itself, and Why Size Matters

Before we talk about how this coffee is processed and what it tastes like, let me paint you a picture of the tree.

Coffea liberica trees can grow up to 17 meters tall. That is not a typo.

To picture that: stack three jeepneys end to end, vertically, and you are close. These are genuinely enormous trees. Harvesters use ladders to reach the cherries.

Now compare that to Arabica. Left unpruned, Arabica trees can grow up to 8 to 12 meters tall. On a managed farm, Arabica is kept at around two to three meters through regular pruning, from about the height of a standard doorframe to a little above it. Growers prune them deliberately so pickers can reach the cherries without ladders. Liberica at 17 meters is not just a different species. It is a different scale of plant entirely.

That size difference runs all the way through: the Liberica leaf is bigger, the cherry is bigger, and the beans are among the largest of any coffee species in the world.

That size is central to understanding how Liberica must be roasted, which we'll come back to. A bigger, denser bean conducts heat differently than a smaller one. It needs more patience.

VII. Where Boy Javier Grows His Coffee: Baungon, Bukidnon, at 400 MASL

Bukidnon is not the kind of place you stumble into. To get there from Manila, you fly to Cagayan de Oro, which takes about 1 hour and 40 minutes, then ride a bus from CDO into the Bukidnon highlands for another 1.5 to 2 hours. Total: somewhere between 3.5 and 4 hours of travel, depending on connections. If you go by sea and road, the journey stretches to over 36 hours. This is the interior of Mindanao. You have to mean to go there.

Baungon is a municipality in the province of Bukidnon, in the landlocked northern interior of Mindanao. The name Bukidnon comes from the word for people of the mountains, a reference to the Kitanglad Mountain Range that defines the province. The peaks go up to 2,400 meters, but the farming areas where Liberica does well sit considerably lower than that.

Boy's coffee grows at approximately 400 MASL, which is 400 meters above sea level.

Here's how to picture that: 400 meters sits just above the roofline of the Empire State Building in New York, which tops out at 381 meters. Another way to feel it: take the height of your bedroom ceiling and stack it roughly 150 times. In the Philippine landscape, it's the kind of elevation you'd reach on that long bus ride up from CDO, above the hot flat plains, where the air begins to cool at night and clouds sometimes roll through in the early morning.

But here's what makes 400 MASL specifically right for Liberica:

Arabica needs altitude. It thrives at 1,000 MASL or above, where cooler temperatures slow the ripening of the cherry and allow complex sugars to build over a longer period.

Liberica is different. It grows well below 1,000 meters, in warm, humid, low-to-mid-altitude conditions. At 400 MASL, Boy Javier's trees are in their sweet spot: high enough for good drainage and slightly cooler nights, low enough to stay warm and lush. Add Bukidnon's mineral-rich soil, with a history of agricultural fertility that has earned it the name "the food basket of Mindanao," and you have terrain that Liberica is genuinely suited for.

In 2022, Bukidnon ranked as the second-highest coffee-producing province in the Philippines, with 9,042 metric tons of coffee produced according to the Department of Agriculture. To picture that volume: a standard 40-foot shipping container holds about 18 to 20 metric tons of coffee. That figure would fill roughly 475 of those containers, enough to line them up nearly six kilometers end to end.

VIII. The Name "Boy"

Now. The man behind this lot.

His name is Wilfredo “Boy” Javier. And in the Philippines, "Boy" is not simply a nickname. It is a name that parents give to children and that those children carry for life, including on their birth certificate. The Philippine Statistics Authority addresses it by name in civil registration guidance, which tells you something about how often it appears in official records. According to CBC News, which spoke to Filipino Canadians about their naming culture, "Boy" is commonly given to the youngest male in a family. "I have three cousins with the name Baby and three cousins named Boy," one person told the outlet.

Ask any Filipino and chances are they have met one.

His farm is called Kape Kumaykay, named after the river that runs through it. The name was chosen to honor the place where the coffee grows. Boy started planting coffee after a friend encouraged him to try. He began by producing his own seedlings with the help of his farm manager, who had previously worked as a technician for Nestlé.

IX. What Makes This Coffee Different: Washed vs. Natural Processing

Most Barako you've encountered, the dark, heavy, intensely aromatic brew your lola made, was processed naturally. The processing method is everything here, so let me explain what that means.

The coffee cherry is a small fruit. An Arabica cherry is about the size of a cranberry. A Liberica cherry is nearly double that, closer to the size of a small grape. Inside that fruit is the actual coffee bean, the seed. To get to the bean, you have to remove the fruit.

Natural processing is the traditional way. The whole cherry is left to dry in the sun for weeks. As it dries slowly, the fruit's sugars and flavor compounds work their way into the bean. With Liberica, the result is something intensely sweet and tropical: heavy jackfruit notes, thick body, wild and overwhelming. This is the coffee your grandparents drank.

Washed processing is what Boy Javier does with this lot. The fruit is removed from the bean quickly, within 30 minutes of picking, using water and a depulping machine. The beans are then held in fermentation tanks for 12 to 72 hours while microorganisms break down the remaining sticky layer of fruit coating, called mucilage. After that everything is washed clean and the beans are laid out to dry.

The result is a cup where most of those heavy fruit flavors are gone. What remains is the clean, direct character of the bean itself: the flavors that come from the soil, the altitude, the variety, the seed's own chemistry.

For Liberica specifically, this timing is not optional. Because of its high sugar content, the cherry begins fermenting almost immediately after picking. Miss that 30-minute window and the fermentation runs away from you. Instead of clarity you get earthy, sour, off notes.

That 30-minute window is also where the difference between a machine and a pair of hands becomes very real. According to research on small-scale depulpers, an electric or motorized depulper can handle upward of 300 kilograms of cherries per hour. A manual hand-cranked pulper, the kind many smallholder farms still rely on, manages around 60 kilograms per hour. For a smallholder harvesting 80 to 100 kilograms of ripe cherries in a morning, that's the difference between finishing in roughly 15 minutes with a machine, or spending close to two hours cranking by hand.

Think of it this way. Natural processing is soaking a tea bag until the water is dark and the flavor is everywhere. Washed processing is a quick steep, just enough to draw out what the leaf itself carries, without letting it go murky.

X. What Does This Cup Actually Taste Like?

The tasting notes for Boy Javier's Bukidnon Liberica are: cinnamon bark, stevia-like sweetness, guyabano, and a gentle umami finish.

Cinnamon bark: The actual bark: warm, slightly woody, spiced. It's a depth note, not a candy note.

Stevia-like sweetness: Clean sweetness without bitterness underneath. Think of the sweetness of fresh sugarcane juice, bright and clean, with nothing bitter underneath. It comes from cherries picked at peak ripeness, when the sugars inside the seed have had the full time they need to develop.

Guyabano: Known in English as soursop, as guanabana across Latin America, and as graviola in Brazil. It goes by many names depending on where you are in the world. That tropical brightness, floral and slightly tart at the same time, sweet but with an edge. That's what it brings to the cup.

Gentle umami: A soft, savory, mouth-coating sensation that lingers after you swallow, like the feeling after a sip of a really good clear soup. It rounds everything out and makes you want one more sip.

XI. The Farm: Understanding the Scale

Boy Javier is a smallholder farmer. The most widely used definition in the specialty coffee world puts the threshold at farms smaller than five hectares. By that measure, smallholders account for 95% of the world's 12.5 million coffee farms and contribute 67% of global production. In the Philippines, smallholder farmers, those working one to two hectares on average, account for an estimated 80% of domestic coffee production.

That said, the word "smallholder" means very different things depending on where you are. Coffee Intelligence notes that in Brazil, a cooperative like Cooxupe defines smallholders as farms producing between 500 and 2,000 bags of coffee a year, volumes that would be considered large-scale in most other coffee-growing regions. Meanwhile, coffee farming in Africa tends to operate on a much smaller and more fragmented scale, to the point where what counts as a small farm in Brazil could exceed the size of a large farm in parts of Africa. What is considered a "large" farm in almost every coffee-producing country in the world, more than 20 hectares, would still be relatively modest by Brazilian standards.

Here's what those land sizes actually feel like:

Boy Javier's farm is a smallholder plot. That's the land where this entire lot of coffee came from. Hand-picked, careful sorting. The kind of scale where every cherry matters.

XII. Why This Roast Is Different, and Why It Matters

Here is something most people don't know about Barako: the bitterness it's famous for was never really about the bean.

It was about the heat.

Most specialty roasters learn their craft on Arabica. Their instincts, their timing, their benchmarks, all of it is calibrated to a small, medium-density seed. Liberica is physically larger and far denser. Push heat at Arabica speed and what happens is this: the outside of the bean caramelizes and browns while the inside is still releasing moisture. The outer layers finish. The core doesn't. What you get in the cup is a collision: burnt on the outside, raw in the middle. Sharp, bitter, flat. The coffee drinks like a mistake.

That's the "bitter Barako" most Filipinos grew up drinking. Not because Liberica is a bitter species. Because it was almost always roasted by people who were treating it like a smaller bean.

We know this now because we've measured it. In our bitterness calibration sessions, we mapped three compounds that define how bitterness behaves in any roasted coffee.

1. Chlorogenic acid lactones are the good bitter, the pleasant structural bite of a well-developed medium roast.

2. Diketopiperazines appear when the roast is underdeveloped: hollow, papery, astringent.

3. Phenylindanes form when it goes too far: harsh, acrid, the taste of char.

Every bitter Barako you've ever had was probably dominated by the last two. Underdone inside, overdone outside. The roaster never stood a chance because they were using Arabica timing on a Liberica bean.

Three Phases. One Principle: Take Your Time.

We roast Liberica in three phases. Each one has a job. Skip one, rush one, and the cup tells you immediately.

A-Phase (Drying): Set the Foundation 

The roast begins quiet. Green beans tumble into the drum. Initial bean temperature rises. Nothing dramatic happens yet. 

A-Phase is the drying phase. Water leaves the bean. The color shifts from green to pale yellow. And the only job here is patience. Keep the heat even. Let the bean reach equilibrium on its own terms.

This is the part most roasters rush. Especially roasters trained on Arabica, where the drying phase moves faster because the seed is smaller.

Liberica doesn't work that way.

Its bean is physically larger than Arabica, with a porous cell structure that absorbs heat differently. The core volume is significantly greater. It needs longer to reach thermal equilibrium throughout the entire seed. Rush this phase, and the outside develops while the inside stays behind. Intact cellulose that's unevenly roasted in the core is what creates that gritty, papery texture most people associate with Barako.

That grittiness was never the species. It was always linked to the roast.

So we give A-Phase roughly 35-40% of the total roast time. No panic. No shortcuts. Just even, steady heat application at nearly 100% power for a full batch size until the foundation is set.

B-Phase (Maillard): Build Sweetness

This is the secret.

B-Phase is the Maillard phase. The beans shift from yellow to brown. Sugars and amino acids interact through the Maillard reaction, the same chemistry that gives bread its crust and meat its sear in a pan. Cinnamon warmth. Stevia sweetness. The tropical brightness of Guyabano. All of it forms here, before the bean has even cracked open, in a phase that takes up more than half of the total roast time. 

Most people think sweetness comes from roasting darker or longer. It doesn't. Sweetness comes from this phase. From the browning reactions that happen between the drying phase and first crack. The longer and more controlled this window is, the more complexity and aftertaste products develops in the cup.

We give B-Phase more than half the total roast time. Over 48-55%.

Low, steady heat. A declining rate of rise that never stalls. Progressive reduction in energy so the reaction sustains without running away.

Here is what happens when this phase gets the time it needs: caramel and honey aromatics develop. Spice notes like cinnamon emerge. The cup becomes smoother, rounder, and more layered.

Here is what happens when it doesn't.

When B-Phase is rushed, the chlorogenic acid in the bean degrades too rapidly. Instead of breaking down progressively into compounds that add complexity, it produces excess quinic acid. That's the compound behind harsh, medicinal bitterness. And the compensating flavors that would have balanced it out never form. The pyrazines that create nuttiness. The furans behind caramel sweetness. The thiols that carry fruit. All of them need time in this phase to develop. Cut it short, and you lose the balance entirely.

Liberica has comparable sugar content to Arabica. Sometimes more. The potential for sweetness is already inside the bean. The question is whether the roast gives it enough time to express.

This is where patience stops being a philosophy and becomes a chemical requirement.

C-Phase (Development): Finish Clean

First crack. The beans pop. 

This is where most roasters feel the urge to keep going. To push the roast a little further, develop a little more, chase a darker color or a heavier body.

With Liberica, that urge is the trap.

C-Phase is the development phase. For us, it accounts for roughly 10-14% of the total roast time. Short. Decisive. Controlled.

After first crack, the goal is integration. The flavors built during Phase B need a brief window to lock in, to settle into the structure of the bean. Too little development and the cup tastes sharp and grassy. Too much and everything you built gets burned away.

Liberica's high sugar content makes caramelization particularly vigorous after first crack. The window between enough caramelization, where mouthfeel deepens and sweetness integrates, and over-caramelization, where volatile aromatics are destroyed, is much narrower than Arabica. Aldehydes, furans, pyrazines. These compounds that carry the most nuanced flavors are also the most fragile. Push past the window and they're gone.

At this stage, the bean is generating its own heat. The exothermic reaction has taken over. The roaster's job shifts from driving to guiding. You're no longer adding energy. You're deciding when to stop.

We stop early. 

Because the sweetness was already built in B-Phase. C-Phase is just the frame around it.

The key insight behind all of this is simple, and it changes how you think about every cup of Liberica you've ever had: most of the sweetness in this coffee was built before first crack. The flavor is made in the patience, not the finish. Every bitter Barako most people have tasted was probably rushed through exactly that phase.

XIII. On Seeing Something for What It Is

There is something quietly beautiful about learning to appreciate a thing for its own character instead of measuring it against something else.

Liberica has spent most of its history being treated as a stand-in. A cheaper alternative to Arabica. A fallback crop after rust wiped out the more desirable species. When it didn't taste the same, when it didn't respond to the same roasting temperatures, when it came out bitter and strange and too big for machines calibrated for smaller beans, the assumption was always that Liberica had failed. That it was lesser.

But Liberica wasn't failing. It was being asked to be something it was never meant to be.

The same thing happens with people, with places, with anything that doesn't fit the mold it was pressed into. We measure it against the standard and call it deficient. We roast it at Arabica speed and call it bitter. We miss the guyabano brightness and the cinnamon warmth and the savory finish entirely, because we never gave the bean the conditions to produce them.

What changes when you stop trying to turn Liberica into Arabica, and start asking instead what Liberica actually is, is that you find something extraordinary. A coffee that held on through decades with almost no commercial market behind it. A bean that needs more patience, more care, a wider window, a slower hand. And when it gets those things, it produces a cup that is entirely its own.

The disappointment was never in the bean. It was in the expectation.

This is true of most things worth knowing.

XIV. Back to Time

The soil in Baungon was there long before Boy Javier was born. It was there before his parents, before their parents, before the coffee trees themselves were introduced to this country. It built itself slowly, over centuries, from volcanic rock breaking down into mineral-rich earth, from rainfall soaking through hillside layers, from organic matter settling and becoming something quietly extraordinary. It wasn't in a hurry. It was becoming.

And somewhere in all that time, Boy was born. Grew up. Lived the life that people live before they find the thing they chose. And eventually he came to those trees on a hillside in Bukidnon, at 400 meters above sea level, and the soil that had been waiting for someone like him finally had its farmer.

The cherry that became your coffee took roughly twelve to fourteen months to ripen on the branch after flowering. The tree that bore it took three to five years to mature enough to produce fruit. The species itself traveled from West Africa to the Philippines over centuries of colonial trade routes and maritime proximity. And the soil held all of that history underneath it, patient and ready.

And then someone picked the cherry by hand. Depulped it. Fermented it carefully. Dried it. Milled it. Shipped it. Roasted it in three measured phases totaling probably fifteen to eighteen minutes. Ground it. Brewed it.

You drank it in five.

This is not a reason to feel guilty. It's a reason to taste it more carefully.

Because somewhere in Baungon, Bukidnon, at 400 meters above sea level, on a patch of volcanic soil, a man named Boy, carrying the warmth of a Filipino naming tradition that stretches back through generations, is tending trees that are taller than three of him stacked up, waiting for exactly the right moment to pick exactly the right cherries, so that someone, somewhere, can have a five-minute cup of coffee. 

Liberica was never bitter. It was just waiting for someone to take their time.

Roasted for filter, but pull it as espresso and add milk. Someone once described it as pecan cake. Someone else said cereal. We'd love to know what you taste.

Tasting notes: Cinnamon bark · Stevia-like sweetness · Guyabano · Gentle umami finish

Origin: Baungon, Bukidnon, Philippines · ~400 MASL · Washed process · Smallholder lot

Producer: Boy Javier · Kape Kumaykay Farm