the kalinga blend

a very close friend called me up and eagerly informed me that his coming to davao and with him is the famous "Kalinga Blend". there are two things rushing into my mind. first, i didnt know that there is indeed a kalinga blend. second, i never know that it is famous. being a coffee lover, i was indeed little excited to have a cup of that "famous" coffee. the bearer have the reason to be proud. my friend and bok, atty jel bongat is the provincial administator of Kalinga Apayao. i met him few years ago in cagayan de oro city when he applied for an honorary membership of our class, PNPA Class of 1992. he was then with the Bureau of Customs as legal officer based in mnila internation container port.

the packaging is bit impressive. the coffee is already grounded and is inside an aluminum foil. but my instinct says, this coffee is definitely not good. another thing strikes me is the instructions at the back. it says, boil a cup of water and pour the contents. again, definitely, the people producing this coffee do not really know their coffee knowledges. and now the taste, to give justice to this coffee, i used my french press. i didnt boil it as it was in the instructions. it confirmed my gut feelings, it sucks. it is a mile away from our own catimor coffee. of course, there are factors to be considered such as time of roasting, the quality of beans during harvest and etc..... in addition, for person who have tasted on the world's best coffee such as the red sea, yemen, brazil, my taste buds are conditioned only for the best tasting coffee.

my verdict, this coffee is not worth drinking. your very convenient 3-in-1 instant coffee is better. saying to a friend that his coffee really sucks is the hardest word to say. but you have to. for the benefit of the doubt, ill send some this to the main man in coffee, bobby timonera, if ths coffee worth a second look.

just like me, i let my kids have their cup of coffee at younger age. maybe it just run in the family that kids are suppose to have their cup of coffee every morning just like adults do. mornings are never perfect without our coffee. its more than just a cup of coffee but it is life in itself. as in the old days, coffee will make or break the day.

my shelu is not different from me. she loves coffee as much as i do, with a little difference however. she like hers with creamer and sugar while i do with no frills. whenever i got freshly roasted beans, she loves to sniff it like dog. i could feel she may be under the spell of coffee. and that made the difference between her siblings. my other kids, the 3 boys, are contented with their 3-in-1 instant coffee from the big "N". for the boys, it doesnt matter from where it is as long as it is coffee. this is the bond that ties me and shelu, our love for home made coffee.

in the pic, shelu holds in her hands freshly roasted catimor beans. like most people do, we contend ourselves with the sweet coffee aroma before grinding it. for me, the aroma from coffee is one thing i can never get enough. it seems heaven to me and i know coffee addicts like me will say in unison, "amen".

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

Walking along almost any city street, in an airport or through a shopping mall carries you past at least one specialty coffee shop or cafe, but coffee is a fairly recent addition to our daily fare. Its origins can be traced to dwellers in Ethiopia's Red Sea hills, where chewing the bright red fruits of the coffee bush allowed them to stay alert while hunting. Adopted by Sufis in Yemen as an aid to religious practices about 600 years ago, coffee soon spread to the rest of the Muslim world.

Finds of coffee cups, pots, and even coffee beans on the mid-18th century Sadana Island shipwreck excavated by INA-Egypt since 1995 let us look a little closer at this addictive luxury's role in the economic and social life of the Middle East.

For centuries, Alexandria's warehouses stocked European and Mediterranean cabinets with spices and luxuries from the east. Unhappy with paying premium prices and able to successfully reach eastern seas, Europeans began trading directly for cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and mace in the late 1500s. Dutch take-over of spice-producing islands around 1600 forever changed world trade.

Egypt lost its monopoly on the "fine spices" and turned to coffee, dominating the trade throughout the 17th century. Coffee still made up about two-thirds of the value of imports from the Red Sea in the 18th century. Most coffee that passed through Egypt's Red Sea ports was sold in Cairo, about half of it for re-export to the Ottoman Empire. Egypt supplied the rest of the Ottoman world with the stimulating, and, some said, sinful drink.

Ottoman sultans periodically ordered all coffee houses shut and trade in coffee halted to prevent the rise of places filled with people doing nothing but sitting about drinking this dark, hot beverage and talking, often about politics and government.

Egyptian wheat, iron, glass and other food stuffs reached southern Red Sea ports in exchange for coffee, but most western Indian Ocean goods had to be paid for with silver coins.

This was not new practice--the periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a sailor's pilot of two thousand years ago, recommended merchants pack plenty of silver and gold bullion if they wished to acquire aromatic resins, spices, medicines, textiles, and fine wares of all types in the Arabian peninsula and western India.

Indian ships carried these expensive wares west on monsoon winds as far as Jidda, the port of Mecca and one of the world's busiest ports. But both Indians and Europeans, particularly the Dutch and Portuguese, were forbidden the northern Red Sea.

One of the curious features of the Sadana Island shipwreck is that no weapons have been found. A ship this size could ordinarily be expected to be armed with large cannon--piracy and capture were common in the western Indian Ocean. That the Sadana ship has no guns suggests that it sailed only within a "safe" area, in this case, the northern half of the Red Sea. This fits well with what we know of trade at Jidda where local rulers monopolized commerce to Suez in return for providing Ottoman officials with half the customs fees.

But the curious construction of the Sadana ship--which we can only describe as not European, not Arab, or not Mediterranean-- suggests that this policy may have changed by the mid-18th century. Archaeologists will work hard during the next excavation season at Sadana collecting wood samples and thousands of detailed measurements to help us pin down the ship's origin.

Studying remnants of the Sadana Island ship's coffee cargo helps us fit the ship's last voyage into the vast trade network encompassing Cairo and the rest of the Ottoman world. The interlocking pattern of exchange in this beloved beverage persists today, though the players are different.



By Cheryl Ward, Ph.D.
Originally published in El Bahri 3.2, 1997