Origin
Atok, Benguet
Elevation
1,400 - 1700mASL
Varietal
Red Bourbon, San Ramon, Typica, Mundo Novo
Process
Washed Process
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SITIO BELIS ATOK BENGUET PHILIPPINES
Peanut Butter, Almonds, Dayap, Milk Chocolate
₱900.00
When we last roasted in 2021, our offering was from a trusted producer, KALSADA Coffee, who has been championing Philippine Coffees through long-term partnerships and training with farmers to help raise the quality and quantity of green coffees.
We got this coffee with that in mind, the relationships we've kept from then until now, and to bring you a bag that speaks volumes of what years can look (and taste) like.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
Similar in values, KALSADA focuses not only on how to make coffee better alone, but also on how to make its value honest. For too long, Filipino farmers have been romanticized for resilience while being priced out of dignity. KALSADA sat in backyards and barangay halls, in between rows of drying beds and handwritten ledgers, and listened until the stories became a map.
Kalsada was built from that map: from trust earned slowly, from partnerships that feel less like contracts and more like shared breaths. We source from them because they invest in what matters: equipment that lifts quality, systems that reward skill, wages that respect time and care.
Every bag we roast is part of a long conversation between craft and community, between what coffee is and what it could mean. We refuse to romanticize struggle and are here to make sure hard work leads toward fairness, sustainability, and a future where young Filipinos can see coffee not as an inheritance alone, but as a possibility. This is why we trust KALSADA as a producer, and we’ve seen their work even before we became professionals working in coffee, as well.
KALSADA’s work is simple, though never easy: to tell the world that Philippine specialty coffee has always been here, waiting to be seen, understood, and shared.
ABOUT THE ORIGIN
To KALSADA, Belis has always been more than just an origin. If the mountain could speak, its voices would echo with the scent of soil after rain, stories of mornings spent among coffee trees and vegetable plots, of families who give more than they keep, and who meet each new season with a steady, unflinching will.
It was this quiet, persistent, and generous spirit that first drew KALSADA here in 2015. Back then, there were only fifteen farmers, a shared dream, and the hum of a single locally made pulper. KALSADA built 18 drying beds from the proceeds of a Kickstarter campaign and, together, learned what it meant to build something from the ground up. Belis holds the story of not just coffee, but of trust.
Eight years later, in 2023, Belis has grown into a heartbeat of its own. From one and a half tons to eleven, from fifteen farmers to seventy-two families and one school. Each name and face tells a story written into the grain of every drying rack. The mountains have changed too, quietly. Two drying houses now stand where there were once tarpaulin-covered patios, built in partnership with the Metrobank Foundation. A privately donated eco-pulper hums softly beside a huller and a storage shed, with its rhythm a kind of hymn to progress.
But numbers can only tell so much. The true story of Belis lives in the hands of those who have stayed: farmers who pour their earnings back into their land, who rebuild their homes, who send their children to finish school. Some of those children now speak of returning, of tending the same slopes their parents once did.
Perhaps, this is what sustainability really means: not a line on a report, but a continuity of care. Belis taught KALSADA this and is still teaching all of us this: that coffee, at its core, is not about the harvest, but about the endurance of a community that refuses to stop growing.