I am not trying to compete with anybody, I am trying to give the people of Baguio a different way of drinking coffee, just a new way of drinking coffee.
Drinking flavored coffee is one thing, knowing more about it is another. Mom and I stumbled upon Fl4vors and we were stunned with how amazing it is! I ain’t some coffee connoisseur, but this coffee shop makes me want to be one!
Jeffrey Bourne, a 43-year old English man, and his wife Irish, a 29-year old Filipina from Zamboanga opened a coffee shop in Baguio where they serve you flavored coffee and English snacks. They are located on the 2nd floor of Dona Anita Bldg, 66 Session Road, Baguio City.
So Jeff Bourne started his story…
In England, in Kings Cross, Longdon, where I am from, we have what we call Pubs. Now pubs are public drinking houses. there is a point to my story. in the town where i live, there are 64, and I only live in a small little town, only small, maybe from Malcolm square to sm, that big square, yeah? and there are 64 places where you can drink beer/alcohol. you just sit and you drink beer and go to the pubs. in England, every week, six pubs close or go bankrupt. 12 coffee shops open, every week. in England. so that’s 96 coffee shops opening every single month. so you can imagine how many coffee shops we have. that’s why I asked why coffee, because coffee in Baguio, don’t you know that the Philippines, Baguio, and Baguio or Benguet were the world’s number 3 coffee producers and then when Brazil, they had an insect came along and eat along all their crops, Baguio or the Philippines became number 1. the world’s number 1 coffee producer. But then, unfortunately, they had a typhoon, and the farms were no more and then they went to the government and asked Marcos for help and they said no. and it’s only now in the last 10 years that the Philippines started to come up again in the coffee world. and then there is this called The Filipino or The Philippine Coffee Board, and they’re bringing it up.
So why did I want to start this to come here?
No one in the Philippines does flavored coffee beans now for nearly 20 years. I did it in England, and what I did in England is we have what we call craft fairs. every Friday Saturday Sunday, there is the size of Burnham park, it’s big, and like the flower festival, I was doing that, all around England and people were loving it. and then I opened a restaurant in England, not selling the coffee beans, and then I met Irish my wife, and I thought, cause I used to come to the Philippines, I used to come to Makati, for two months, of every year, and I thought the Starbucks, and there are other coffee shops, coffee bean, and tea places, but nobody sells what I sell: flavored coffee beans. But I did not carry it on. I just thought about it and I mentioned it to Irish, and she said let’s do it. but where we live in, Pampanga, they do not drink coffee. they drink liquor, coca cola, so we said where Tagaytay but there are no tourists there it is dead so we thought Baguio. three yrs ago we came here and it took us one year to find some premises. because it is no good having a coffee shop in camp john hay, there is a Starbucks there but the store is full because of the customers, so we kept looking and looking and looking and we found this and it was originally a coffee shop, but the owners spend a lot of time on their cellphones, even on the FB page they spend all their time on it, pictures of them so we took this.
People have tried to do flavored coffee beans but they don’t know the secret. There is a secret. I cant tell you that, well I can but I will have to kill you haha. but there is a secret to doing it. I can tell you that the flavors are all natural ingredients. There are no artificial flavors at all. I will give you an example, the lemon that we do. It is the outside of the lemon, the zest of it, it is going through a process which I taught my daughter how to do, she does all of that for me, it goes through the process, it has to sit for six months, and then she sends it over by balikbayan boxes. It is how we add it to the coffee beans. If you break open the coffee bean, you still smell it inside. Some people think ‘oh you use powder with its coating, no, it actually penetrates inside the bean.
No granules…
We don’t use an espresso machine. “Espresso” means force from Italy. And it means pushing. We don’t use drip or filter. We use Aeropress, invented by Alan Adler, an engineering instructor, who was fed up with the drip. The espresso machine makes your coffee bitter.
Aeropress Process:
We have a paper filter that goes in there, turn this upside down, put your coffee in, you pour some water in, and when you’re done, you leave it for two minutes. We have a timer that actually goes off for two minutes, and I tell the staff, immediately it goes off, turn it over and you push down and that forces the water through and you end up with no granules.
English Snacks…
And then I thought, we can’t just sell coffee, let’s sell English snacks. The Jacket Potatoes. We spent weeks in the Baguio Market, looking for the right size of the potatoes, not that big, not that small until we found someone. Irish makes most of the pastries. We are trying to make our snacks in an English Way.
What advice would you give to those who are in the coffee business or what advice would you give to those who are planning to open up their own coffee business?
Unless you have a different idea to just selling coffee, then I would NOT suggest opening a coffee shop.
They are selling the best Strawberry jams I have ever tasted so far, and they are planning to expand within the next 12 months. Also, they are going to serve flavored chicken like no other, very very soon! I cannot wait to taste all their English snacks! Going back as soon as possible!
