COMISING COFFEE

KEEPING UP WITH THE COMISINGS. What are the odds that the ancestral house built by Chief Comising, the local hero who led Kabayan in coffee production and exportation to Europe, stands less than 200 meters away from the new RuRi Rural House? Only one house separates us! What a grand coincidence, what a grand house. How inspiring to live and work so close to the house of a historical figure.

REVIVING THE LEGACY OF COMISING. History records show that coffee was first introduced to Benguet by the Spanish military governor Manuel Scheidnegal y Sera. He distributed coffee seeds to the different Igorot tribes and issued an edict forcing them to establish coffee plantations in their ancestral domains. The proud tribal leaders opposed this—killing the coffee plants by uprooting the stalks and pouring boiling water on the root system—with the exception of one, Comising of the Ibalois in what is now the town of Kabayan. Comising was not only an exceptionally brave leader—the many scars on his body a testament to many hard-fought battles against busoles (head-hunters) of the north—but he was also exceptionally wealthy. He owned many herds of cattle, packs of horses, and large sementeras of rice. After many visits to the capital of Manila, a very difficult trip for a mountain Igorot to make, he recognized how the new produce that was being forced upon his people would be valuable to their economic survival. “If you plant this coffee on the land”, he promised his people, “I would buy it all and deal with the Spaniards myself”. And so this is how it came to pass that Kabayan, by 1902, became the major source of coffee exported to mainland Spain. Fast forward to the modern day, Kabayan has fallen far on the wayside in coffee production, overtaken by Atok, Itogon, La Trinidad, Kibungan and Tublay. We shall not speculate how this happened but suffice to say that one of Rural Rising’s goals in is to bring back Kabayan-grown coffee to its former glory. Organically-grown, single origin. Exclusive.

COMISING’S LEGACY COFFEE — P549 for 500 grams and 250 grams linuklukot