Yoon Yamini had traveled far and wide in search for the best coffee in the world. And the 56-year-old coffee lover has found it in Talibon town, northern Bohol.
“Twelve years ago, in my quest to see and taste the best of coffees, I found the Philippines. Being a tropical country and located in the Coffee Belt, I know the best of coffees are here,” she told Cebu Daily
News at the sidelines of an ongoing Korean Festival at SM City Cebu.
Yoon’s kiosk at the food festival area set up on the canopy of the mall’s A. Soriano entrance offers both Philippine and Korean coffee blends.
Yoon’s coffee beans were harvested from her three-hectare coffee farm in Talibon town, Bohol which she acquired in 2002 for P300,000.
She now exports her coffee products to her native Korea as well as to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia under the brand name P.P. Coffee.
Her venture has given livelihood to more than 20 Boholano families whom she hired to work in her farm.
Yoon said she plans to further develop her farm into a “coffee university” where Filipino and Korean agriculture students could go to study coffee farming.
ROMANCE WITH COFFEE
Yoon said South Korea is among the top global consumers of coffee. She said it has nearly 12,300 coffee houses.
She said Korea’s coffee industry has doubled over the past five years, catapulting it to become the 11th largest coffee market in the world.
“Koreans really love coffee, because for them coffee is like a medicine,” she said.
Driving her point home, she said most Korean television drama series have scenes set in coffee houses.
While she had studied coffee beans in Korea, Yamini said she couldn’t figure out whether it is “old, new, natural-processed, washed-processed or a bean from a rotten berry.”
“Being a coffee lover, without knowing those things it’s like saying that a blind person touches only an elephant’s leg and conclude that it’s the whole creature,” she said.