In October 2018, our team was deep in the upper highlands of the Cordillera Mountains — not on a sourcing trip, but on a disaster relief mission.

We were there to serve the remote indigenous communities that called those mountains home — people living at elevations where roads dissolve into trails and outside help rarely reaches. It was the kind of work that defines why The Black 6 Project exists.

It was also where we first encountered Philippine Arabica. Grown at altitude in the cool Cordillera air, the beans from those highland farms were unlike anything we'd tasted — clean, bright, and carrying the unmistakable character of the land. We sourced some to bring back, knowing we wanted to do something with it.

Before heading home, we made one more stop. We'd heard about a small municipality in Cavite — a highland town called Amadeo — that locals called the Coffee Capital of the Philippines. We went to see it for ourselves.

What we found there became the first coffee we ever offered our customers: a rare, complex, and nearly forgotten bean most Americans had never encountered. Philippine Excelsa.

We've been wanting to tell this story properly for a while. Consider this it.

How a Quiet Hillside Town Became the Coffee Capital of the Philippines

Amadeo's coffee story begins in 1876, when coffee cultivation first arrived in Cavite's uplands. The town's early farmers quickly recognized what they had: sloping volcanic terrain, well-drained soil, and a cool microclimate sitting between 330 and 570 meters above sea level — near-ideal conditions for high-altitude crops.

By 1880, the Philippines was the fourth largest coffee exporter in the world. Then came the coffee rust epidemic of 1889, which devastated Batangas — the country's original coffee heartland — virtually overnight. Production collapsed to a fraction of what it had been. The world moved on.

For the next century, Amadeo's farming families quietly cultivated coffee across generations — preserving varieties that had nearly vanished from global production. In 2002, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo officially proclaimed Amadeo the "Coffee Capital of the Philippines," a recognition long overdue. The town now celebrates this heritage every February with the Pahimis Festival — a thanksgiving harvest celebration that fills the streets with coffee culture, farm tours, and the town's signature Pahimis Blend.

Today, Amadeo is one of the only places in the world where all four commercially viable coffee species — Arabica, Robusta, Liberica (Barako), and Excelsa — are grown side by side on the same hillsides.

Excelsa: The Forgotten Fourth Species

Most coffee drinkers know Arabica and Robusta. Fewer know Liberica. Almost nobody knows Excelsa — and that's exactly what drew us to it.

First discovered in Central Africa in 1903, Excelsa found its way to Southeast Asia thanks to one remarkable trait: extraordinary resilience. While other varietals succumbed to rust and disease, Excelsa thrived. Filipino farmers in Cavite adopted it, nurtured it, and built something rare — a living piece of coffee heritage that now represents only 7% of global coffee production, with 5.5% of that grown right here in the Philippines.

In our sourcing work, we hand-pick beans that carry a real story — farms that practice sustainable, traditional agriculture; communities where coffee is livelihood, identity, and culture. The Excelsa we brought back in 2018 checked every box. It came from farmers whose families had been tending these same hillsides for generations, working a bean that most of the coffee world had written off.

This isn't a coffee that asks to be overlooked. It's tart, bold, tropical, and unlike anything most American coffee drinkers have encountered. That's the point. We don't source ordinary coffee.

When we walked those farms in October 2018 — picking cherries alongside the farmers, watching the drying beds catch the highland sun — we weren't just sourcing a product. We were making a commitment: to tell the stories of these growers, to connect veterans and everyday customers in America to the people and places behind what's in their cup.

Every bag of Black 6 Excelsa is that commitment, roasted into something you can hold in your hands.