Green Hunting in Benguet 2026: A Fat Seed Sourcing Trip to Atok and La Trinidad

Every origin trip has two parts: the serious part, and the part where the entire team turns whatever table is available into a temporary coffee station within minutes of arrival.

For this year’s Benguet green hunting trip, Fat Seed headed north from March 11 to 13 and set up in Camp John Hay, where the weather was cold, the pine trees delivered, and the Airbnb had exactly the kind of mountain-lodge energy that makes you want to start brewing coffee outdoors the second you drop your bags (That was our first agenda). It had a cozy fireplace too, which would have been more useful if we had secured firewood on the first night. We did not. (The first night was freezing cold).

But this was not just cafe people on a field trip.

We were in Benguet to visit farms, inspect green coffee, roast samples, cup coffees on-site, and spend time with producers whose work is helping shape the future of Philippine specialty coffee. For us, sourcing is not just about buying what tastes good on a cupping table in Manila. It is about understanding the coffee where it begins, building real relationships with producers, and staying close enough to the work that we can keep learning from it.

That matters even more when your team includes a licensed Arabica Q-Grader. Bryant Dee led much of the technical evaluation across the trip, helping us look more closely at physical quality, roast behavior, defects, and cup potential. That level of hands-on assessment is part of how we approach sourcing, not as spectators, but as buyers, roasters, and coffee people who want to be fully present in the process.

Our first stop was Atok, roughly another two hours out from Camp John Hay and deeper into Benguet. By that point, the trip had settled into its rhythm: colder air, winding roads, weaker signal, and even more coffee talk.

In Atok, we visited Mercy Dapnit and Elsie Dicos. What stood out right away was how warm and welcoming the visit felt. It was just so real. We spent time checking greens, talking through the coffees, roasting samples on-site, and sharing feedback face to face. This is the part of sourcing we care about most. Not just securing supply, but actually being present enough to understand the coffee in context and the people behind it.

There is something important about seeing coffee in its real setting. Not cleaned up for presentation. Not abstracted into a spreadsheet. Just the actual environment, the actual work, and the actual people behind every lot. These are the parts of origin trips we value most, because coffee stops being just a product and starts becoming what it actually is: work, people, homes, decisions, and years of accumulated experience.

The next day, we headed to La Trinidad to visit the farm of Roger Tacdoy and Rodyio Tacdoy. Getting there was was our biggest logistical challenge yet. The roads were steep, the turns were tight, signal was basically decorative, we got lost once, ran into a truck on a narrow stretch and had to reverse all the way back, and one of our team members got altitude sickness on the way up. Benguet was testing our commitment a little.

Still, the second we arrived, it was obvious why the trip was worth it.

At the farm, we got a closer look at the drying setup, sorting work, and the level of care going into each lot. We spent time inspecting physical quality, discussing defects, roasting samples, preparing cups, and evaluating the coffees on-site. What stood out most was the openness of the conversation. Feedback was not treated like an insult. It was treated like useful information. If something was off, it was discussed. If something could improve, it became part of the analysis. That kind of transparency is rare, and it says a lot about a producer’s mindset.

For us, this visit carried extra meaning because our relationship with Rodyio goes back before the headlines. We had already visited his farm in 2025, built a relationship with him before competition season, and even bought some of his coffee before the Philippine Coffee Quality Competition. Later, we also took part in the now-record-setting bidding frenzy that pushed his PCQC-winning coffee to ₱9,900 per kilo. We unfortunately lost the bid but we were so very happy for Rodyio regardless.

Publicly, that moment became a milestone for Philippine specialty coffee. Personally, it also felt surreal to watch history happen around a producer we already knew was the real deal. 

That is part of what makes origin trips so important. Great coffee does not come out of nowhere. It comes from producers who are paying attention, improving constantly, and willing to stay curious about their own work. It also comes from relationships strong enough to support honest dialogue, real feedback, and mutual respect.

Being able to do that directly with producers is invaluable. It makes the conversation clearer, more honest, and more useful on both sides. Producers get more immediate insight from the buying and roasting side. We get a better understanding of the coffee, the conditions behind it, and the people making it possible.

Of course, Benguet was not done humbling us yet. On the way down, the car got stuck. Not metaphorically. Literally stuck. We had to conduct some roadside problem solving,  Roger and Rodyio had to give us some backup and we are so glad that they, because only they were able to unlodge the boulder we got stuck on. The pick up truck did not leave unscratched (oops). Very funny in retrospect. Less funny while it was happening.

By the end of the day, we had earned a proper meal and a few beers. We ended up at a nice restaurant, decompressed, ate well, and, because this is still Fat Seed, our photographers eventually borrowed the mic, the stage and the guitar from the acoustic performer and briefly took over as performers. So the trip closed the same way it began: somewhere between serious coffee work and unserious chaos.

The next day, we packed up and headed back south.

Trips like this are exhausting. They are real work. Long drives, rough roads, cold mornings, weak signal, coffee roasting in unfamiliar spaces, on-site cuppings, and more than one moment of asking ourselves whether the car was truly meant to be on that road. But they are also some of the most rewarding things we do all year.

Because this is what serious sourcing looks like for us.

It looks like driving deep into Benguet to taste coffees where they are grown. It looks like talking to farmers in their homes and workspaces, not just over a message thread. It looks like checking greens, roasting samples, cupping on-site, and exchanging information openly. It looks like building relationships over time, not just showing up when the coffee starts winning awards.

At Fat Seed, we care deeply about the coffees we buy, roast, and serve. Trips like this remind us why. Behind every cup is a place, a process, and a person. And the better we understand those things, the better we can do our job too.

Also, next year, we are bringing more firewood.