The Coffea liberica tree grows up to 20 metres in height, producing larger fruits than those found on Coffea arabica trees. This coffee was brought to Indonesia to replace the arabica trees killed by the coffee rust disease at the end of the 19th century. It is still found in parts of Central and East Java today.
Liberica is a small crop in the Philippines. The city of Lipa in the province of Batangas province became the country's biggest producer of arabica in the 1880s until the industry collapsed due, as with Indonesia above, to the coffee rust of the 1890s, killing almost all Coffea arabica plants in the area and threatening the variety with extinction. Today, Batangas and the neighboring province of Cavite are producers of a variety of liberica known as barako.