A few months ago, we had coffee from an estate called Kalledevarapura delivered to our home, ground just a couple of days before specifically for our brewing method of choice, the French press. The website of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters promised us a medium dark roast with a nutty chocolate finish, cranberry overtones and an aroma that would make us feel like we had walked into a baker’s shop.
On Saturday, during TheIndianBean.com‘s coffee tasting pop-up at Bombay Shirt Company in Kala Ghoda we compared nutty, sweet, caramel-like coffee from a farm in Coorg to another one with refreshing acidity and fruity notes from the Biligirirangan hills 200 kilometres away. Before an evening show of Finding Fanny last week, I checked out a menu featuring coffees from estates in Columbia, Costa Rica, and from the Kathlekhan Estate in Chikkamagaluru, Karnataka at Cafe Coffee Day’s The Square outlet at CR2 mall in Nariman Point.
How did we, a predominantly chai-drinking nation that exports about 70 per cent of our coffee production, and consumes mostly blended coffee or the more convenient instant coffee from the stuff that stays here, suddenly start talking so much about single estate coffee, often using romantic words that are generally reserved to describe wine?
In the last couple of years, coffee drinkers in Mumbai seeking out beans from specific plantations and regions (as opposed to generic blended, bulk coffee) have had at least three independent purveyors and two chains to pick from. These are purveyors who visit farms, meet farmers, seek out award-winning beans, and are keenly interested and sometimes even involved in how the beans are produced. On their websites, each single estate coffee is described in a paragraph or two, with details about the bean, the estate, the region, and the characteristics of the cup it yields. It also makes business sense, as seen by the growth of coffee chains and coffee consumption, which has overtaken tea consumption in India.
Coffee made its way into India when traveler and Sufi saint Baba Budan smuggled in seven green coffee beans strung around his waist around 1670. He carried them from Yemen to Mysore while on pilgrimage, and planted them on what are now known as Bababudangiri hills (giri means hill) in Karnataka. According to the Coffee Board of India, it remained a “garden curiosity” But coffee really only arrived when the British set up commercial plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1942, the Coffee Board of India was set up and managed by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and it took charge of coffee promotion, marketing and trade in India, buying from farmers in bulk, with a focus on exports.
Coffee became a commodity, a way to build our forex reserves. Most Indian coffee exports were and are still used by MNCs to make instant coffee and blended coffee (two or more varieties mixed together from the same region, or several different regions). And so it continued until the liberalisation of the economy. In 1995, the Board’s marketing functions were deregulated and eventually privatised, and companies and farmers could start treating and marketing their beans as a more specialised product. If single estate coffee is catching on today, it’s because of a process that started over 20 years ago.
Single estate coffee is exactly that – coffee from a single plantation. Single origin coffee is a slightly wider term, and may or may not be from one estate, but is from one location. Almost 70 per cent of the coffee produced in India is the lower quality robusta variety, a hardier, more resilient plant that can grow at lower altitudes and higher temperatures. Arabica, which is a better quality variety, but a more delicate plant that needs high altitudes and lower temperatures, makes up most of single origin/single estate coffee in India.
The single origin coffee movement around the world is driven by both romantic and sensible considerations. The romantic aspect of it is flavour and traceability. Like with wine, chocolate and cheese, the flavour of a coffee is also derived from its terroir – it has distinct identifying flavours and aromas. Ethiopian coffee is known for its syrupy floral aromas, Brazilian coffee is known for its lingering peanutty taste, Indonesian coffee is often smoky, toasty, and savoury. Flavours therefore, also vary from estate to estate, depending on how the farmer feeds the soil and tends the plant, what the weather is like, the fermentation or processing of the beans at the farm, the grade of the beans, and even sometimes which plants grow alongside the estate. (There are also other factors that influence the flavour after it leaves the farmer – the roast, the grind, the water, the brewing method, and so on.)
“Single estate coffee has traceability,” says Matt Chitharanjan , founder of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters. “It has a connection with the farmer. You can see all of the supply chain. Not all growers take as much care of their coffee as they should. By identifying growers who do care for their coffee you are allowing the bean to shine. It’s farm-to-table for coffee.” For aficionados, the distinctive characteristics of these different coffees are a source of pleasure and knowledge. To draw a comparison with wine, it’s like drinking a blended, unlabeled table wine versus a wine whose vintage, grape, region and vinification you’re familiar with. The single estate coffee’s flavours are best identified in a pure unadulterated brew, without milk or sugar.
“Wine has about 350 flavour notes, coffee has over 1,200 taste notes,” says Kunal Ross, founder of The IndianBean.com. “An untrained palate will get at least three or four notes in a cup – say, grapefruit, honey, caramel, and nuts. A trained palate will get about 20 to 30 notes. The whole thing is about exploration. Indian coffee has a very distinct taste. Most of our coffee is shade grown, we have different harvesting styles, a different climate, sometimes there are spices like pepper growing alongside. It is a complex and distinct product, and people are seeking it out.”
The sensible considerations include integrity of product – consumers know that the coffee is 100 per cent Arabica from a particular estate. We know exactly what is in our bag of beans, and therefore in our cup, so we can be assured of a certain level of purity and quality. More transparency also means that we can be aware of how ethically or sustainably produced the beans are, and understand the processes taken by the farmer to ensure the quality of the crop.
But of course, none of this means that single estate coffee is always better than blended coffee. Single estate coffee from a bad crop, or a badly treated crop, (or even a poorly roasted or brewed bean) will yield a bad cup, while a blend of excellent coffees from various estates and regions can be better than a merely good single estate. Single estate coffee is also often, but not always more expensive than blended, bulk, or instant coffee – it depends on the estate, supply and demand, production methods, quality, and other costs, such as transport.
Well-travelled coffee lovers with evolved palates may be developing a taste for single estate coffee, but it is still very much a niche product, barely making a dent in the market occupied by instant coffees and blended brews, which have mass appeal because of convenience, accessibility and our taste for sweet, milky caffeine. “Internationally and in South India, brewing is part of the ritual,” says Ross. “In Bombay, at home, typically someone brews it for us [or in the case of instant coffee] mixes it for us. Everybody finds freshly brewed coffee better, but people like convenience. For us it is about promoting Indian coffee, improving the quality of our coffee.”
WHERE TO BUY
Blue Tokai
Bluetokaicoffee.com
Coffeewala Roasters
Coffeewalaroasters.com
Indian Bean Co
Theindianbean.com
The Square – Cafe Coffee Day
Cafecoffeeday.com/thesquare/
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi is a Mumbai-based food journalist, a contributing editor at Vogue magazine, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and a restaurant reviewer for the Hindustan Times newspaper in Mumbai.