I grew up in a tea family across the river from Calcutta, saved for weeks to buy one coffee at CCD, and kept going back to a room called the Coffee House. What India grows, why the south drinks coffee and the north drinks tea, and what to buy.
My family comes from Tamluk, a river town in Purba Medinipur that was the port of Tamralipta when a Chinese pilgrim sailed from it for Ceylon sixteen centuries ago, and from the terrace of my grandfather's house there I used to look down on a yard of humming transformers the Electricity Board had rented, which is the first sound I remember and, I suspect, the reason for most of the work I have done since. I grew up in Howrah, across the Hooghly from Calcutta, in a family that drank tea as naturally as the river runs, and spent my days on the far bank among the trams and book stalls of Esplanade and College Street, and summer holidays meant Darjeeling, hillsides of tea green as a felt tablecloth, and visits to Tamluk meant my grandmother's kitchen, where the tea was brewed in a dented aluminium pan and smelled of smoke and sugar. Apart from one cup in Durgapur, which I will come to, I did not drink coffee until I was twenty-four and landed in Seattle in the rain.
And yet the room I kept going back to as a student was on College Street, and it was called the Coffee House, and almost nobody in it was drinking coffee either.
A year and a half back in Bengaluru now, and December is the one kind month, cool in the mornings, with a thin mist over the lake that burns off by nine, and the boys have opinions about school, and my two evening projects, the council of researchers and the energy map, are both alive, which is more than I could say for the last thing I built. This year I also finished a master's in international relations, a degree that sits beside my doctorate in electrical engineering like a sitar in a machine shop and that began as a question in a locked pink house in Jaipur, in the first summer of the pandemic, when every nation on earth was shut indoors and I wondered what countries owe one another when none of them can leave home; five years on, the question has a certificate and no final answer, and it has left me reading every history, this one included, by first asking who wrote it and for whom. We came home to build more carefully than I built the first time, and some of the care is very small, like the monthly water log I promised in the , the Whitefield tap still reading high and the filter under the sink still bringing it down.
This last note of the series answers the question I am asked most often here, whether Indian coffee is any good and what to buy.
Baba Budan and the seven seeds
Every account of Indian coffee starts with a Sufi pilgrim named Baba Budan, who is said to have carried seven seeds from Mecca, strapped to his body, past an Ottoman export regime that scalded every bean so it could not sprout, and planted them in the hills above Chikmagalur, where the mist sits in the valleys like milk in a bowl, and the range carries his name, and the story is told with the seeds in his beard or his belt and a date somewhere in the seventeenth century.
The written record is thinner and more interesting: the foundational English history of coffee, compiled a century ago by an American trade editor, says only that Indian tradition relates that Baba Budan planted seeds near the hut he built in those hills, and gives two dates a century apart, and no contemporary document of the exploit exists, so the founding story of Indian coffee is a legend in the technical sense, like Kaldi's goats in the history note. The best account of how coffee reached India was written on another continent by a man who had to say "tradition relates" because we left him nothing firmer, just as the liveliest description of my grandfather's port was left to a Chinese monk, and how will a country be remembered if it leaves the writing to its visitors?
The shrine on the hill is sacred to Muslims and Hindus together, a Sufi's resting place to one and a seat of Dattatreya to the other, and it has been argued over in the courts for thirty years, and I love it for the very thing that makes it difficult, one hill with two paths up it and the same mist on both.
Green hills near Chikmagalur, in the coffee country of Karnataka. Photo by Mayank Agarwal on Unsplash.
The better story, which almost nobody tells
At the end of the seventeenth century a Dutch official on the Malabar coast, prompted by a curious mayor of Amsterdam, shipped coffee plants from the port that is now Kannur to Java, and the first shipment died and a second took, and Java is the source of the plants that went to Amsterdam and then to Paris and then, on the ship of the French officer who shared his water ration with a seedling, to the Caribbean and across the Americas. So the arabica in a bag of Colombian coffee has an Indian great-grandmother, defensibly, in the old sources, and I would love to see that printed on a bag.
Why the south drinks coffee and the north drinks tea
I grew up believing this was culture, and the older I get the more it looks like topography and marketing in culture's clothes: the south drinks coffee because the Western Ghats have what arabica needs, altitude and rain and cool nights and shade, which almost nowhere else in India has at scale.
Coffee Board estimates for the current crop. Almost all of it grows in shade along the Western Ghats, which is why the south drinks coffee and the north drinks tea.
The north drinks tea because in the nineteen thirties a marketing board sitting on an unsold surplus after the Depression sent motorised vans with giant kettles through the towns, and gave away millions of free cups, and sold tiny packets cheap, and hung enamel signs in railway stations, and sent teams to teach the English method, which Indian vendors cheerfully ignored, boiling the leaves with milk and sugar and spice until the kitchen smelled of cardamom and ginger, and inventing chai. Tea was pushed into the northern cup while coffee climbed the southern slopes on its own, and a Bengali tea family is, quite literally, a marketing success, which I say with love and a dark roast in my hand.
The Coffee House
The Coffee Board built its chain of coffee houses in the thirties and forties to create a domestic market for Indian coffee, and failed at that and succeeded at everything else.
In the fifties the Board moved to close the outlets, and the workers, led by A. K. Gopalan, the communist member of parliament from Kerala, took the houses over, and after a long argument in which Gopalan wanted state ownership and Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister, wanted cooperatives, they settled on cooperatives. The one on College Street was shut a year later and reopened after the professors of the two colleges across the road petitioned the government, saved by its customers, and has run for seventy years since as a worker-owned cooperative, and I know of no more successful one in the country.
The main hall is nicknamed after the British parliament and sounds like one, a high room the colour of old newspaper with ceiling fans turning like slow propellers and a hundred conversations rising and falling like the sea, and the signature drink is black coffee made by the south Indian filter method and called, simply, infusion. Filmmakers and economists and poets and an American beat poet on a long visit have sat at those tables, and a song from the eighties, sung by Manna Dey, names seven friends who met there and tells where each ended up, its opening bars borrowed from the Scottish song sung at midnight on the last day of the year, and every Bengali of my parents' age can hum it.
The song is about adda, the Bengali word for long, purposeless conversation, and coffee in it is the price of a chair for an afternoon, the reverse of what the Board built the chain to do and exactly why it worked. It is also the argument of the first note in this series, arriving from the other side of the world: people come to coffee for the company, and the bean is content to be the excuse.
Café Coffee Day, once, in Durgapur
For my generation the second wave of coffee arrived in red and white, under the sign of Café Coffee Day, and to a boy doing his B.Tech at NIT Durgapur it was a door into the modern world, armchairs and air conditioning and music in English and a menu on which one cold coffee cost a week of canteen dinners. I went once, properly, which is to say I saved pocket money for weeks to take a girl there, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu with the confidence of a man who had studied it in advance while she ordered something with cream on top, and did sums under the table on my fingers while the slogan on the wall promised that a lot can happen over coffee, which in my case was mostly sums, and I remember those good old times more clearly than most cups I have made since.
The man who opened that door was V. G. Siddhartha, from a Chikmagalur coffee-planting family, who put the first Café Coffee Day on Brigade Road in Bengaluru in 1996 and carried it into small towns until coffee became something a student could save up for. His story ended in grief in 2019, under debts none of us at those small tables could have imagined, and this city still speaks of him quietly, and on Brigade Road I think of how much of my generation's first taste of the modern world grew in his hills.
What India grows
India is the seventh largest producer of coffee in the world and exports most of it, largely to Italy, where it disappears into espresso blends without a name, and nearly all of it is grown on smallholdings, and this year's crop is a record. A bean doing reliable, anonymous work inside somebody else's brand is the back office again, the same bargain Whitefield made with its software, and I would like the century ahead to be the one in which India signs its work, in the cup and in the laboratory both.
Whitefield, Bengaluru, December 2025
The two species as a share of production, world and India. India's mix is the imprint of a leaf disease that arrived in 1869.
What surprises everyone, including me, is that India is a robusta country in a world that grows mostly arabica, and the reason is a disease. In 1869 a leaf rust reached Ceylon and killed its coffee industry inside twenty years, the leaves going orange and dropping like autumn, and the island replanted with tea, while India was hit and held, thanks to small farms and seasonal labour and a home market Ceylon lacked. India answered with breeding at a research station in the Chikmagalur hills, founded a century ago, which has run one of the longest rust-resistance programmes anywhere, and whose most famous selection, from the forties, still covers a large share of Indian arabica and is planted across Indonesia because, unusually for rust-resistant coffee, it tastes good, and the robusta share on the chart is the fossil of that year.
Monsooned Malabar, the coffee that is nostalgia for freight
Under British rule green coffee crossed to Europe in sailing ships around the Cape, months in humid holds that smelled of tar and salt, and arrived swollen and pale and stripped of acidity, and when steam shortened the voyage the transformation stopped and the buyers complained, so the curers rebuilt the voyage on land, spreading natural-processed green coffee on the floors of open-sided warehouses on the Malabar coast through the monsoon, raked and turned and re-bagged for weeks in air you could wring out like a cloth, until it swells to nearly double and loses much of its density and turns from green to the gold of old brass, one of the lowest-acid coffees in the world.
This deliberate reconstruction of a shipping defect has protected geographical status and, as the buying note's chart showed, is the cheapest category in the Indian specialty market, so India's most famous coffee is its least prestigious at home, and I do not know what to make of that, and I drink it in the filter, roasted dark, where it tastes like a wooden chest that once held cloves.
Shade, and what is quietly going wrong
Indian coffee is almost all grown under a two-layer canopy, with black pepper trained up the trunks and cardamom and orange and jackfruit in between, so that walking through an estate is like opening a spice cupboard in the rain, and the estates hold hornbills and barbets and giant squirrels and civets. The thing to watch is the drift toward a single fast-growing shade tree that yields timber and carries pepper, under which diversity collapses beneath a label that still says shade-grown, and a study of robusta farms in Kodagu found smaller beans and more borer beetle where the shade was monotonous, so the label stays true while the canopy thins.
Araku
The most interesting institution in Indian coffee is a cooperative of tribal farmers in the hills where Andhra meets Odisha, built over twenty-five years by a foundation, thousands of one-acre organic farms with every plot mapped by slope and soil and shade in a vocabulary borrowed from wine on purpose, and its coffee won a gold medal in Paris in its first year there.
The price paid to a farmer for a kilogram of parchment coffee in the Araku hills, through three channels. The bars for the first two start at zero; the cooperative pays a range.
The price story is the point, a kilo of parchment fetching far more through the cooperative than on the open market or through the state agency, and the caveat belongs beside it, that the company behind it is reported still to be unprofitable and the region had a very large number of days above thirty degrees last year, and I, who spend my evenings on a map of exactly this kind of data, know how rarely the two halves of such a story share a page.
A green valley under a cloudy sky in the Araku hills. Photo by Kaushik Dey on Unsplash.
The words on an Indian label
The most practical thing in this note is a glossary almost nobody prints:
Plantation means washed arabica, whatever the word suggests about estates.
Cherry means natural, dried in the fruit.
Robusta Parchment is washed robusta; the premium grade has a royal name.
Robusta Cherry is natural robusta.
The letters after those words are size grades.
A handful of regions now carry protected names, Coorg and Wayanad and Chikmagalur and Araku and the Baba Budan hills themselves, which our own register describes as the birthplace of coffee in India, so the legend has found its way into the law.
Decode an Indian coffee label
What to buy, and what it costs
This autumn I went through a catalogue of the Indian specialty market, dozens of roasters and over a thousand coffees, and half are Chikmagalur, with Kodagu and the Baba Budan hills and the Shevaroys and Sakleshpur making up most of the rest.
A snapshot of the Indian specialty market. Half of all bags sit between the first and last bar.
The palate is its own, chocolate and nuts and caramel far more often than the flowers and berries that dominate the marketing of East African coffee, and I prefer it, because that is what a dark roast is for, so if you want blueberries buy Ethiopian, and if you want a cup that tastes like the hills two hundred kilometres from here, with the oils sitting on top like varnish, buy this.
Roasters worth your time, in no order and with no arrangement between us:
the one that started in a Delhi bedroom and now has outlets everywhere;
the Bengaluru chain with a wave in its name;
the Mumbai roaster chasing high scores;
the one in Nagpur run by the country's first AeroPress champion;
the conservation-minded roaster that sources by bird count;
the Araku cooperative's own label;
a few dozen others, many of them in this city;
and, since this is my own site, a roaster in Whitefield who buys a few kilos of green from one Karnataka farm, roasts it after you order and leans dark, whom you can find in the shop.
Only a third of listings name the estate and only a third the variety and very few publish a score, and the note on reading a bag will tell you which questions to ask until they do. And the fact that should make somebody build something is that until 1996 growers here could not sell to whom they chose, everything going through a pooled system run by the Board, and the year that ended, the year of that first café on Brigade Road, is the true founding date of Indian specialty coffee, one more piece of our history waiting for one of us to write it.
Filter kaapi, and how it differs from a pour-over
This answers the question the espresso note left open. The steel filter is a perforated cup on top, a pressing disc on the grounds and a chamber below that collects the decoction:
Grind fine and roast dark, often with a fifth or so of roasted chicory.
Spoon the coffee into the top cup and set the disc on the grounds.
Pour boiling water on top.
Walk away for fifteen minutes.
Add the decoction to hot milk in whatever proportion your family argues about.
Pour from height between tumbler and bowl until it froths.
A pour-over is water flowing through, each particle wet for seconds and the whole governed by how you pour, while the Indian filter is slow immersion under a still head of water, governed by time and saturation the way a stew is governed by the clock, its disc and packed bed controlling the flow while the person leaves.
The chicory does hydraulic work as well as flavour, its roasted root swelling when wet to slow the water through the bed, and it carries no caffeine, which cuts the dose; food law allows nearly half of a coffee-chicory blend to be chicory, and most blends use far less. The pour from height is engineering dressed as theatre, frothing and mixing the milk fat into the decoction and cooling the drink to where you can hold it, with a sound like a small waterfall, a hand-powered heat exchanger. And the degree in degree coffee belongs to the instrument that certifies milk purity, first-degree milk and second-degree milk, and the thermometer has no part in it, which is how a temple town in Tamil Nadu came by its famous cup.
The device that removes the operator, I understand now, is a machine for making the person available to the room, so you set it and sit down with someone and the coffee comes when it comes, which is what the Coffee House always needed, a drink that would be ready without anyone watching it.
Coffee in the Darjeeling hills
In the hills of our summer holidays, in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, there are now a few hundred acres of coffee, planted by small farmers and by a state department set up a century ago to grow the quinine tree, nearly all of it arabica from Karnataka seed, while Darjeeling's tea output has fallen to its lowest in a century and a half and the hills are warming.
Darjeeling's tea output at its peak and last year. Coffee is now planted on a few hundred acres in the same hills. That is a symbol, not yet an economy.
A few hundred acres against the thousands under tea is the size of a symbol, and I print the acreage beside it so that nobody mistakes the symbol for an economy.
The hills where a tea family took its summers are learning to grow the thing I left the country to discover.
I began these notes at four in the morning in a New York kitchen, meaning to find myself in the history of coffee and the history of India and the lives of the Indians who made both, and I end them in the December mist of Whitefield having learned that these were one braid all along, a Sufi's seeds and a cooperative of waiters and a planter's son from Chikmagalur and a boy on College Street breathing in an infusion he would not taste for years, and that the braid is still being written, and that this time I mean to write my own strand of it. The last instruction of the series is the one I would keep above all the others:
Find an estate two hundred kilometres from wherever you are.
Buy a kilo.
Roast it dark if you can, and buy it dark if you cannot.
Find out what your own place tastes like.
Questions this note answers
Is Indian coffee any good?
Yes, and it tastes like itself: chocolate, nuts and caramel more often than the floral, fruity profile of East African coffee. Buy from a roaster who prints a roast date and names the estate. Chikmagalur, Kodagu and Araku are good places to start.
What does Plantation or Cherry mean on an Indian coffee label?
Plantation means washed arabica, not that it came from a plantation. Cherry means the coffee was dried inside the fruit, the natural process, not fresh fruit. Robusta Parchment is washed robusta and Robusta Cherry is natural robusta.
Why does South India drink coffee and the north drink tea?
The south drinks coffee because the Western Ghats have the altitude, rain and shade arabica needs. The north drinks tea because a marketing board in the 1930s gave away millions of free cups to sell a surplus. One grew; the other was pushed.
