Origin stories do more than add color to your cup: these extrinsic attributes are an integral part of determining the price we pay (and that farmers earn) for coffee.

NAMISHA PARTHASARATHY explores the history, challenges, and opportunities of specialty coffee in India.

Since its introduction in 2019, the SCA’s Coffee Sustainability Program has engaged learners in the principle that sustainability must be embraced by all actors in the coffee supply chain if the specialty coffee industry is to survive and thrive. Over 500 learners from all facets of the specialty coffee industry and many geographies around the world have graduated from the foundation, intermediate, or professional levels of the program.

The three-part curriculum trains students to understand the complexity of sustainability issues across the value chain and to identify and implement best practices for their business or organization. It also helps them confidently confront opportunities and challenges as they strive to take measurable actions to enhance long-term sustainability, wherever they interact with coffee’s value system.

At the professional level, learners are equipped to design, carry out, and assess their own sustainability project in accordance with their individual, organizational, or business goals and capabilities. The projects articulated and completed at this level range from database creation to enable local coffee communities to share information, to researching insights into domestic consumption markets, as well as developing strategies for better sustainability practices at coffee events.

The Coffee Sustainability Program launched at a time when the specialty coffee industry has begun to see the fruit of labors initiated decades ago—things like the SCA’s own Coffee Tasters’ Flavor Wheel and the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon did not emerge from thin air, but are the outcome of long, slow development projects initiated to provide opportunities for specialty coffee, for producing countries, and for the smallholder farmer. The success of these projects is evident in the value of the global coffee market, and the diversity of coffees celebrated and consumed in your cup today, appreciated for their various attributes and characteristics, connected back to the farms or geographies where the coffee was grown.

For her professional project, Namisha Parthasarathy sought insight into global perceptions of coffee from India with an eye towards solutions that would benefit Indian smallholders. It also provides a small snapshot into the nascent world of Indian specialty coffee, with challenges and pains that will not seem unfamiliar to smallholders in other producing countries. These remind us that though specialty coffee has come a long way, its promises and solutions are yet to be fulfilled for many, challenging the sustainability of the coffee industry as a whole. In this shorter extract of an almost 10,000-word report submitted for her professional certification, “Jaago (‘Wake Up’) and Smell the Coffee,” Namisha urges us to embrace these challenges and pains and curate new appreciation for coffees from India. In supporting Indian smallholders, we have the possibility to continue to work towards a sustainable coffee value chain—not just for some, but for many worldwide—and truly provide for specialty coffee’s future.

Julie Housh
Knowledge Development Manager

Growing at just over 1,500 meters above sea level, nestled under pepper trees and interspersed with cardamom, are coffee cherries of a bright red only matched by the iron-rich soil in which they grow.

Entirely shade grown, the plants thrive amidst the rich biodiversity of a semi-forest. A short walk through the trees reveals the rhythmic drumbeat of the woodpecker, with its home in the forest canopy. Elephant- and cow-dung-caked paths offer fertilizer-rich manure needed to form slowly matured, ripe cherries. Sit back, close your eyes, and perhaps you picture yourself in the misty hills of Ethiopia, or Kenya? You are, in fact, over 4,000 km away in the Baba Budangiri Hills in Chikmagalur, Karnataka. You are in India.

Road through the Baganeheddal Estate in Chikmagalur, offering a glimpse of the region's red soil and shade conditions.

Although India is the sixth largest exporter of coffee,[1] much of its coffee remains anonymous, commoditized for mass consumption. Indian coffee is often perceived to be of a lower quality because of its flavor profile, rarely highlighted as a “single origin.” As specialty coffee’s global growth continues and expands into coffee-growing countries, cultural capital, even within India, is still measured using imported Western aesthetics and flavor preferences. Longstanding traditions and goods often need to be exported and anglicized before being fully accepted into mainstream culture, both abroad and in India. An example that clearly highlights this is “Haldi ka doodh.” An Ayurvedic remedy consumed in virtually all Indian households, the drink needed to be packaged as the “turmeric latte” to gain extraordinary popularity abroad. Only since then has it started to slowly appear in specialty cafés locally, often referred to by its anglicized name.

With dialogue around the appreciation of coffee’s different attributes evolving, the stars seem to be aligning for India to be more widely recognized. Deanonymizing India’s coffee and creating value for its unique attributes requires dissecting a complex narrative, particularly as domestic and international perceptions become increasingly linked through globalization. India is faced with the historical legacy of colonization, and in modern coffee, it simpact on our most subjective sense, taste.

India’s Coffee History

Legend has it that a Sufi saint, Baba Budan, smuggled seven beans into India from Yemen, an illegal act at the time, and grew it in Chikmagalur, one of India’s highest and biggest coffee-growing regions today. So began India’s coffee-growing tryst, on a tropical land that would not have otherwise lent itself to the fruit.

Sunset over the Baganeheddal Estate in Chikmagalur, India. Legend has it that a Sufi saint, Baba budan, smuggled seven beans into the region from Yemen; today, Chikmagalur is one of India's highest and biggest coffee-growing regions.

Little is documented about India’s coffee growing prior to the early 1800s. In the southern hilly regions, “sandalwood, teak, vengai, kadukai, tamarind, and karungali, besides several medicinal plants” were intercropped by the native and tribal populations.[2] It is likely that coffee’s value was understood by some at the time, as “favorite lieutenants of rulers of Mysore in the eighteenth century were granted special coffee lands.”[3] When local ruling dynasties clashed and fell, the British took greater control, and agriculture and coffee growing became widespread and systematized. To the colonizers, India was a land rich in resources they could extract in order to aggrandize the “British Empire.”

Large-scale coffee growing in India is entirely a product of colonization. As English geographer C. R. Markham noted in 1866, “little short of 60,000 acres of forest” was destroyed for the proliferation of coffee, tea, and quinine-yielding chinchona (the key anti-malarial ingredient in tonic water).[4] Although coffee was only introduced to the Shevaroys in 1825, by 1883, “9,210 acres was under coffee cultivation [of which the British held] 7,776 acres or 85 percent, and the remaining was with the Indians, mostly non-tribal people.”[5] Upon the end of colonial rule, large plantations/estates were transferred to elite, wealthy, higher-caste Indians, not to indigenous or tribal populations.

This continues to have an impact on coffee growing and on who it benefits today. Although 99%[6] of growers are smallholders on 75% of coffee-growing land, their work only accounts for 30%[7] of the total production—and this legacy is incredibly difficult to dismantle. In present-day India, most smallholders have no other option but to sell to large commodity buyers. The anonymity of commoditization is synonymous with lost leverage, not only to command higher premiums, but also to build relationships with end buyers.

The British colonial presence in India lasted more than 300 years, with around 100 years of direct rule as the “British Raj.” Alongside plantation systems and partition, their influence extended into the realms of taste and class (among other things). In a post-colonial world, these attitudes still manifest themselves when products from the Global South, such as coffee, garner value because they enhance prosperity in the Global North.

A Modern Coffee History

India’s first wave was concentrated in southern India, with its time-honored tradition of drinking filter kaapi—a milky, frothy drink brewed with coffee and chicory through a south Indian filter. The British controlled most large-scale coffee growing until their departure in 1947. The transition period was marked by the government establishment of the Coffee Board of India in 1942, which had a monopoly over coffee sales, pooling and selling growers’ coffee. It was not until the mid-1990s that the coffee market in India was liberalized, with growers able to sell to roasters and retailers directly. At the turn of the century, India’s second wave saw domestic brands like Café Coffee Day and Barista popularize espresso-based drinks and café culture. With Starbucks’ entry in 2012, shortly followed by one of the first homegrown independent roasters Blue Tokai, second wave incumbents slowly gave way to a new landscape of coffee. Chai-drinking north India saw millennials trade in their cuppa for a flat white. Cafés with the semiotics of everything third wave represents in the Global North—in-house roasteries, minimalist wooden spaces, prescriptive brewing methods, and farm stories—began cropping up across India.

A stainless-steel south Indian filter brewer, which uses percolation to brew filter kaapi, surrounded by other barista tools. By positioning these together, Namisha asks: what tools do we associate with specialty coffee?

This is no coincidence. The Indian bourgeoisie, influenced by a long history of class and colonization, continues to import aspirational cues in the form of language, aesthetics, and popular culture from the Global North.[8] This, coupled with an internet savvy youth, has seen an exponential growth in appetite for both coffee and its content across a diverse audience, making James Hoffmann and Tim Wendelboe household names on India’s Reddit coffee forums.

Prohibitively high import duties on green coffee have forced Indians to consume local varieties almost exclusively. This focus has made the feedback loop between farmers, roasters, and the nascent specialty coffee consumer base extremely robust, creating an inward-looking industry seeking to maximize the potential of local produce. Abroad, Indian coffee may be synonymous only with robusta, monsooned malabar, and dark, commoditized roasts of a bygone era, but Indian specialty coffee enthusiasts have discovered that local varieties are a lot more nuanced. Nevertheless, the impact that a small group of specialty consumers can have on farmer livelihoods is limited. Local consumers are only just catching up to the excitement of specialty coffee, so placing the onus of questioning the dominant, imported culture of modern coffee consumption on them at this juncture is a stretch. When the nuance and value of Indian coffee are viewed through an imported lens of taste and flavor, the task is not just to communicate Indian coffee’s worth to Indians, but to the international community.

The Entwining of Quality and Flavor

Specialty coffee’s hyperfocus on “the cup” and systems of “quality” can offer significant premiums to producers. Previous inherited definitions of specialty include “the highest quality green coffee beans roasted to their greatest flavor potential.”[9] A widely accepted industry standard (80–100 points as scored on the SCA cupping form) is another example of how foundations are laid for quality and flavor to be inextricably linked.[10] These methodologies act as simple communication tools with discerning consumers, who want to feel connected to a value system with ease. However, when taste is reduced to a simple number, we develop a myopic shorthand for the implied “quality” of coffee.

Efforts to expand our understanding of quality from a number to a list of flavor descriptors are complicated, too. Central to the dialogue around distinctive taste and flavor is the World Coffee Research (WCR) Sensory Lexicon and its accompanying visual presentation as the Coffee Tasters Flavor Wheel, a collaboration between WCR, the SCA, and the University of California, Davis. Although created to enable sensory scientists to have “a reliable and repeatable way to measure the flavors and relative magnitude” in a scientific setting, the introduction confirms that the WCR Sensory Lexicon “is not truly global.”[11] The simplicity and aesthetic of the wheel has led to widespread use among coffee professionals and consumers alike, although it belies the underlying complexity of the lexicon. Many of the references used are either unavailable or unaffordable in producing countries, being only widely available in the US, where the lexicon was developed and where World Coffee Research will do most of its sensory evaluations. This can inadvertently lead to an othering of gustatory experiences and frames of reference.

Outside of its scientific context, the lexicon and wheel lose their neutrality as they’re shared, discussed, and overlaid with personal preference. In the real world, as it moves through layers of trainers and tastemakers to consumers (many of whom are located in the Global North), users develop shorthand for “desirable” and “undesirable” flavors. However, taste preference is subjective and a function of exposure, conditioning, and cultural zeitgeist amongst other things. This has wider implications—local communities who appreciate different flavors (for example, “woody” and “earthy” in India) may be unsure of whether or not these flavors are “okay” to enjoy, especially when they’re categorized under a different and dominant, imported cultural understanding of flavor. This can lead to coffee drinkers in the Global South second-guessing themselves.

In Whose Taste?

When Global North flavor preferences are normalized as standards for “quality,” it can significantly impact which flavors are rewarded in the marketplace. A case study of the Cup of Excellence program by Togo Traore, Norbert Wilson, and Deacue Fields III found that, using the auction system, growers could receive and retain significantly more financial reward for their coffee. The study also noted that, of those achieving the highest premiums, 95.7% of the coffees were described as “fruity,” 95% of them were “sweet,” and only 58% were “sour/acid.”[12] How did these particular flavors come to be recognized and rewarded in the auction?

Although it’s tempting to reduce the development of these preferences down to simple consumer demand, the reality is complex. Taste and therefore quality in coffee have their foundations on a set of conventions and protocols familiar to the industry–the lexicon and the flavor wheel. But the world of specialty is marked by constantly changing preferences, with access to the exotic and unique. Scientific rigor and the quest for consistency often distract from the fact that quality is “not discovered but created.”[13] A consumer market that caters to neophiles offers security to no particular group of farmers, even those who are endowed with access to the limited beans growing at exceptionally high altitudes.

Tim Wendelboe, owner of the eponymous roastery, has seen his own flavor preferences, and therefore his customers’ preferences, shift over his career. When we spoke about the history of flavor preferences and the future of Indian coffee in September last year, he noted that, in his experience in Norway, modern tastes for fruity coffees with heightened acidity, like Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees, are “not due to customer demand.” Referring broadly to coffee buyers, he noted: “We kind of collectively changed the preferred flavor in the market.”

This is, in fact, good news: our collective preferences are always in development; we’re not limited to the prevailing set. But it also highlights a difficult truth: As consumers, we are often unaware of when these shifts happen. How we value certain flavors over others can very much be a function of whose opinion we value, and how stories are told. Unwittingly, we find ourselves echoing a strong desire for fruity and floral notes with heightened acidity.[14] Later in our conversation, Tim Wendelboe reflected that, while he understands consumers’ desire to have “an expert to validate that you have good coffee, the best thing [would be if] people discovered [what’s good] themselves.”

The bourgeoisie ideal of the artisanal, and the implicit objectivity of flavor that is embedded in these bags and then brewed in standardized ways, makes customers feel like they are paying up for something that is unambiguously excellent. Expectations of consistency in flavor from harvest to harvest are also unreasonable, and unsustainable, at the smallholder level. A recently published SCA white paper attempts to redefine specialty coffee as “a collection of attributes,” intrinsic and extrinsic, therefore making its “special-ness” or distinctness a function of these. This is one such blueprint for how we can start to dissociate quality from flavor alone. Arshiya Bose of Black Baza Coffee in Bangalore says, “a lot of the coffee growers we work with have a super expanded notion of quality, whereas some of the coffee drinkers we work with have a far more linear notion of quality.”

Time for New Stories

“Indian coffee is not seen as high quality, standalone origin coffee because it’s either valued or considered lower quality when compared to all the other South Americans and Africans,” remarks Tanya Rao of Kaveri Coffee Works in San Francisco. Sunalini Menon, Indian coffee veteran and “Asia’s First Lady of Coffee,” faced this challenge early in her illustrious 50-year coffee career. “Initially when I used to cup with a lot of cuppers, I used to find that our Indian coffee was so different,” she shared in an interview. “So I used to feel a little bit sad about it. I would always apologize.” Another North American roaster on whose menu Indian coffee plays a vital part noted in our chat that, despite his efforts to sell and highlight carefully grown and processed single-origin Indian coffee, “it’s still kind of just a drop in the bucket in terms of what’s going on here.”

Internationally, India still struggles to untether itself from being known solely as a robusta producer. Mithilesh Vazalwar of Corridor Seven Coffee Roasters in Nagpur says that even amongst international professionals that are aware of Indian coffee they say, “‘Your robustas are very good.’ I don’t take it as an offense, but it’s not the full picture.” And, should you want to explore adding an Indian coffee to your offering, access isn’t streamlined. In a recent conversation about the future of Indian coffee, I was excited to discover that James Hoffmann used Indian coffee in his first ever Barista Championship blend back in 2005. Despite this, he surprisingly revealed that with respect to procuring high-quality Indian coffee today he “wouldn’t even know who to call.” India’s smallholder farmers often engage in sustainable practices such as intercropping, making the story compelling. But only larger estates have the resources, infrastructure, and capital to produce the consistency needed for international direct trade, effectively ruling out over 80% of growers. And Arshiya Bose laments that—unlike the cooperative model that’s taken hold in other former colonies—smallholder produce is “still not being processed in centralized locations, which is the big, big, big difference to a lot of the cooperatives across both Central America and also the kind of cooperatives we know really well in Uganda.” The addition of difficult storage conditions to the above has created the perfect storm for risk aversion amongst roasters, raising the barrier to entry for those looking to partner directly with farms.

Fresh Voices, New Perspectives

The nascent domestic direct trade market in India shows promise. Black Baza Coffee exclusively sources coffee from direct relationships with smallholder farmers, and Arshiya notes a 56% increase in revenue for farmers over what they’d make with their local trader, which “itself is reason to be optimistic.” However, if India wants to make inroads into bigger revenue markets in the Global North, international direct trade partnerships are the necessary next step.

When James explained why he decided to use Indian coffee back in 2005, he recalled “the reason I liked it so much is that it was like drinking cream. What I remember was, certainly as espresso, it felt really great to drink.” Given how central espresso-based drinks are to the entire movement of specialty, this affinity sometimes feels like a lost opportunity that India hasn’t been able to capitalize on; alongside other unique attributes, there are the makings of a powerful new story. “Indian coffees have their own specific attributes; uniqueness in terms of their genetic makeup, which lend themselves to being appreciated by the global market, provided they are carefully and innovatively processed and marketed to the right market,” noted Sunalini Menon. A common thread across almost all interviewees I spoke with for the purpose of this article was India’s need for more voices marketing and telling the stories of its coffees, therefore driving demand for their unique attributes.

Picture yourself taking a Sunday stroll in a nearby city on a chilly morning. You crave a warm cup of coffee, and an artisan coffee shop with a queue outside catches your eye. On the display counter, you see the week’s showcase, alongside a picture of misty hills covered in coffee plants. The label reads “Grown by the Soliga tribe in the Biligirirangan Hills,” and upon closer inspection, you notice this is in India. The barista tells you it was shade-grown amidst teak and jackfruit, with tasting notes of amla and butter. You add amla to the list of foods you want to try one day. You ask for a filter kaapi brewed with a south Indian filter, because it’s cold this morning and you want a milk-based drink. The creamy, frothy top layer coats your tongue, enveloping you and making you feel warm. As you pay US$4.75 before heading out, you smack your lips with the last sip. That was worth it. ◇

NAMISHA PARTHASARATHY is the co-founder of Ārāmse, a slow-coffee company based in London and Mysore. This feature is a condensed version of the longer essay she submitted to receive her SCA Coffee Sustainability Program Professional certification in December 2021.

The author thanks Arshiya Bose, James Hoffmann, Sunalini Menon, Tanya Rao, Mithilesh Vazalwar, Tim Wendelboe, and the interview participants not directly quoted here for their time discussing these ideas.

References

[1] International Coffee Organization. “Monthly Trade Statistics: November 2021.” https:// www.ico.org/prices/m1-exports.pdf.

[2] Velayutham Saravanan, “Colonialism and coffee plantations: Decline of environment and tribals in Madras presidency during the nineteenth century,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 41, no. 4 (December 2004): 465–88. DOI: 10.1177/001946460404100405.

[3] Bhaswati Bhattacharya, “Local history of a global commodity: Production of coffee in Mysore and Coorg in the nineteenth century,” Indian Historical Review 41, no. 1 (June 2014): 67–86.DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521734.

[4] C. R. Markham, “On the effects of the destruction of forests in the Western Ghauts of India on the water-supply,” The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 36 (1886): 182.

[5] Velayutham Saravanan, “Colonialism and coffee plantations.”

[6] Defined as fewer than 10 hectares or 25 acres by the Indian Coffee Board.

[7] M. R. Narayana, “Size distribution of estates, inequality and poverty: Evidence for India’s household coffee farmers,” Journal of Asian Public Policy 7, no. 1 (2014): 18–40. DOI: 10.1080/17516234.2013.873339.

[8] Maanvi Singh, “How snobbery helped take the spice out of european cooking.” For Foodies, NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/ thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery- helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking.

[9] Specialty Coffee Association, “Towards a Definition of Specialty Coffee: Building an Understanding Based on Attributes.” https://sca.coffee/attributes-whitepaper

[10] The Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) that certifies Q-graders was initially founded as the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s charitable trust.

[11] https://worldcoffeeresearch.org/resources/ sensory-lexicon.

[12] Togo M. Traore, Norbert L.W. Wilson, and Deacue Fields III, “What explains specialty coffee quality scores and prices: A case study from the cup of excellence program,” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 50, no. 3 (2018): 349–68. doi:10.1017/aae.2018.5.

[13] Edward F. Fischer, “Quality and inequality: Creating value worlds with Third Wave coffee,” Socio-economic Review 19, no. 1 (January 2021): 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwz044.

[14] Fischer, “Quality and inequality.”

We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 17. Both the print edition and the availability of these features across sca.coffee/25 wouldn’t have been possible without our generous underwriting sponsors for this issue: Tempesta Barista Attitude, BWT water+more, and TODDY. Thank you so much for your support! Learn more about our underwriters here.

Jaago and Smell the Coffee: Deanonymizing (and Decolonizing) Indian Coffee | 25, Issue 17