National Coffee Break

RUKHSAR SHEIKH’S hometown Katihar, Bihar, may still be waking up languidly to masala chai every morn­ing, but when she suggests that your Americano will taste best with robus­ta from the Kalledevarapura estate in Chikmagalur, Karnataka, she speaks with authority. The young woman with an easy smile is the face and voice of Subko, the newest disruptor in the burgeoning speciality coffee business. And her stage is Sidecar, which was last ranked No. 18 on the coveted Asia’s 50 Best Bars in 2023.

Coffee makes good business sense to Sidecar co-owner Minakshi Singh. “It piques the interest of curious consumers and helps us get good daytime business when the bar is not busy,” says the business partner of celebrity mixologist Yangdup Lama. “We even serve a Bach­chaccino for chil­dren during the day—it is made with drinking chocolate from Subko!” adds Singh, who’s also the mother of an eight-year-old boy.

At another end of Delhi, at the tony Olive Bar & Kitchen in the shadow of Qutab Minar, as he makes a customer taste hand-pressed espresso, Sushant Kumar speaks excitedly about subjects that one only encountered at spiffy wine tastings—whisky barrel ageing, yeast fermentation, the impact of terroir, and why it’s important to know that the Gowri Estate in the Shevaroy Hills, Tamil Nadu, is also home to 500 species of birds and butterflies.

As if all this disruption wasn’t enough for a day, Bharat Singhal, Founder, Bili Hu Coffee, surprises you at Café C in the posh setting of The Chanakya atrium. With flourish, which would be more appropriate for a Rolex from the glittering display nearby, Singhal produces a sleek electronic weighing scale along with the pour over you have ordered. He insists that it is important to know how many millilitres of water you’re adding to the coffee because it makes a difference to the body of the brew.

From the time when the 17th-century Sufi saint Baba Budan is said to have smuggled seven coffee beans from the port of Mocha in present-day Yemen to Chikmagalur in Karnataka, and literally sowed the seeds of India’s coffee industry, to the decades when instant (or filter) coffee loaded with chicory ruled the market and espresso meant a milky beverage spiked with Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate, India’s coffee culture has travelled light years.

That too in 30 years, as Binny Varghese, who motorbiked 21,000 kilometres on his Royal Enfield Himalayan across India and Nepal in 2017 to understand how people were drink­ing coffee, puts it. No one knows this better than DS Shravan Tejas, a fifth-generation coffee planter with a Master’s in Coffee Economics and Science from Illy’s Universita del Caffe.

Today coffee is being spoken about in the same way as some wine tastings—whisky barrel ageing, yeast fermentation and the impact of terroir

Tejas still remembers the time when Matt Chithranjan and his wife, Namrata Asthana, who had left their well-paid financial sector jobs to chase a start-up dream in the early 2010s, landed up in a travel-weary Tata Indigo cab at his family’s estate at Kalledevara­pura in Chikamagalur with an idea to sell—and an order for 100 kilos of coffee beans.

Normally, they would have been politely sent off to the nearest kirana store without a bean in hand, for the estate was used to getting export orders of nothing less than seven-eight tonnes. Yet, Tejas’ father was delighted to part with the minuscule quantity sought by the eager-faced couple. It was because for the first time a company of roasters had come up with a business plan to sell coffee named after the estates they had been sourced from, and not after some faceless corporate behemoth.

Estates producing coffee primarily for exports were within grasping distance of fame and fortune closer home. Tea had its Makaibari and Glenburn, but here was a chance for coffee to have its Kalledevarapura or Attikan or Seethargundu moment. India, after all, is the world’s sixth largest producer of the commodity and Indians have been quaff­ing the brew since the 17th century.

By 2013, Chitharanjan and Asthana, who started out by roasting and packag­ing coffee beans sourced from friendly estates in their Delhi home, opened their first roastery and café in Delhi’sSaid-ul Ajaib. Today, their company—Blue Tokai—is looking back at a 2023-24 turnover of ` 211.1 crore and eyeing the prospect of operating 350 stores across the country within the foreseeable future.

Their growth mirrors the surge in consumption (mainly of roast coffee, and not instant brew, as in the past) since the time the first CCD outlet opened on Brigade Road, Bengaluru, in 1996. Indians today are drinking 30 per cent more coffee than in 2018, says global industry tracker Coffee Intelligence.

Suhas Dwarkanath, founder of the Speciality Coffee Academy of India, and popularly known as the Coffee Man of India, was still a student when the second CCD outlet opened in South Bengaluru. And as he remembers now, he would save two weeks of pocket money to have a cup of the brew that had stoked his interest.

In a sense, though, the change was more superficial than real. Explains Chitharanjan: “India’s coffee landscape was still heavily shaped by legacy brands. Those cafés were instrumental in intro­ducing urban India to coffee as a social ex­perience, but the focus was less on the product itself and rarely on origin, traceability, or flavour nuances. Coffee was a vehicle — not the destination.” He adds, “Roasters like us now have access to micro-lots, natural and honey-processed coffees, and experi­mental fermentations that simply weren’t available before.”

Today, these leaders of the First Wave of Coffee, and the vanguard of the Second Wave, most notably Costa Coffee (which arrived in New Delhi in 2007), who introduce the culture of chilled coffee drinks in pre-Starbucks India, have lost their bragging rights to the likes of Blue Tokai, the aggressively expanding Third Wave (co-founded by Sushant Goel, Ayush Bathwal and Anirudh Sharma in 2016), Slay Coffee (launched by Chaitanya Chitta and Lakshmi Dasaka in 2019), and Subko (rolled out by Rahul Reddy in 2020).

These are the brands dominating the coffee discourse as India rides the Third Wave on the strength of serious infusions of VC funding, even as newer premium brands are opening up in India, starting with Nespresso from the multinational behemoth Nestle, followed by the Greek chain Coffee Island, which is launching its first outlet in Gurugram and eyeing 250 stores by 2029, and then by Costa Cof­fee announcing its plan to expand at the rate of 40-50 stores annually. Then there are the 100-plus smaller coffee brands. And of course, there’s the direct-to-consumer coffee business to also take into account.

India’s coffee production supports this growing demand, emphasises Coffee Intelli­gence. It quotes the Coffee Board of India to report, “the country produced approximately 374,200 metric tons of cof­fee in the 2023/24 marketing year, with robusta accounting for 261,200 tons and arabica for 113,000 tons.”

EQUALLY EYE WATERING is the proliferation of independent cafés across India. Varghese has compiled an impressive list, from Analog Bistro in Leh to Kochi’s Cafficana, from The Flat White Coffee House in Surat (the city with the distinction of having the highest number of cafés per capita in India) to Kohima’s Été Coffee.

And if these cafés do not adequately quench your thirst for coffee surprises, check out the ‘Conceptual Coffee’ offer­ings at celebrated chef Vicky Ratnani’s new restaurant, Omny Kitchen, Gurugram. It has cheekily redefined cold brews with flavours such as Gujarati Jeera (jeera soda, mint, chaat masala and rock salt) and Jigarthanda (a tribute to Madurai’s famous thirst quencher, using the same ingredients—almond gum, sarsaparilla, or nannari, syrup and vanilla ice-cream). The base is single-estate coffee sourced and roasted by Nagpur’s Mithilesh Vazalwar (Corridor Seven Coffee Roasters), who’s in the news for popularising the new trend of ‘coffee raves’, where coffee lovers swing to electronic music while sipping speciality brews.

“Social media and international travel are driving the interest in coffee and the boom in consumption,” explains Singhal. Innovative ways of brewing, serving and savouring a simple, humble coffee bean, Singhal says, make for engaging social media content, which is amplified on the ground by cafés popping up in neighbourhoods with growing regularity as well as curated, hands-on exposure to brewing and appreciating coffee.

Coffee has become such an essential part of the urban experience that popular hangouts are re-defining the offering in their own innovative ways. West Bandra’s bustling Boojee Café, opened as a modest 15-seater by Randeep Singh Kukreja in 2019, is packed and proliferating with­out being the least pretentious. It has, in fact, turned Bandra into the nerve centre of Mumbai coffee culture.

In Fort Mumbai, just steps away from Flora Fountain, Yahvi Mariwala gets beans for the sleek Mahlkonig grinders at her pet-friendly Nandan Coffee from the 40-acre plantation her grandparents, Hansraj and Hamsa, have nurtured in the Palani Hills of Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, with elephants and bison for company, since the 1990s.

Tea had its Makaibari and Glenburn, but here was a chance for coffee to have its Kalledevarapura or Attikan or Seethargundu moment

In Gurugram, Rajan and Deepika Sethi’s Omo Café, a hugely successful veg­etarian restaurant with a dedicated ‘coffee island’, serves Ngarum coffee sourced from ‘nano lots’ in Nagaland by their associate Grace Muivah. Nagaland and coffee? The connection seems so tenuous that it never fails to grab the attention of the media, though Nagaland’s farmers were introduced to coffee cultivation only in the 1990s.

If coffee cultivation in Nagaland comes as a surprise, then Araku in Andhra Pradesh is a splendid success story being brewed by Manoj Kumar, a development economist and Managing Director Naandi Foundation. Working in the poorest villages of Araku, the foundation trained 65,000 farmers to be­come coffee planters in the early 2000s. Today, the area’s 100 per cent arabica is considered to be premium coffee in the world’s most discerning coffee markets, namely, Japan and Korea. After setting up a base for Araku Coffee in France (three cafés in Paris, and counting!) and a 2026 foray planned into Manhattan, the promoters of the brand are all set for a rollout in India beyond their showpiece store in Bengaluru. As Kumar says with a sense of satisfaction, “The tribals of Araku who had fallen off the map are today putting India on the world map of premium coffee.”

And all this has happened, as Varghese doesn’t stop reminding us, in just the past 30 years. Restaurants no longer serve an espresso or a cappuccino; instead, they present a menu with single-estate coffees that come with their own tasting notes and loyal customers. Baristas such as Rukhsar Sheikh and Sushant Kumar, meanwhile, have moved way beyond making coffee to becoming coffee som­meliers, holding forth on the acidity, body and natural sweetness of a brew, and talking about provenance, traceability and elevation—subjects that would have sounded like Latin in the past.

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, who most recently pumped $10 million into Subko (the other big-ticket investors included Gauri Khan and John Abraham), has a good reason to stay invested in coffee. As he points out in a LinkedIn presentation, there’s been a significant rise in the preference among Indians, especially the Millennials and Gen Z, for “the rich flavours and aromas of artisanal roasted coffee, moving away from instant cof­fee,” which their parents grew up with. The country’s urban elite, from Leh to Kochi, more now than ever, is waking up and smelling coffee, not masala chai.

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