Our farm
We grow our own beans. That is the whole trick.
One hundred and forty acres in Pollibetta, Coorg. Every bag we sell starts here.
The estate
A third generation on the same Coorg soil
Tej Thammaiah farms the estate his grandfather planted in Pollibetta, in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. It is 140 acres of shade-grown coffee, and it is where every coffee we sell begins.
Most Indian roasters buy their green coffee at auction or from traders. We do not. Owning the farm means we decide what gets picked, when, and what happens to it afterwards, and it means nothing in your cup was bought from someone else's estate.
Nothing in your cup was bought at an auction.
The people
Picked by hand, by people who have done it for years
Harvest runs from November to February. Cherries are picked at ripeness by our own estate team, sorted by hand, and processed on site within hours. The rest of the year is pruning, shade management and waiting.
Processing
Same soil, different treatment
Every coffee we sell comes off the same 140 acres. The difference between one bag and the next is not where it grew; it is what we did to it after picking. That is where the experiments live.
Washed
Pulped, fermented, washed clean. The clearest expression of the bean itself. Most of the signature range.
Natural
Dried with the fruit still on. Heavier, fruitier, sweeter. The way coffee was processed before anyone had a washing station.
Honey
Some of the fruit left on during drying. Between washed and natural in body and sweetness.
Fermented
Cherries fermented in fresh orange juice, or in beer. Coffees that exist because we own the farm and can try things.
The smokehouse
Fourteen hours over a cold fire
Cold-smoking coffee was our idea before it was anyone's in India. Green beans sit over a low, cool smoke for fourteen hours, long enough to take on the character of the wood without cooking, and then they go to the roaster like any other lot.
The result is Ol' Smoky: mellow, sweet-smoky, unmistakable. It is the coffee people ask about, and the one that could only have come from a farm willing to experiment on its own crop.
The roastery
Roasted in Bengaluru, every day, only to order
Green coffee comes down from the estate to our roastery in Kothanur. Ashish and Sreeram roast what Tej grows, daily, and nothing is roasted until someone has ordered it. Your bag is roasted the day it ships and dated on the pack.
Most coffee sold in India was roasted weeks or months before it reaches you. Coffee is at its best in the two to four weeks after roasting, which is the window we ship into.
"That is the whole trick. There is no trick."
Sreeram, Ashish & Tej
And a few friends
Occasionally, a neighbour's coffee
A small part of what we sell comes from partner estates near ours, growers we know and whose coffee we want to roast. Where that is the case, the product page says so by name.