The sailing-ship story

Every bag of Monsooned Malabar tells you the origin story, usually badly, so here it is properly.

Under the Raj, Indian coffee went to Europe in wooden sailing ships, round the Cape of Good Hope, on a voyage that took something in the order of six months. The green coffee sat in the holds of those ships through the whole journey, in humid sea air. It absorbed moisture. It changed from the fresh green of new-crop coffee to a pale, aged yellow, and it changed in size and texture as well as in colour — and in the cup.

European buyers came to expect that character. It was what Indian coffee tasted like. Then the Suez Canal, steamships and eventually sealed containers cut the voyage down and kept the cargo dry, and the coffee arriving in Europe was suddenly bright, acidic and green — and the buyers complained that it was wrong.

So the Indian trade set out to reproduce the effect on land. That is the useful part of the story: Monsooned Malabar is not an accident preserved by tradition. It is a deliberate industrial process, designed backwards from a flavour that shipping used to produce for free.

How it is actually made

The raw material is natural coffee — cherry-dried, not washed. Sun-dried cherry coffee comes down from the estates in Chikmagalur, Manjarabad, Coorg, the Biligiris, the Nilgiris, Wayanad and Travancore to curing works on the coast, where it is hulled, graded and sorted into AA and A before monsooning begins. Washed coffee will not monsoon properly; the process depends on the character natural drying leaves behind.

Then it waits for the weather. Monsooning runs with the active South West monsoon, roughly June to September, and takes about 12 to 16 weeks. It cannot be rushed and it cannot be done out of season.

The sequence, as run in the coastal curing works:

• Spreading. Beans are laid out on cement or tiled floors in well-ventilated, open-sided warehouses, in layers 10 to 15 cm thick. Too deep and the middle does not breathe; too shallow and you waste floor space that is in very short supply for those four months.
• Absorbing. Monsoon-saturated air moves through the sheds continuously. The beans take up moisture to roughly 14–15% — well above the 10–12% at which green coffee is normally traded and stored.
• Raking. The beds are raked at fixed intervals so that every bean gets equal exposure. Uneven monsooning gives you a lot with two different coffees in it, which is a defect.
• Re-bagging. The coffee is packed loosely into gunny bags, filled only to about half their capacity and left unstitched, then stacked four bags high in rows with clear space between rows so air keeps moving through the stack.
• Repeat. The spread-rake-bag cycle is run over and over through the season until the curer judges the change complete. This is not automated and it is not measured by instrument; it is a trained eye judging colour and swell.
• Finishing. Finally the lot is polished, re-graded, hand-sorted to pull out beans that did not monsoon evenly, and fumigated before shipping.

Three to four months of floor space, labour and repeated handling, on a crop that arrives already dried. That is why it costs more than the natural robusta or arabica it started as.

What monsooning does to the coffee

The physical changes are dramatic and easy to verify by eye. Green Monsooned Malabar does not look like green coffee. It is pale — golden straw or bone, rather than the blue-green of new crop — and it is visibly bigger and lighter in the hand.

The curing works report that beans swell to roughly double their original volume and that bulk density falls by about 40–60%. Those two figures are consistent with each other: if mass is broadly conserved and volume roughly doubles, density roughly halves. It is still a striking claim, and it comes from the producers themselves, so treat the exact percentages as trade figures rather than laboratory measurements. The direction is not in doubt — put a handful of monsooned green next to a handful of Plantation A and the difference in weight is obvious immediately.

In the cup, the changes are these:

• Acidity effectively disappears. This is the defining change. The process is described as leaving the coffee practically neutral. A washed Chikmagalur arabica has citric brightness; a monsooned coffee has essentially none. If you have ever wanted a coffee with no perceptible sourness at all, this is it.
• Body goes up substantially. Heavy, syrupy, coating. It is one of the fullest-bodied coffees available anywhere.
• The flavour turns earthy and spiced. The standard descriptors — chocolate, nuts, spice, tobacco, a certain pungency — are accurate. There is a musty, almost cellar-like note that is intrinsic to the style.
• It roasts differently. Low-density, high-moisture beans take heat differently from dense new-crop arabica, and they are unforgiving of a fast roast. They also tend to look darker earlier than they actually are.

Whether that musty note reads as "character" or "defect" depends entirely on what your palate has been trained on. A cupper working to an SCA arabica form would mark it down. That form was not written for this coffee.

The GI, and the grade names

Monsooned Malabar is protected. Both Monsooned Malabar Arabica Coffee and Monsooned Malabar Robusta Coffee hold Geographical Indication registrations in India, filed by the Coffee Board under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry — applications 85 and 114 respectively, with the robusta application dated October 2007. The protected area is the Malabar coast running from Mangalore in Karnataka down to Kozhikode in Kerala, with the raw coffee drawn from the estate districts listed above.

Practically, that means the name is not a style anyone can use. A coffee monsooned in a shed in Pune is not Monsooned Malabar, whatever the bag says.

The grades follow the Indian sieve system, adjusted for the fact that the beans have swollen:

Monsooned Malabar AA is the grade you will normally meet at retail. Basanally is a smaller-screen monsooned arabica and appears less often outside the trade. If the grade language is unfamiliar, our guide to Indian coffee grades covers the whole system.

Who it is for — and who it isn't

We would rather sell this to the right person than to everyone, so:

It is also, quietly, one of the best coffees in the world for a blend. A small proportion of monsooned coffee in an espresso blend adds body and a low-acid base without dominating — which is why it has been used that way in Europe for a very long time.

We roast ours as DRIFTWOOD, at a medium roast on purpose. The instinct with a low-acid coffee is to roast it dark, and most Monsooned Malabar on the market is roasted very dark indeed. We think that is a waste: the coffee has already given up its acidity in the warehouse, and pushing it dark on top of that strips out the spice and nut character and leaves only carbon. A medium roast keeps the sweetness and the aromatics that survived the monsoon.

How to brew it

Monsooned coffee behaves differently from anything else in your cupboard, and the usual starting points will mislead you.

• Weigh, do not scoop. The beans are far less dense than normal, so a scoop that gave you 18 g of a washed arabica will give you noticeably less monsooned coffee. This is the single commonest mistake and it produces a weak, disappointing first cup that gets blamed on the coffee.
• Start coarser than you expect. Low-density, brittle beans shatter easily and throw more fines than a dense arabica at the same grind setting. Go a step coarser than your normal position and work back.
• Espresso. Excellent. A conventional 1:2 ratio in 27–32 seconds is a good starting point. Because there is no acidity to protect, you can extract harder than usual without the shot going thin or sour. Method in our espresso guide.
• Moka pot and French press. This is where it is happiest. Both methods reward body and neither punishes low acidity, and the earthy, spiced character comes through beautifully.
• South Indian filter. A natural fit — the heavy body stands up to the milk and sugar, and the low acidity suits the style completely. Blend it with chicory if you like, or drink it clean. See our filter coffee guide.
• Cold brew. Very good. Long immersion at low temperature already suppresses acidity, so pairing it with a coffee that has none produces something exceptionally smooth. Use a slightly higher ratio than usual.
• Pour-over. Possible but it is not what this coffee is for. Pour-over exists to show clarity and acidity, and monsooned coffee has traded both away.
• Water temperature. Slightly lower than you would use for a bright coffee, around 90–92°C, keeps the earthy notes from tipping into ash.

One last note. Monsooned Malabar is not a subtle coffee and it does not pretend to be. It is the product of a Malabar warehouse, four months of monsoon, and a lot of people with rakes. Drink it as that, not as a light-roast Ethiopian in disguise, and it is very hard to beat.