Collections
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Karnataka Coffee
Karnataka coffee beans from shade-grown estates in the Malnad hills of Chikmagalur, where India grows most of its coffee. Roasted to order in New Delhi with the roast date on every bag. Try RATNAGIRI WASHED CUT, RATNAGIRI NATURAL CUT or VYOM 01 for caramel-sweet medium roasts, or MOSS THEORY for a light, floral cup. Free shipping across India. Explore the estates on our Indian coffee estates pages.
More on Karnataka coffee
Karnataka grows roughly seventy per cent of India's coffee, across Chikmagalur, Coorg and Hassan. Almost everything in this collection comes off estates in the Malnad hills, where the trees grow under a native shade canopy rather than in open sun. That is unusual globally, and it is a large part of why Indian coffee reads as rounded and low in sharp acidity: shade slows cherry ripening, and slower ripening builds sugar without spiking acid.
One practical consequence of monsoon-fed, shade-grown coffee is how it behaves in storage. Keep the bag closed, at room temperature, away from the kitchen window. Refrigerating coffee is the common and expensive mistake, because the bag sweats every time you take it out and condensation on a roasted bean stales it faster than air ever would. Buy a size you will finish inside a month instead of stockpiling, and grind it as you go rather than all at once.
The estates behind these lots are mapped on our Indian coffee estates page.
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Light Roast Coffee
Light roast coffee beans, roasted to order in New Delhi for filter, pour over and AeroPress. Bright, floral and fruity, with more of the estate's own character than a dark roast. In stock now: CULTURED 42 (citrus, floral), MOSS THEORY (floral, fruity), OBSIDIAN and ÉTOILE NOIR (chocolatey, fruity) and RED LANTERN (chocolate, fruit, nut). Ground to your brewer, roast date on every bag, free shipping across India.
How to brew light roast coffee
Light roast means the beans leave the drum before the sugars have caramelised far, usually just past first crack. What survives is what the farm and the process put there: acidity, floral notes, fruit, a tea-like clarity. What you give up is the roasty chocolate character most people associate with coffee in general. Neither is better. They are different amounts of interference between you and the origin.
Light roasts are denser and harder to extract, so nearly every problem you will have with one is under-extraction dressed up as sourness. Grind finer than you think, push the water to 94 to 96C, and give the bag ten to fourteen days off roast rather than seven. Light roasts hold their gas longer and a very fresh one tastes closed and thin. If it is still sharp after that, extend the brew rather than dropping the temperature. These reward filter methods far more than pressure.
The vocabulary here, first crack and density and under-extraction, is explained in our coffee glossary.
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Matcha Powder
Stone-ground Japanese green tea in two grades. Ceremonial first flush for whisking in a bowl — sweet, thick, deeply umami. Café blend for lattes and iced drinks, where you need it to stand up to milk and ice rather than disappear.
Both keep best sealed, cold and away from light. Matcha oxidises faster than coffee — buy small, use it up.
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Medium Roast Coffee
Past first crack, stopped well before second. That is the whole definition. Sugars have caramelised enough to give sweetness and body, but the roast has not started contributing its own smoke and bitterness. Origin character is still visible, just softened around the edges. This is the range most people mean when they say they want coffee that tastes like coffee.
The practical advantage is tolerance. A medium roast extracts across a wider band than a light one, which means it will still make a decent cup on a machine you have not dialled in, on a grinder that drifts, at whatever temperature your kettle actually reaches. Rest these seven to ten days from the roast date. If you are buying one bag to serve black in the morning and through milk in the afternoon, this is the range that does both without a compromise you can taste in either.
Undecided between roast levels? Find your coffee asks a few questions and narrows it.
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Microlot Coffees
Microlot coffee from Indian estates: very small, separately harvested lots, roasted in tiny batches and gone once they sell out. In stock now: MOSS THEORY, ÉTOILE NOIR, OBSIDIAN, CULTURED 42 and RED LANTERN, all light roasts with floral, fruity or chocolatey notes. Brew one as pour over first. Free shipping across India, roast date on every bag.
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Natural Process Coffee
Natural process coffee beans, dried in the cherry for berry sweetness and a heavier body, lovely as pour over, AeroPress or a fruity espresso. Roasted to order in New Delhi from named Indian estates. In stock now: RATNAGIRI NATURAL CUT (caramel-sweet, fruity), MOSS THEORY (floral, fruity) and RED LANTERN (chocolate, fruit, nut). Whole bean or ground for your brewer, roast date on every bag, free shipping across India.
How to brew natural process coffee
In a natural, the cherry dries whole with the fruit still on the seed, and only then gets hulled. Sugars from the pulp migrate inwards during drying, so the cup comes out heavier, sweeter and fruitier than the same variety washed: berry, jam, sometimes a fermented depth underneath. It is also the harder process to get right. Badly dried naturals taste of overripe fruit and vinegar, which is why the ones worth buying are traceable to a named estate and a known drying method.
Brew naturals a touch cooler than washed lots, around 91 to 93C, and slightly coarser. They are already high in soluble sugars and it is easy to push them past pleasant into cloying. Give them a longer rest as well, twelve days or more from the roast date, because the fruit-forward volatiles keep developing after roasting and a very fresh natural can taste boozy rather than sweet.
Most of these are single-estate lots; the regions behind them are mapped in Indian coffee estates.
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NEW LAUNCHES
New on the shelf: Yule Ember, the winter blend; three single origins roasted medium light — Paper Moon (Guji, Ethiopia), Deep Field (Koraput, Odisha), Cold Front (Kiambu, Kenya) — plus Triptych, a flight of all three; Udaygiri cascara and two matchas.
