India's best-known coffee name, and it isn't from an estate.
The only Indian origin with a name people recognise outside the country, and the only significant one that is not in the Western Ghats and not farmed by estates. Araku is smallholder coffee, grown by Adivasi households on plots measured in acres.
Araku Valley · Andhra Pradesh
It is October, and the cherry is ripening on the branch. Picking starts in November.
A typical year for this kind of country. This farm's own dates can run a few weeks either side.
Araku Valley lies about 110 km inland from Visakhapatnam, in what is now Alluri Sitharama Raju district (carved from Visakhapatnam district in 2022). The valley floor sits around 900 m and coffee is grown roughly 900–1,200 m on the surrounding slopes, with rainfall of just 1,000–1,400 mm a year — a third or less of what falls on Kodagu.
The planted material is the standard Indian selection set — S.795 widely grown, with Selection 6, SLN 9, Cauvery and Chandragiri also present, newer plantings leaning Chandragiri. The shade here is younger than in Karnataka, much of it planted deliberately alongside the coffee rather than inherited as old-growth forest. Araku Valley Arabica received its geographical indication in 2019, in the same round as Coorg, Chikmagalur, Bababudangiris and Wayanad.
“We keep this page live even without a current SKU because Araku is the origin most customers already have an opinion about, and it deserves an honest one: genuinely different geology and farming from the Western Ghats estates that make up most of what we sell.”
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