Robusta, treated like the finest arabica.
The farm that treats robusta the way most growers treat their best arabica: champagne yeast on one lot, a Kölsch beer ferment on another. If you think you don't like robusta, this is the estate that will change your mind.
Karnataka
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.
Kaapikaadu is grown by Mr. Lobo, and the reason we buy from him has nothing to do with the ground and everything to do with what happens after harvest. This is a canephora specialist's farm: the lots we buy are built around named fermentation protocols most growers reserve for arabica.
ÉTOILE NOIR is canephora fermented with a champagne yeast — sparkling fruit and layered sweetness, a structure rarely found in the species; filter stays bright and grows sweeter as it cools, espresso goes to darker sugar over a dense body.
MALTLINE takes a canephora lot and ferments it with Kölsch beer before its natural dry — not beer-flavoured coffee, but a deeper, malt-like sweetness and a rounder structure, roasted medium light to keep bitterness unusually low.
STILL LIFE, the estate's 100% Arabica lot, is whole cherry sealed away from oxygen and fermented with EM5, a live culture that keeps the ferment slow and the acidity round instead of sharp.
Indian robusta has a reputation problem built on decades of anonymous, poorly processed bulk lots. Kaapikaadu is one of the clearest counter-arguments we roast: graded, fermented and dried with the same care as a competition arabica, and it cups like it.
“Kaapikaadu is our answer whenever someone says robusta can't be a specialty coffee. Champagne yeast, a beer ferment, EM5 on the arabica lot — Mr. Lobo runs a fermentation programme most arabica growers would envy, and puts it to work on the species everyone underrates.”
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