Our Story
The roastery · New Delhi
India grows extraordinary coffee. Most of it leaves.
India is the seventh largest coffee producer in the world. Around three quarters of what we grow is exported — a lot of it as unroasted green, blended into somebody else’s bag, sold under somebody else’s name. Meanwhile the coffee most Indians drink at home is instant, or a supermarket packet that was roasted so long ago nobody bothered printing a date on it.
BROOT exists in the gap between those two facts.
We are a small roastery in New Delhi. We buy from estates in Chikmagalur, Coorg, Koraput and Tamil Nadu — the same growers, season after season, so we know what a lot should taste like before it arrives. We roast in 2kg batches on two machines. And we roast after you order, which sounds like a slogan until you understand what it actually costs to run that way.
01 · No warehouse
We hold green, not roasted.
Roasted coffee starts dying the moment it leaves the drum. Most brands roast to a forecast, box it, and hope it sells before it flattens. We hold unroasted green — which is stable for months — and turn it into your coffee once you have paid for it. It is a worse business model on paper. It is the only one that puts a genuinely fresh bag in your hands.
02 · Every roast is logged
Consistency is a file, not a claim.
Charge temperature, turning point, first crack, development time ratio, drop temperature — recorded for every batch, tasted against the last one, adjusted. That record is the reason the bag you buy in October tastes like the one you bought in March. Without it, “small batch” just means “inconsistent”.
03 · Direct, and repeat
The same growers, season after season.
Buying direct is easy to say once. Buying from the same estate for the fourth year running, when the harvest was difficult and the price went up, is the part that actually changes how a farm invests. We would rather have ten relationships that last than fifty lots that were cheap.
04 · Indian first
Including the robusta.
India grows more robusta than arabica and the specialty world has spent twenty years pretending otherwise. Well-grown, well-processed Indian robusta is a genuinely good coffee with weight, crema and a place on a menu. We roast it deliberately, not as filler — read why.
Where this came from
A roaster I was not allowed to touch.
I worked part time in a roastery in Waterloo, Ontario, while I was studying there. I was never allowed near the roaster — I did not have the certifications for it — so I spent that whole time a few feet from the one machine I actually wanted to understand, watching somebody else run it.
That is the entire origin of this company. Curiosity with nowhere to put itself.
BROOT was built on money raised from family and friends, and on a first year spent on foot. We carried samples to more than a thousand cafés, one door at a time, for a year. Most of them said no. Enough of them said yes.
That is now more than fifty recurring accounts, ten-plus cafés we have consulted for, and working relationships with the farms we buy from. Very little of it is one person. There is a team here that cups, roasts, packs, dispatches and picks up the phone, and the coffee is better for not being a single palate’s opinion.
The part nobody warned me about: I am an introvert, and this turned out to be the easiest room I have ever walked into. Roasters, baristas, growers — people in coffee help each other in a way that does not happen in most industries. The support was real. The friendships turned out to be the point.
Tamandeep Singh Makan · Founder · New Delhi
Coffee should taste like where it came from and when it was roasted. Everything else is packaging.
Where we buy
Four origins we keep going back to.
Baba Budangiri
Where Indian coffee started. The highest range in Karnataka, old varietals, deep shade, and the most structured acidity in the state.
Read more → ChikmagalurRatnagiri Estate
One of the most experimental estates in India. Washed, natural and culture-fermented lots, all from the same hillside.
Read more → OdishaKoraput
India’s newest serious origin. Tribal smallholder lots in the Eastern Ghats, and processing that improves every single season.
Read more → Tamil NaduYercaud & the Shevaroys
Cooler, slower ripening, and a cleaner acidity than anything grown further west. Almost absent from the specialty conversation.
Read more →