Coffee of India

India produces 2 fine coffees, but even among coffee advocates - at least in America - they remain comparatively unknown and un-drunk.

That is too bad. They should be extolled for the love attached to them, if nothing else ; happily, they also taste rather good too. According to legend, coffee was found in Ethiopia. The first big coffee craze, though, took place in Arabia, where by the 13th century Muslims were brewing and drinking giant quantities of it. Travelers from Arabia took the beans with them wherever they went - beans purposely made desolate, purportedly, by parching or boiling. Due to this stern export control policy, it is claimed that no coffee seed sprouted outside Africa or Arabia till the 17th century. Enter ( or exit, as the case might be ) one Baba Budan - one of the great heroes in the history of coffee, in my view.

Wrapping up a pilgrimage to Arabia from his local land of India, Budan left Mecca with many fruitful coffee beans strapped to his belly. From those beans sprouted the 1st coffee trees to be grown in India, and a rural industry that could not be contained to one tiny part of the planet. For love, though, nothing worldwide of coffee, to my mind, beats the tale of Monsooned Malabar, one of the 2 coffees for which India is understood today. The English commenced the modern commercial cultivation of coffee on the hills of southern India, along the Malabar coast, a century-and-a-half gone. The coffee grown there had been packed raw into the holds of wooden ships and sent on a half year trip, round the Cape of Good Hope, to the coffee homes and shops of Europe. On such a long trip, and in such vessels, the beans necessarily became exposed to just about constant humidity. That humidity turned the beans pale gold and leached them of their astringency. When the coffee eventually reached its destination it had been considerably mellowed - and Continentals loved it. Progress at last interruptd, though, to momentarily reject the coffee drinkers of Europe their beloved aged Indian bean. The opening of the Suez Canal made the trip from the Malabar Coast much shorter. And, the coffee started to be shipped in modern steel vessels.

These developments collaborated to deprive the coffee beans of the lengthened exposure to humidity which had been in charge of their particular flavour. To meet the clamor for the old style of coffee from Malabar, some growers hit on a straightforward but creative solution. They might copy the moist conditions of the old sea excursion by exposing their beans to the Indian monsoon. Therefore , Monsooned Malabar. The monsooning process is a long one - and actually reasonably work intensive.

First, the coffee to be monsooned is stored in a special warehouse to await the monsoon season. When the time comes, the sides of the warehouse are opened, permitting the wet monsoon winds to circulate around the beans. The beans could also be raked or hand-turned on the floor of the warehouse to help in the process. Monsooning takes twelve to sixteen weeks. In this time the beans swell to twice their picked size and turn that signature pale golden color. The flavour of Monsooned Malabar coffee is generally described in terms such as musty, earthy, corky and woody. Some writers have called it "mellow" yet "aggressive" at the same time! All agree that it's got a polarizing quality - you will either like it or dislike it. Perhaps I just haven't had enough cups yet to really judge, but in my viewpoint the taste isn't as quirky as all that. Musty, maybe, put not off-puttingly so.

I believe that many folk would like it, not just those among us who enjoy searching out the more surprising offerings of the coffee world.

And again, for my part, the entrancing story behind this coffee compensates for any deficiency in the cup. Sadly , you continue to can't find Monsooned Malabar just anywhere. Ordering it by mail is still the best chance for many of us. Oddly enough, till quite recently it was simpler to get green ( unroasted ) Malabar coffee beans than roasted ones.

My first cup came from beans that I roasted at home, myself, in a popcorn popper. There are some resources online for any one interested in getting into home coffee roasting, a delightful past-time in its own right. .

There are a few coffee sellers on the Web now who offer roasted Monsooned Malabar and similarly exotic or hard-to-find beans. In the case of Malabar (as opposed, say, to geunine Kona or Jamaican Blue Mountain), the price actually compares quite favorably with more mundane or "normal" coffees. If you like traveling the world in a coffee cup - and especially if you'd like to drink something with a bit of romance to it - you owe it to yourself to get your hands on some Monsooned Malabar. By the way, if you drink a lot of espresso, you might have had some Malabar coffee without knowing; some expresso producers include it in their so-called exotic blends.

India's other major coffee variety comes from the Mysore region (now the state of Karnakata). Called Indian Mysore, Mysore Nuggets, Mysore Straight, or simply Mysore, it makes a rich and spicy cup of coffee that at its best may be termed "sweet" -- a word you would never hear applied to Monsooned Malabar. Interestingly enough, though, Mysore coffee also gets its unique taste from being exposed to the monsoon wind and rain, which pump up the beans with moisture and smooth out their flavor. The difference may be simply that in the case of the Malabar, the monsoon exposure is purposely carried to an extreme.

Mysore coffee is also becoming easier to find in the United States, although most people will still have to seek out a reliable seller on the Web. It's definitely worth finding and trying some. According to some connoisseurs, Indian Mysore at its best is among the finest coffees produced anywhere.

Arabian coffee