Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/491365
STiR tea & coffee industry international 39 India's Domestic Coffee Scene Brewing coffee at home takes more than an instant and street vendors charge 25-cents a cup. The newly-elected government seeks to lower barriers to foreign investment. There is renewed interest in value-addition from packag- ing to promotion and growers today are more competitive, many offer their own brands. In the past 20 years significant improve- ments in coffee quality have made Italian, Ger- man, and Russian roasters into loyal fans. Last year Italian firms purchased $165 million of Indian coffee. German roasters purchased $70 million. Even coffee producing Indonesia and Malaysia have developed a taste for India's cof- fee. The United States has also become a more valuable export destination paying $18 million to import 4,000 metric tons last year, down from a 10-year high of 7,000 metric tons in 2010. Domestic demand "Meeting India's domestic demand is the biggest opportunity in coffee," according to Dr. Aarti Dewan Gupta, IDAS, the Coffee Board of India's director of finance. Domestic consumption rose from 50,000 to 115,000 metric tons in the 30 years ending 2011, she said. "Home consumption is rising with the emer- gence of brewing devices and there are now many specialty coffee chains in cities," Dr. Gupta said from her offices in the ornate federal building in Bangalore. Per capita consumption remains low at 90 grams or about 4 cups per year (the U.S. per capita average is 6 kilos) but India's market is ex- pected to grow by 100 million coffee drinkers. Technopak Advisors, a global retail consul- tancy, estimates India's retail cafes generated $230 million last year with a potential to quickly expand to 3,000 outlets earning $410 million by 2017. By Shyamali Ghosh COIMBATORE, TAMIL NADU – A sandwich board advertising Kum- bakonam filter coffee for 15 rupees a cup, sits in the middle of Cross-Cut Road, one of the city's busiest shopping streets. The coffee stand is actually set back from the street, down a dark hall to the right, lit by a single fluorescent bar. Brass cups line the shelf behind the slender, plaid-clad barista. The milk's always on the boil at Kumbakonam, and there's only one kind of South Indian filter coffee on offer. To make a cup, the barista takes a brass tumbler, rinses it with hot water, sets it in a matching dhavra—a shallow, straight-sided bowl—and adds a generous spoon of sugar to the bottom of the cup. He then pours milk into the tumbler through a fine orange plastic sieve, letting a bit fall into the dhavra, and then tops it up with a splash of very dark coffee filtered through another sieve. He brings the coffee to one of the four small tables that fill the shop, holding the dhavra. The tumbler is almost too hot to touch, let alone carry any distance. Customers pour the coffee from tumbler to dhavra and back again, mixing in the sugar and cooling the coffee to drinking temperature at the same time. I pay the equivalent of 25-cents U.S. Neither the barista nor the cashier know whether the beans are Arabica or robusta, though it's a given that it's about one third chicory. The packaging doesn't say. No one has ever asked! Coffee at home Most Indians prefer tea. The country consumes three times more tea as coffee. Nevertheless, South Indian filter coffee, marketed as 'Filter Kaa- pi' is a traditional beverage in coffee-growing states, particularly Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka. The coffee South Indians use is about two- thirds coffee beans and one-third chicory, ground together to a fine pow- der. Proportions vary according to taste. Some families create their own mix, but pre-ground, pre-blended coffees abound. Most supermarkets stock blends that are between 20% and 40% chicory.