Coffee’s fifth wave is brewing in India
India is in the fifth wave of its coffee journey with coffee lovers, planters and entrepreneurs promoting homegrown varietals in boutique settings. Much of what’s happening in coffee is led by those who began as nothing more than coffee drinkers
Growing up in Bengaluru in the late 1990s, Suhas Dwarakanath wanted to open a coffee shop. “It was purely the cool quotient," says the founder of Benki Brewing Tools in Bengaluru, which he started in 2017, selling café equipment. As a high-schooler, he often cycled past Café Coffee Day in Jayanagar, then a quiet residential neighbourhood. “It was where the rich kids would hang out," he remembers. “I would save ₹50 to go buy a cappuccino there. Everyone used to bring their fancy cars. It was nothing to do with coffee," he recalls. It was all about the vibe and the experience it offered.
After pursuing a course in business management and international trade, in 2011 he moved to Dubai to work. There, he hung out at cafés often but was galled to realise that his colleagues seemed to know so much more about coffee, which he had grown up drinking. It goaded him to learn more—the Speciality Coffee Association offered a programme that Dwarakanath enrolled in. Around this time, he got a job as a brand manager at Cafés Richard, the French coffee roasting and equipment supply company, in Dubai.
He spent the next three years at Cafés Richard, travelling the world and teaching people how to use the equipment. In 2017, having saved up enough to start his own coffee shop, he returned to India, which was waking up to speciality coffee. Today, alongside his coffee equipment business, he runs a café, a speciality coffee academy, manufactures brewing equipment, owns a coffee estate in Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka, and trains coffee planters. Dwarakanath is also this year’s winner of the National Barista Championship. His is a story that seems to rise and fall with the “waves" in the coffee story in India.
Globally, coffee trends are tracked in waves—the first being when coffee is largely seen as a commodity, followed by the setting up of modern cafés, then discovering speciality coffee, and the fourth wave being bringing science and innovation to coffee. India is currently riding the fifth wave of the business of coffee, connecting with savvy millennial and Gen Z audiences and providing boutique coffee experiences.
Where a few decades separated the first and the second waves in India, subsequent waves have arrived far quicker from the mid-1990s to now. Chains like Café Coffee Day and the now defunct Barista, which grew throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, gave a taste of what the coffee experience could be like. But these were businesses run by corporates, not passion projects bootstrapped by economists or engineers intent on delivering refined, artisanal and boutique experiences.
Over the past decade, a new wave of coffee entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and experimenters has transformed Indian coffee from a commodity for export to a movement to promote homegrown varietals. In India, much of what’s happening in coffee is led by those who began as nothing more than coffee drinkers. Never has a hobby inspired such a leap of faith as coffee has.
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Blue Tokai, the Gurugram-based coffee roastery and café that opened in 2012, is credited with changing how we perceive coffee in India. Its founders Namrata Asthana, a communications specialist, and Matt Chitharanjan, an economist, began as coffee drinkers, learning about speciality coffees when they lived in the US, where the latter grew up and Asthana went to college. In 2011, Chitharanjan moved to Chennai to work, where he met Asthana. Struggling to find “good coffee", despite India being one of the world’s top 10 producers of coffee, set them on a path that has become a part of Indian coffee lore.
What they did was bring the coffee estate to the forefront, much like one would do for wine. Every coffee that they roasted or served has the estate’s name. Transparency, a new concept for what was always sold by the kilo as a commodity, had arrived. They took the feedback to the growers, changing the relationship that existed between these two parts of the coffee ecosystem.
“Blue Tokai has brought about a lot of positive changes in the speciality coffee and home brewing market. Matt, the founder, realised very early that consumers need to start brewing coffee at home, and understand the flavours of a high quality speciality cup. He promoted ‘Channi coffee’— basically, putting ground coffee in a regular chai channi (sieve) and extract a black coffee in a simple way—such simple initiatives, alongside their expansion of cafés across the country offering coffees from different smaller estates helped elevate Indian coffee as well as home brewing," says Abhinav Mathur of Kaapi Machines, a B2B coffee equipment company.
They inspired new businesses, offering a model to borrow from. “There are today more than 100 micro-roasters, 75% of them having come up during the past five years," says Mathur. Consumers have a choice they never did before and as micro-roasters compete for the best coffee, it pushes coffee growers to look at the processing quality and invest in the crop.
Getting speciality coffee right isn’t just about growing the beans—it is also about drying, fermenting and roasting them correctly. Of these steps, roasting is critical. Before roasting, the green beans are quite flavourless. The right temperature for the right amount of time unlocks the flavours, lends body and taste, and balances acidity.
“A generation ago, my grandfather-in-law would have dealt with traders or the curing works (where the bean is cured and cleaned so raw coffee becomes green coffee). Today, we speak directly with the roasters who will ultimately roast our coffee. This shift has allowed us to share our story more personally, and for roasters to carry that narrative forward to the consumer," says Komal Sable. Along with her husband, Akshay Dashrath, she runs the fifth-generation, family-owned Mooleh Manay coffee estate in north Coorg, Karnataka, and co-founded South India Coffee Company in 2017, a India and UK-based B2B venture promoting Indian coffee internationally.
Mooleh Maney, known for its carbonic macerated arabica, 120 extended carbonic macerated robusta and 84 hours fermented excels, also supplies to Blue Tokai.
“The right roastery should bring transparency and showcase the art of roasting to the public. It connects customers to the daily cup of coffee," says Marc Tormo, 55, of Marc’s Coffee in Auroville.
In 1997, Tormo, then 26, closed his coffee business in Spain and moved to India, with which he’s “always felt a connection" since his first visit as a 16-year-old. Tormo visited coffee estates and supported coffee growers, even starting a café in Chennai. But it was not until 2008 that he saw a niche and started roasting speciality coffee. “South India is a coffee drinking place. It’s a culture, not commodity. The culture needed to be expanded and we picked up that thread."
Although cafés were popular, roasters were becoming more proficient, and customers were seeking options, the market for speciality coffee remained in pockets—until the pandemic. “I am a product of covid," says Shobhit Agrawal of Mushin Coffee House, Noida, explaining that it was the time spent at home during the lockdowns that persuaded him to give his dream of opening a coffee shop a shot.
Working as an engineer in Pune before the pandemic, his hangout was a local café, The Beans Talk, which he credits for his “discovery of coffee". Returning home to Noida in 2020, he remained a committed coffee enthusiast. “I contacted every roaster and brand to ask what to buy and how to brew at home. I must have tasted some 150 coffees in that one year," he says. It paid off. In 2021, Agrawal became the first home brewer to win the Aeropress competition.
In 2022, Agrawal pursued a master’s in coffee economics and science at the Ernesto Illy Foundation in Italy. On his return, he opened Mushin Coffee House, a training centre for enthusiasts and professionals and a “brew bar" where anyone can pay by the hour to use coffees, equipment and experiment, “a playground" for speciality coffee.
Food and beverage ranked high in the list of “pandemic pastimes". Cafés lost business but roasters could still ship, and coffee drinkers learnt to replicate their favourite coffees at home.
Mathur of Kaapi Machines launched an online platform, Something’s Brewing, for home brewing equipment in 2020. Bhavyesh Vyas, one of Mathur’s regular clients, is a staff solutions architect in pre-sales. “I got my first espresso machine (Silvia) during the lockdown and it gave me lot of time to learn about espresso." About his home coffee setup, he says, “It is end-game minus one," going on to list several machines, including “an SSP burr grinder, every type of filter coffee brewer and a flow control espresso machine," along with a “very detailed plan for upgrades". He also spends close to an hour every day brewing and reading about coffee.
In October 2021 on International Coffee Day, Something’s Brewing was opened as an “experience centre" in Bengaluru. “It has become a community hub for home brewers. Roasters and estate owners drop by regularly to launch their new coffees, take feedback from consumers. Ourblue most popular one being ‘BYOB—Bring your own Brewer’ to get consumers to bring any coffee machine they do not know how to use so we can teach them. ‘Coffee On the House’ is where we allow newbies to get a café-style cup of coffee for free, but only if they brew it themselves."
Even coffee communities formed during the pandemic have lasted long beyond. Two years ago, Mathur opened Something’s Brewing in Surat because “it is the most exciting home and speciality coffee market, not known to many."
“Did you know, in Patna, there is a street with 18 cafés," asks Sreeram G of Maverick & Farmer in Bengaluru and director of marketing, Speciality Coffee Association of India (SCAI). Patna joins Ajmer, Indore, Jalandhar, Pune, Amritsar and Surat in the growth of cafés, proving that coffee has cut through geographical, social and culinary barriers in India.
In Rohru, in Shimla district in Himachal Pradesh, Himanshu Khagta, a photojournalist and apple farmer, runs Tinmos, a speciality café that he started in 2022. His introduction to speciality coffee was a film he shot in 2021 at the Salawara coffee estate in Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka, where he met Dwarakanath. “Editing the film taught me more than I expected," he says, talking about the video on processing and roasting speciality coffee. Trying speciality coffee and enjoying it set him out on his own coffee journey.
“We sell four different coffees, an overkill for a place like Rohru," he says, adding that for many people in his town, this was the first experience of good coffee. Oddly enough, in the first two years, he sold more espresso, he says, and it’s only now that milk coffees have caught on. He is planning to open a second café locally and set up speciality cafés in rural areas. “From a business side, it’s a growing industry."
Beyond the brew
Speciality coffee has catalysed new businesses, from selling coffee equipment and running cafés to setting up roasteries. It also gave us the barista, who is not just a “coffewala" but slowly—very slowly—finding acknowledgement as a skilled worker.
In July, at a Coffee and Cocktails Masterclass hosted by artisan brand Swa Artisanal Syrups in Bengaluru, Dwarakanath was joined by Avinash Kapoli, owner of Soka Cocktail Bar, also in Bengaluru, to talk about basics of mixology, how to think of the coffee and use it. It was followed by a competition where baristas and bartenders paired off to create a coffee cocktail and a shot at winning ₹50,000. What struck me was the synergy between the barista and the bartender. Speciality coffee has borrowed a lot from the bartending world, in the performative side of brewing and serving coffee.
Gurugram-based Rishab Nair, 26, who was the first runner-up in the National Brewers Cup organised by the Coffee Board and Speciality Coffee Association of India, started his coffee journey as a barista in Bengaluru. In 2022, with an engineering degree, Nair planned to enter the air force. With some time on his hands, he joined Starbucks and ended up staying for two years before taking up ad sales. Coffee came calling again and he joined Blue Tokai for B2B sales for the south in 2024. “I would cup coffees with the roasters," he says. “Quality really excites me. How did we not appreciate such variety when it was always right here?" Nair is the only one among those I spoke to who didn’t start as a coffee lover. “I hated it," he says, of his first black coffee as a 15-year-old. Much has changed since. “The barrier is broken. I can taste bananas, pineapple, watermelon in coffee." Seven months ago, he started working as a roastery manager at Blue Tokai’s Gurugram roastery.
In a café, a barista can expect to move up as shift manager, café manager, manager or head barista. If a café is attached to a roastery, that adds a lateral growth opportunity. Starting salaries for barista are between ₹15,000-20,000 but entry points are low, requiring only a class XII pass. And the training they get is invaluable—and expensive if one were to undertake it on their own.
Regular coffee drinkers are now asking for their baristas by name and there are competitions where they can showcase their skill. It’s also a great marketing tool as every participant will speak about the estate and the coffee they are using.
Dwarakanath, whose company has been hosting the Indian Aeropress Championship since 2017, says two years ago they had 640 contestants, up from 35 in the first year. But competitions are an expensive undertaking. Dwarakanath, who is now set to represent India at the global Barista Championship has a fund-raising page on his company website, to raise the ₹27 lakh he needs to prepare for the event in Italy. Dwarakanath will carry three coffees, one of which is a green-tip geisha, grown only on one farm in India. Elsewhere the barista is already better recognised; Dwarakanath talks of last year’s barista champion from Indonesia being signed on as a brand ambassador for a clothing line. “Like movie stars," he says. He believes that in the next few years, the barista will rise in reputation, “treated on par with chefs and bartenders."
A community of hands
Coffee’s entry point is affordable and home brewing equipment costs significantly less than a few years ago. Coffee meet-ups, raves, Reddit communities, Instagram… it is fuelling a lot of talk online and offline. Having spent the last decade watching tea planters express frustration at the slow growth in speciality tea in India, I am examining coffee for clues to take back to tea. Maybe coffee brewing is more exciting, more performative. Or maybe the world of coffee is sufficiently nerdy, and provides scope for involved discussions about heat, flavour and more.
“Across India, there’s a thriving exchange of ideas happening, from WhatsApp groups to Discord channels, and at coffee meet-ups," says Sable. “Conversations often dive deep into the science of brewing, extraction, water chemistry, grind size, pour technique, and temperature consistency. People are engaging with coffee at a granular level."
Tapaswini Purnesh, 38, a fifth-generation coffee producer and director of marketing and promotions at Harley Coffee, her family’s estate in Sakleshpur in Karnataka, talks about an event she attended recently at a cafe, where home brewers showcased their brewing skills. “Some of the brewing methods were more sophisticated than any speciality cafe out there."
Even milk is a reason for the geeks to drill down. The milk that Dwarakanath used at the Brewers Championship, for instance, is a mixture of dairy, oat and almond milk with the dairy milk vacuum-distilled in a device that he had custom built.
I turn to Nikhil Pradhan from Bermiok estate, Sikkim, who straddles both tea and coffee. “India is, above all, a milk-drinking nation and tea and coffee are used with milk depending on where you are—coffee in the south and tea in the north," he says. “It’s the specialty tea and coffee culture that is more interesting to observe, where milk is not part of the equation and complexity in ‘flavour’ and the nuances of ‘quality’ are sought after. This market in India is still very small and nascent when it comes to both tea and coffee."
But this niche customer is willing to spend. The Bermiok Station (a café, shop and gallery for local produce and artisans) at the Craft Theory Collective on Gangtok’s high street attracts more Gen X and millennials, he says, for whom classics like the long blacks, lattes and flat white top the chart. Alongside this, they serve “tender coconut americanos, espresso tonics, fruit-based cloud coffees, and our riffs on some Vietnamese and European coffees besides the occasional tik tok trending ones," says Pradhan.
It does feel like the old favourite, the south Indian filter coffee, the only one I am familiar with and which reminds of chai for its deep cultural connect, has been sidelined. “I personally believe filter coffee is a phenomenal opportunity to own as Indian. Espresso is synonymous with Italy. Filter coffee could be ours. The whole theatre behind filter coffee lends itself brilliantly as a uniquely Indian coffee," says I.B. Bopanna, who returned to his birthplace in Coorg in 2019 after three decades spent working in international coffee trading and marketing. The last 15 years of his career were spent leading the coffee category for The Coca-Cola Company in Singapore and Atlanta, US.
In 2024, Taste Atlas, an online encyclopaedia of world food, listed south Indian filter coffee as the second-best coffee “for its rich, full bodied flavour and unique brewing process". But, café owners say filter coffee has not seen much innovation and can’t be priced highly enough to warrant a café setting. The India International Coffee Festival (IICF) includes a ‘Filter Coffee’ contest, thanks to Sreeram’s push for it but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with single-origin estate coffees. As one of the judges, Sreeram himself says, “Table layouts are getting better but the signature drinks are predictable with jaggery and paan flavours."
Growing coffee today
With all these developments around coffee, surely coffee growers must be happy. More demand, better prices, one would assume, but that is an area yet to see the full potential of an aware and loyal domestic market.
“As per the Coffee Board of India, per capita coffee consumption in 2024 has increased by about 40% compared to the last decade but still stands at about 100g per capita per annum. This is still very low compared to Europe, where it is about 6kg," says Mathur.
“Speciality coffee is not yet a big enough market in India. The success stories are motivating of course, however the volumes of coffee roasted are relatively small in comparison to that exported," says Bopanna. While he maintains exports are the bedrock of demand for coffee growers focused on quality, he too is not immune to the growing demand for speciality coffee and has set up an artisanal coffee pulping and washing station and has a cupping room and an in-house private café at his plantation in Coorg, to showcase his coffees and the farm-to-cup experience to his buyers.
As in the rest of the world, Indian coffee is mostly grown by small growers, which comes with its own challenges ranging from quality to scalability. S. Karumbaiah, a third-generation coffee grower from Coorg who promotes the stories behind Indian coffee, processes and estates on his Instagram handle @socoffee.club, and is a coffee processor, says, “Most cafés source from 100-150 estates but we have 400,000 coffee growers across the country. With nearly 90% being small growers, the real gap is in quality processing after harvest and that has to be bridged for Indian coffee to reach its full potential."
Purnesh adds, “As domestic buyers increase, they want more differentiation, exclusivity. No one wants to serve the same coffees as the other cafés." This requires growers to be more innovative with fermentation and post-harvest processing.
At an IICF session with coffee planters, Rohan Kuriyan, fifth generation planter at the Balanoor estate in Chikkamagaluru, echoed this, when he said, “We are being pushed to do more with the process by customers. We’ve become like scientists with beakers and experiments during harvest time to improve our coffee."
India is a mainly robusta-growing country, when it’s arabica that dominates the speciality coffee segment. The perception is that arabica is the more flavourful coffee, but with climate change, robusta trumps arabica as a hardier plant. “People are willing to pay for arabica; robusta is still a hard sell. It’s the narrative told for a long time that robusta is woody and harsh. India has some of the best robustas in the world," says Purnesh.
Some have begun the good fight, creating awareness about robusta coffee. Bopanna offers a high-elevation premium washed robusta from his estates in Coorg and his brand, Chombuka Coorg Coffee. Marc’s Coffee offers a session called “Robusta for arabica lovers" and Hyderabad’s Last House Coffee takes it further by serving only robusta.
While the coffee story has been dominated by the south, especially Karnataka which produces close to 80% of India’s coffee crop, change is brewing. Besides more cafés and roasteries, the coffee terroir is expanding beyond the traditional geographies in Karnataka and Kerala, to Odisha, Sikkim, Nagaland and Assam, although these states still produce very small volumes.
The success of Araku Coffee, a single origin, fair trade, organic from the Araku highlands in the Eastern Ghats that supports local tribal communities, shows the path ahead. Araku opened its first café in Paris in 2017, followed by one in Bengaluru in 2021. Bopanna feels Nagaland coffee is poised to become the next Araku, if they play their cards right. “It offers authenticity, and exclusivity, a culture that is one with nature, and a landscape ideal for shade grown agroforestry with coffee," he says.
I recall a remark I overheard about how coffee farmers in the past likely never drank the coffee they produced, prizing tea much higher and serving it in their own homes. They had no idea what became of the beans they sold. What the new wave of coffee has brought is a realisation of the value of something right in front of us. While studying in Italy, Agrawal was part of a group of 25 students from 17 countries. Everyone brought coffees from home to brew, and Agrawal’s was a coffee from the Baarbara estate, in Karnataka’s Bababudangiri Hills, with pepper and cacao flavours. It was a hit. It had body and flavour, which is hard to find together. “We have the coffees, have the knowledge. Let’s not shy away."
At Marc’s Coffee, we finish talking and I have savoured the flat white with its precise 3mm crema. Tormo talks about his long desire to find that perfect coffee. “It was a quest. I kept searching. I travelled north, south, east and west, the world." Lots of good, even superlative, coffees came his way. Then, a couple of years ago, a friend who is the custodian of the Silence Forest in Auroville called him to say he’d spotted a new plant in bloom—could it be coffee? The white flowers had a jasmine-like scent. The berries were small, barely 1-2mm. Tormo brought a batch to his roastery and very carefully processed them. “It was the sweetest coffee I have tried. The coffee of my dreams, the one I was looking for," he says.
In 2011, the plant once placed in the genus Psilanthus was subsumed into genus Coffea. Now renamed Coffea wightiana, it is one of four heirloom Indian coffees. That it thrives at sea level under harsh summers is appealing in the age of climate change. There are about 1,800 Coffea wightiana plants in Silence Forest, producing a small bean that needs to be carefully processed, generating small volumes of coffee. Tormo shakes his head at the irony—the perfect coffee was right here all along, a lesson for all of us.
Aravinda Anantharaman is a Lounge columnist.
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