Our Coffee

We source all our coffee from small farmers in Darjeeling, including Kalimpong and Kurseong. Over the years, we have moved on from buying parchment coffee to cherries and we now process most of it ourselves. This has helped in improving the quality of our coffee by enabling us to keep a strict check on cherry ripeness and also eliminating floaters before and during processing.

Acknowledging the primary role of our farmers in the circle of coffee, in a spirit of fairness, we pay the highest possible purchase price to our farmers for their cherries. We also absorb the cost of the floaters in their produce rather than passing that on to them.

Since the volume of coffee we work with is still very small, as of now, we do our processing entirely by hand. We ferment our cherries in plastic drums using thermostat-controlled heaters. Winters in Darjeeling are harsh and the water, ice cold, with a layer of ice often forming at the top, overnight. The heaters help the cherries to ferment, softening up the skin. The pulping is then carried out using an okhli, a traditional wood pestle. We sort the pulped cherries by hand, dry them in the sun on drying racks and then dehusk and polish the beans again in an okhli. After winnowing the dehusked beans in nanglos [round woven bamboo trays], the final sorting and grading is then done using metal sieves with wooden frames.

 Hand processing is very involving and time consuming but, it has taught us more about our coffee than any book or tutorial could. We are working towards mechanizing some of the functions as the yield increases and we feel this initial toil will serve us well, scaling up.