A Short History of Indian Coffee.
India has been growing coffee for over 350 years. It's the seventh largest producer in the world. And yet it remains one of the least represented origins on specialty menus globally. This post is an attempt to explain how that happened — starting at the beginning.
How Coffee Came to India
The most widely told origin story involves a Sufi saint named Baba Budan, who is said to have smuggled seven coffee seeds from the Yemeni port of Mocha around 1670, returning from the Hajj. He planted them in the hills near Chikmagalur in Karnataka — hills that today bear his name, Baba Budangiri.
The story is almost certainly embellished. I wasn’t there and nor were you to verify if it’s fact, and there aren’t any contemporary records to verify it. The details — seven seeds, the beard, the exact year — have been retold for three and a half centuries. What is documented is that coffee was already present in Mughal India by 1616, likely via Arab traders along the Malabar or Gujarat coast. Baba Budan may represent a specific act of cultivation rather than the very first introduction of coffee to India.
Either way, by the late 17th century, coffee was growing in the Western Ghats.
India's Role in the Global Spread of Coffee
What happened next is less well known. In 1696, the Dutch East India Company shipped coffee plants from the Malabar coast of India to Java — the first coffee plants introduced to that island. The initial planting failed due to flooding. In 1699, a second shipment from Malabar succeeded, and those plants became the progenitors of all the coffees of the Dutch East Indies.
In 1760, coffee plants from Portuguese India were shipped to Brazil.
Java and Brazil — two of the most historically significant coffee origins in the world — both trace their coffee lineage through India.
The Colonial Period
For roughly two centuries after initial cultivation, Indian coffee remained largely confined to the hills of Chikmagalur and the surrounding Western Ghats. By the 1830s it had become a key commercial crop in the region, and British planters began establishing large estates — the first in Coorg around 1850. The British introduced the plantation model: organised labour, systematic export, and the infrastructure that still underpins Indian coffee production today.
The industry that emerged was export-oriented by design. Indian coffee left in bulk — primarily to Europe — where it was blended and sold without origin attribution. Quality incentives were limited, so the farmer optimized his efforts to make his harvest as sellable as possible as fast as possible. In 1942, the Coffee Board of India was established, and a pooling system further reduced the incentive for farmers to differentiate on quality. Liberalisation came in the 1990s, but decades of commodity-focused production had left Indian coffee with little identity in the specialty world.
The one exception was Monsooned Malabar — green coffee transformed by months of monsoon humidity during colonial-era sea transit, producing a distinctive low-acid, heavy-bodied cup that European roasters recognised. It became India's most internationally known coffee, and for a long time, its primary calling card.
Where Things Stand Now
India currently exports over 70% of its coffee production, valued at US$1.81 billion in FY25. The majority is Robusta, used in instant coffee and espresso blends. Specialty Arabica remains a small fraction of total output — but it's the fraction that's changing most rapidly.
Estates across Coorg and Chikmagalur are investing in precision processing — washed, honey, natural, and experimental anaerobic lots — with cupping scores that are increasingly competitive internationally. Domestically, a growing specialty coffee culture, led by roasters and café chains focused on Indian-origin coffee, is creating new demand and new visibility for the origin.
The gap is in international specialty distribution. Indian microlots rarely appear on menus outside India — not because the quality isn't there, but because the supply chains connecting estates to specialty roasters in Asia, Europe, and beyond are underdeveloped. That's the problem Spice Route Coffee is working on.
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