Growing Coffee in Arehalli: Notes from the Western Ghats
What it takes to grow coffee at 1,055 metres in Arehalli: shade trees, pepper vines, the monsoon, and a village of small farms in the Western Ghats.
Drive west from Bengaluru for about five hours and the plains give way to hills. The air turns cooler and wetter. This is the Western Ghats of Karnataka, and it is where every bag of Āne begins.
Where the coffee grows
Our coffee comes from Arehalli, a village of small farms around Geergal Estate, about 1,055 metres above the sea. The farms here do not look like plantations. Coffee grows under tall shade trees, with pepper vines climbing the trunks, streams running through, and paths the elephants were using long before anyone planted a coffee bush.
The height matters. Nights are cool up here, so the cherries ripen slowly, and slow ripening gives the sugars time to build. That is where the gentle sweetness in our Single Origin Arabica comes from. We do not add it at the roaster. The hill does that work.
A year on the estate
Coffee here keeps time with the monsoon, not the calendar. After the first showers, usually around March, the bushes flower white for a few days and the whole slope smells of jasmine. Those few days decide the size of the next crop.
Then the rains come. The ground turns red, the mornings move slowly, and the cherries swell green on the branch. By December and January they are a deep red, and picking begins. It is done by hand, in several rounds, taking only what is ripe.
After the harvest, the cherries are dried whole in the sun for weeks. Then they rest, are milled, and come to us. We roast them in small batches, medium-dark.
Shared land
The farmers we work with grow with a light hand. The shade is not there for a certificate. It is simply how coffee has always grown here, and it is why the same land still holds birds, pepper, cardamom and the occasional elephant passing through.
We do not own an estate with a gate and a logo. We are a small roaster that buys directly from a village, pays fairly, and puts the name of the place on the bag.
Taste the place
Everything we make comes from this one village. Start with the Catalogue, or read what single origin really means. If you would like the estate to reach you every month, with a print and a letter in the box, that is Friends of Āne.