Brewing on an Ancient Land: Wayanad

A coffee connoisseur's road trip across Kerala's Wayanad reveals the storied history of the beverage, rooted in spice trade and accidental discoveries.

- MUSKAAN GUPTA

Hyundai TUCSON's latest India Coffee Series campaign merges comfort with luxury as one of India's leading coffee connoisseurs, Suhas Dwarakanath breaks down the complexity of the beverage through its history, the craft of production, drinking culture, and anecdotes from its producers across India's coffee-growing regions. In the second leg, falling back to the comfort of his personal drive, he journeys through spice-laden plantations to one of the oldest coffee destinations of India, Wayanad.

Kerala's GI-Joe

 Out of the many colonial chapters in the history of food, the tale of 'monsooning' is rather unique. After the boom of plantation culture in the subcontinent, processed and dried green coffee would travel from the western coast of India to the U.K., skirting the Cape of Good Hope. Coffee would be plucked by February and processed and packaged only by May before it was globally shipped. The nature of the beautiful accident that gave monsooning an origin lies in the primitive packaging of the green beans into wooden crates and boxes. On one fine journey, when Indian coffee reached the homeland's shores, the green beans had gone pale with a golden tinge, and swollen considerably in size. The bleached harvest being a bulk shipping, couldn't be discarded and so, was sent for roasting. What resulted was a full-bodied cup rich in umami, low-acidity, and bursting with mellow flavours of chocolate, unlike any other coffee consumed. Upon reverse investigation, it was found that the lack of thermatic packaging allowed processed beans to soak in the moisture of the salty sea breeze, which dramatically altered their structure.