A chapter puts together nuggets from the earliest recorded reference on coffee by philosopher Rhazes.
Did you know that if not for a rather observant goatherd named Kaldi, you might never have known the pleasure of a steaming cup of coffee? Kaldi of Abyssinia in Arabia noticed how his goats were too energetic after snacking on a certain kind of berries, and he brought it to the attention of a mufti who ran a Muslim seminary.
The mufti brewed the berry, and thus was born the earliest recorded caffeine fix.
Fascinating, isn’t it? Well, this is just a tiny extract from PT Bopanna’s The Romance of Indian Coffee, a book that explores several interesting tales and facts about coffee. It is an eclectic compilation of articles and essays written by a range of experts associated in different ways with the coffee industry. According to Bopanna, a veteran journalist who has penned a few books on Coorg, this book “offers a 360-degree view of Indian coffee—the fascinating history of coffee, many charming facets of coffee culture, its symbiosis with nature and what makes coffee such a captivating brew.”
The book traces the story on how Ivor Bull, founder of Consolidated Coffee Estates Ltd, became the father of Indian coffee industry through his innovative leadership that eventually saved coffee planters who were on the verge of ruin during World
War II.
Bull envisioned the “coffee pooling system” where all planters pooled the produce and marketed it together as a cooperative society. The foreword of the book is an excerpt from Coffee: The Consolidated Story, which explores the pivotal role that Bull played in the coffee history of India.
CP Belliappa’s Evolution of Coffee puts together nuggets from the earliest recorded reference on coffee by philosopher Rhazes (850-922 AD) to the Starbucks and Barista of today. An excerpt from Cathleen Ballantyne’s Plenty Salaams is an unusual first-person account on the life in coffee plantations of the 1880s. In Plenty Salaams, first published in 1954, Ballantyne talks of how she arrived in Coorg as a young European bride of a planter and stayed on for 50 years.
Initially, the life in a coffee estate might be dull, she says, but in a year’s time no other life could have held any charm for her. In their essay ‘Coffee-forest symbiosis’, Dr Anand Titus Pereira and his wife Geeta Nanaiah Pereira make a case for coffee forests, which has thousands of species of flora and fauna, against mono-cropped forests that hardly supports any other plant or animal life.
Priya Ganapathy writes about what goes into the perfect South Indian filter coffee, and gives tips on how to make one. She also has some interesting recipes to spike your coffee.
The Romance of Indian Coffee tells you why Indian coffee, entirely shade-grown, is in demand globally.
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