Coffee Cupping

After a 45 drive through the traffic snarled Bangalore city ... Suresh Babu bought us to an Industrial lay out in Bangalore which houses a prominent coffee roaster ..M/s Coorg Coffee Supplies Pvt Ltd. Mr.Surya Prakash (MD) of the company is a engineer and a professor and has thought in some of Bangalore city's well known collages . It was his father who started the company around 50 years back , got into textiles during the 80's and moved back to trading coffee in the 90's.

The man's a walking ,Talking dictionary of coffee. He is the Chairman of the Tasting Commitee of the Coffee Board Of India.

Coorg Coffee Supplies is a well planned unit which procures coffee beans straight from the farmer , specialises in bespoke roasts and also retails under its own brand name .
After a brief Introduction by Mr. Babu on why we were in Bangalore .....Mr. Surya Prakash was quick to get things organised . He had around 100kg of beans ready for us for roasting in batches of 25kg each. he took us to his Roasting section .

Clyde,Sudhir understanding the whole process

The Control Panel

The roasting section has a huge dry air roaster (an Indian Make) with a jazzy control panel (like the ones u see in the old Hindi movies ). One side of the roaster has a Hopper funnel which sucks in the coffee into the roasting chamber .While the other side of the machine has an extruder which throws out the cooled coffee.

Mr . Prakash meticulously checks the roast temperature because its the degree of roast which will give character to the coffee. He also has a light sensitivity meter on which he grades the colour of the roast so that we could get the same degree of roast each and every time .

If you look closely at the pic above you will see how the bean after loading goes from being pale white to light brown to dark brown . The whole process can be viewed through a small glass in the roaster . Hot air is passed through the beans at a temperature varying from 175*C to 186*C for a dark roast . We froze at 182*C as suggested by the master roaster Mr. Prakash himself.

A Roast Diary is maintained specifying the origin of the bean , grade of the bean ,Temperature of Roast and but obviously the date of roasting .

After the roasting is completed ....other beans are sent for blending . Blending is a process of mixing two or more beans or chicory root powder to the coffee(after grinding). The Factory has 2 power full grinders for bulk grinding of beans .

After grinding e went to the cupping area . "Cupping" is a term used for tasting coffee (similar line of wine tasting)
A round turn table with basin's are provided so that the tasting panel can taste coffees.On day one we went through close to 90 cups of coffee and were high on caffeine.

The Tasting WheelThe Cupping Sheet

We kept the tasting wheel with us as a guideline .... but filling the cupping sheets was taxing ...never the less we had to do it ,cause it was the reason we were there for ....

Chaithanyaa Coffees - Bangalore

Been quite some time since I update the blog ... have been travelling a bit ... well my agenda for this quarter of the year was to standardise important ingredients on my menu .Not that it wasn't standardised ,but wanted to have one supplier , a uniform rate ,uniform quality and specifications etc .... ingredients like coffee , chocolate , cheese etc .... So i set out with the team in search of the first ..i.e COFFEE....

I had met Suresh Babu ...proprietor of Chaitanyaa Coffee - Bangalore at a trade exhibition in Mumbai a couple of months back ....This company was officially promoting coffees grown in India . After meeting up with him and he explaining to me about the coffees grown in India . i realised we were sitting on a gold mine ...Never did I ever think that we produced so much of coffee. I did know that we in India produced a lotta coffee but didn't know the quantum we exported .

o Sudhir (Talent sourcing Mngr -Mocha) , Clyde ( Asst. Training Mngr-mocha) & ,myself set out in search of setting one of our basic products right...Our ESPRESSO BLEND ... and some speciality coffees like the Monsoon Malabar ,Indian Pea Berry and some speciality coffees from India grown from the Coorg , Chickmanglur ,Waynad etc regions of India

Sudhir & Clye @ Chaithanyaa Coffee

After landing into Bangalore early in the morning we knew we were gonna have an over load of Caffeine .... but we were kind kicked about it ....

At the shop Suresh Babu had made a dessert for us named .."EAT COFFEE"..... It was kinda a coffee extract set like a jelly and slightly translucent .An okish product for my palette and not some thing I would die for ....

Suresh Babu has been Trading coffee since the last 40 + years ... The business had been set up by his dad and he has been taking care it since the last decade .He has an understanding with the Coffee Board Of India to promote coffees grown in India under the new scheme of the Coffee Board .... Coffees of India.http://www.indiacoffee.org/indiacoffee.php?page=CoffeeRegionsIndia

Mr. Babu is quite a traveller ... and his love for coffee has taken him to quite a few coffee growing regions across the globe. Whislt travelling he brings along a lot of coffee . This time around he had kept aside single origin beans from Guatemala , Peru, Brazil and some decaffeinated coffee for us . He has a small batch drum roaster in which he roasts smaller quantities of coffee .

Single origin Beans

The coffee Business in India though big is a small community .What I liked was the business practice they followed . If supplier had a problem the rest would come to help ..but most importantly they would never eat or poach into the others business.
Since our quantities were large , Mr.Suresh Babu decided to take help from his friend /competitor Mr. Surya Prakash who runs the 2nd generation Coorg Coffee Supplies Pvt Ltd in Bangalore . Mr Surya Prakash was a walking dictionary of coffee. He is the chairperson of the tasting panel of the Coffee Board Of India and his Knowledge about coffee was amazing . we were glad that we had him help us develop a blend , a particular roast for our Espresso Blend .