Chikmagalur Arabica
Arabica from India's founding coffee district, where cultivation began under Baba Budan's legendary seven seeds.
Chikmagalur is where Indian coffee cultivation began, and the Bababudangiri hill range within it is named for the saint credited with introducing Arabica to India centuries before the British established plantation agriculture in the region. The area now hosts a mix of large estates with century-old infrastructure and smallholder farms managed alongside pepper and cardamom.
S795 is the workhorse varietal across most estates, prized for its balance of yield and cup quality, alongside older Catuai plantings and the SLN 9 selection developed specifically for Indian growing conditions. Elevation ranges from 1,000m in the valleys to over 1,500m on the higher estate blocks, giving noticeable cup variation even within a single district.
Both washed and natural processing are common here, unlike Koraput's near-exclusive reliance on naturals — estates with established wet mills run washed lots for a cleaner, more acidic cup, while smaller farms without milling infrastructure sun-dry their cherries. This gives Chikmagalur and Bababudangiri the widest process variety of any Indian origin covered here.