GROWING UP IN ANAGIRI PART 2: COFFEE

Living on a Coffee Estate, coffee was omnipresent, from the coffee bushes in the field, the dried beans stored in the ninety-year-old mud house waiting to be roasted to the powdered coffee that makes it into our cup as a delicious, drink.

The Coffee plants in Anagiri start in the germination beds in our nursery. Carefully selected seeds are sown in these beds at regular intervals in December or January with Grandpa supervising the Estate Labourers and little me supervising him. Once the seeds are sown, the bed is covered with a layer of dried grass and bracken fern to ensure the proper temperature for their germination.

In about 45 days, the seeds sprout and are then transplanted into polybags. The saplings grow in these bags until August or September when Grandpa instructs them to be planted in the Estate. Coffee, unlike tea, need shade and as such, in Anagiri, the coffee is planted in neat rows with dadaps, silver oaks, jackfruit, banana, oranges and other trees interspersed between them. These coffee bushes grow and mature for about three years.

From the third year, the new coffee bushes are a sight to behold with their lovely, white blossoms on each node of their branches giving off a unique fragrance. Anagiri is filled with the buzz of bees collecting nectar from the flowers to make one of the sweetest honey I have ever tasted. Each year around October, the Coffee picking frenzy would begin. Estate Labourers would go to all corners of the Estate to handpick ripe, red coffee berries and bring them to the pulping area. Carefully, each berry would be scrutinized and only those that were perfectly ripe would be fed into the coffee pulper to remove the outer red skin of the drupe.

After pulping, the coffee parchment is fermented for at least 24 hours and then washed. Then comes my favourite part, the drying of the coffee parchment in the hot sun. Two-year-old me would somehow find myself sitting in the middle of the drying coffee clutching a tiny fistful of half dried coffee parchment. The drying of coffee was always a stressful part of the process owing to the unpredictable weather we have here in Kodaikanal. Everyone had an eye on the sky at all times and dozens of large gunny bags ready in case the sky decided to turn moody and pour down on us. Each day, Grandpa would check if the coffee parchment was dried sufficiently. When he was satisfied, the coffee parchment is hulled to remove the cover of the bean and stored as coffee rice ready to be graded, roasted and finally powdered and used to make a plethora of different brews to suit everyone’s taste buds.