Tribe-O Koraput – Kohi Roasters

About Tribe-O Project

Tribe-O Project is dedicated to improving the livelihood of tribal coffee farmers in India and placing Indian coffee on the world specialty coffee map. Their vision is to propagate a sustainable lifestyle, sustainable harvesting practices and bio-dynamic produce. They’ve started this journey in the forests of Koraput, Odisha, where the local tribes grow semi-wild, bio-dynamic (non-certified) Arabica coffee beans with the aim to improve the livelihood of the tribes from coffee farming and finding ways to give back to make the lives of tribal communities better.

Tribal farmers in Koraput, cultivate coffee across 2,246.46 hectares of forest land and began coffee farming in the 1960s. However, the coffee trade has seen increasing interest only in the past fifteen years. Tribe-O Project is a proud part of this journey and doing their bit to make coffee farming more commercially relevant to the indigenous peoples of Koraput, while retaining their age old tradition of living in harmony with nature and observing bio-dynamic practices naturally through such traditions.

Tribe-O Koraput Coffee grows in the forested hills of Koraput, where the tribal farmers don’t own the forest land but have permission to harvest the coffee cherries from it. The forests where the coffee plants grow are dense and the plants grow far apart from another in the natural foliage. This makes it challenging to pick the ripe coffee cherries. Each tribal coffee farmer can barely manage to pick 10-12 kgs of coffee cherries in a day. The process is slow and laborious with lunch being the only break during the day of picking, which starts around 10:00 AM and ends with the sunset at 6:00 PM. Over the years, some of the tribal coffee farmers have become adept at yields which exceed 12 kgs of coffee cherries in a day. Tribe-O Koraput Coffee farming is an agricultural activity carried out mostly by the women in the tribal villages of Koraput.

2021 was the first time that Tribal harvested coffee from the forests of Koraput was processed as naturals on raised beds specially created for this purpose and introduced by Tribe-O Project. It was also the first time that Anaerobic Fermentation was undertaken in tanks before drying the cherries on raised beds over a period of over a month under natural sunlight. The coffee that you are experiencing is the result of such innovation.