Updating…
Even after years of Coffee Journey, I still wonder every now and then, ‘How did I end up in this?’
It was in 2008, I happened to visit the coffee growing region of Araku accidentally to experiment on some of my crazy ideas. Fell in love with the people, the region and ofcourse coffee. One thing led to other and in no time I saw myself associated with the tribal farmers assisting them in various aspects – introduction of new crops suitable to that region, educating them on new agricultural practices to increase yields, linking them directly to end buyers avoiding middle men, etc..,.
Though the initial steps are limited to trading green bean, always had this dream of roasting coffee on my own. Finally it came true in 2020 with a small batch roasting machine, which uses the ‘Hot Air Fluid Bed Mechanism’ in place of the traditional drum roasting process.
It wasn’t a cake walk working on that machine as there are very little or literally no resources available whenever there is an issue. We always enjoyed the challenges life has offered. So, without limiting our experiments to roasting coffee alone, we extended our skills to the machine too and gradually increased the machine capacity from 300 gms to 1.25 kilos.
Having direct linkage with the farmers enabled us to procure select coffees directly from them seeing to it they get a fair price they deserve for their crop and see to it their coffee reaches the end consumer in the best way making it just the three of us in the chain – the farmer, roaster & the end consumer.
Through my work, I am just trying my best to showcase coffee as an intriguing & ‘Friend of all’ commodity than an intimidating one.