Good According to Who?
Coorg, Karnataka. Late January. Ten weeks before Germany.
Along the way, someone decided what “good” should taste like. Everyone else just followed.
There is a gooseneck kettle in a café in Bangalore that costs twenty-five thousand rupees.
A functionally identical object, a narrow-spouted vessel designed to control pour rate, has existed in Indian tea preparation for generations. It costs twelve rupees at a hardware store. It works the same way.
The difference is not performance. The difference is signal. One says: I belong to this world. The other says nothing, because nobody designed it to say anything.
This is how specialty coffee operates in India right now. Not entirely. But enough that it’s worth naming plainly, without ceremony.
I spent a few days in Coorg in late January, moving between farms and processing facilities and conversations in cars stuck in traffic. The same fault line kept appearing.
On one side: a growing specialty market, internationally connected, fluent in the vocabulary of origin and process and score, building something that looks increasingly like what happened in Melbourne and Portland a decade ago.
On the other: farmers in their sixties managing land that their children have mostly left. A supply chain where the person absorbing the most risk, weather, price volatility, labour, soil, captures the least margin. A quality evaluation system designed elsewhere, by other people, for other palates.
Both of these things exist at the same time. The specialty industry tends to celebrate the first and mention the second in brand storytelling.
Coffee is grown almost entirely by people in the Global South. The countries producing it sit in equatorial zones that colonial trade infrastructure was specifically built to extract value from.
The quality standards, the grading systems, the flavour wheel, the scoring rubrics that determine whether a coffee is called specialty or commodity, those were developed in consuming countries.
Organisations headquartered in the United States. Sensory traditions rooted in European preferences. A professional culture that decided what excellence looked like from several thousand kilometres away from where the coffee was grown.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a consequence of who had institutional authority when the standards were being written.
But consequences compound. A farmer in Karnataka has his crop evaluated against a standard he had no part in creating, using a vocabulary that was not developed with his crop, his context, or his palate in mind.
Even the names encode the hierarchy. Canephora, the correct botanical name for the species most people call Robusta, carries in its nickname an implied inferiority it never agronomically earned. What Robusta actually describes is a species that thrives where Arabica cannot: higher temperatures, greater pest pressure, lower elevations. Hardy. Adaptable. Resilient.
What the nickname implies is crude. Lesser. Unworthy of serious attention.
Brown producers accepted the nickname. Brown consumers repeated it.
The hierarchy became self-reinforcing, and nobody had to enforce it because by then everyone was already enforcing it on themselves.
Coffee doesn’t begin in the cup. It begins in a set of decisions about whose preferences count, and those decisions were made long before you ordered your first pour-over.
There’s a related myth worth examining without drama: that commodity coffee is the problem, and specialty is the correction.
Most coffee consumed in India is instant. Most coffee consumed globally is commodity grade, industrially processed, drunk with milk and sugar by people who are not thinking about fermentation protocols or tasting notes. These people are not uninformed. They are drinking what they want, the way they want it.
Commodity coffee exists because there is genuine, enormous, sustained demand for it. Some of the companies supplying it pay reasonable prices to producers for specific quality tiers. Some have invested more in producer relationships than the specialty sector acknowledges publicly.
More fundamentally: specialty is defined as exceptional in relation to a standard. Remove commodity and the word loses its referent. You cannot have a premium without a baseline.
The disdain for commodity production that circulates in certain specialty circles is not a quality position. It is a marketing position wearing quality’s clothing.
The farmer growing commodity-grade coffee and earning a reliable return is not failing. He is farming.
The demographic picture in Coorg is not difficult to read. The people managing the estates are aging. The younger generation has largely made a different calculation, that the returns on a lifetime of farming, given the volatility of coffee prices and the alternatives available to someone with education and mobility, don’t add up.
When the last few years produced unusually high prices, commodity coffee spiked, Canephora briefly outpaced Arabica, it looked like a reprieve. It was an exception. Everyone who has been doing this long enough knows the difference between a trend and an exception.
When farms change hands, sold or leased to buyers without accumulated knowledge of the land, quality erodes. Not through malice.
Through the absence of something that took generations to develop and cannot be purchased. A lease farmer optimising for short-term yield doesn’t manage shade cover and soil health the way a family intending to be here in fifty years does. The estate degrades quietly. The coffee suffers incrementally. Nobody notices until the damage is already settled in the soil.
The specialty industry wants the story of the dedicated producer. The handshake. The traceability. The name on the bag. What it more rarely wants is to pay the price that would make the next generation’s decision to stay on the farm economically rational.
These are not separate problems.
I left Coorg at the end of January. Germany was booked, a roasting course starting April 13th in Mannheim, then Turkey to understand the trade side, then Japan, then Vietnam, then back to India to figure out what to do with all of it.
I was going because roasting is where I’d decided to place my attention. Because the process genuinely interests me. Because I wanted to do it with technical grounding rather than instinct and guesswork.
But I was carrying something out of those few days that I hadn’t expected to bring.
A consultant who chose small farms by design, not circumstance. A producer managing land his children weren’t coming back to. Seven drums of coffee labelled in marker pen, representing a year of learning not intended to produce a single sale. A farmer who used the word careful where the industry used the word specialty.
The arc I thought I was following, learn the craft, source well, roast honestly, build something, still holds. But the questions underneath it are harder than the arc suggests.
Good coffee, according to whom. Sourced fairly, measured how. Honest about what, exactly.
I’ll be in Germany in April. I’ll learn the curves, the chemistry, the profiles. I’ll get better at the technical side of this.
The other side, I’m still working that out.
Roaster’s Note
∙ The green coffee you buy carries the full weight of every decision made before it reached you: agronomic, economic, and political
∙ Sourcing is not separate from roasting philosophy; who you buy from and on what terms is itself a roasting decision
∙ The story on the bag is only worth something if the terms behind it are
Practical takeaway: When building a sourcing relationship, ask what price the producer received per kilogram of green, not what score the coffee got. One number tells you about the coffee. The other tells you about the relationship.
— Roaster on the Road