Everything on this website is about a small stretch of Southern California, so it is worth saying plainly that our favourite coffee company in the world is nine thousand miles from Huntington Beach, in a valley in the Eastern Ghats.
ARAKU grows in the Araku Valley, in Andhra Pradesh — high, cool, tribal farmland that has been growing arabica for over a century without anybody outside India paying much attention. What ARAKU did was treat it as a terroir rather than a commodity: map it, work organically with the farming families who own it, and then process and roast to a standard that stands up anywhere.
Their flagship is in Indiranagar, Bangalore, and it contains India’s first SCA-certified coffee academy. There is another in Mumbai. There is a third in Paris, which tells you what they think of their own coffee, and they are right to.
Artwork to come
The ARAKU flagship on a Bangalore morning
Brief · Hand-inked letterpress illustration in the Bear State style — heavy engraved line work and cross-hatching, cream paper, one spot red (#ef3b39) used sparingly, no gradients, Wall Street Journal stipple sensibility. Scene: a modern café frontage on a tree-lined Indiranagar street in Bangalore, early morning. Tall glass front, a espresso bar visible inside, a rain tree overhanging from the left, an auto-rickshaw passing in soft focus at the right edge. Warm and quiet, not busy. Horizontal 3:2. No text in the image.
What we have actually drunk
We are not writing this from a press release. We have bought their coffee twice — once shipped here, once sent to family in Bangalore, which is a considerably better way to get it fresh.
Micro Climate. 100% arabica, medium roast, 250g whole bean. The one to start with, and the one that makes the argument: it is clean and sweet and completely unlike the dark, chicory-heavy idea most people outside India have of Indian coffee.
Signature. 250g in a tin. The everyday. If you want to know what the valley tastes like without any particular occasion attached, this is it.
Grand Reserve. Two 250g tins. The serious one, and priced accordingly. Worth it.
Festive Edit. A seasonal pouch, which we ordered partly out of curiosity and partly because a company that bothers to do a festive edit is a company that is enjoying itself.
They also make chocolate — a coffee-and-orange and a mint-and-pepper — which has nothing to do with coffee and which we bought anyway. No notes.
Why a California company cares
Because ARAKU is doing the thing we spent 2013 trying to do, at a scale and a depth we never reached.
Bear State curated other people’s roasters. Good roasters, genuinely — but we sat in the middle, between the farm and the kitchen, adding taste and logistics. ARAKU went the other way and took the whole chain: the land, the farmers, the processing, the roast, the café, the training academy. Seed to cup is a phrase most companies use loosely. They mean it literally.
There is also something bracing about a coffee origin deciding it is not going to be somebody else’s raw material any more. India has grown superb coffee for generations and exported nearly all of it to be blended into anonymity somewhere else. ARAKU kept it, put its own name on it, and opened in Paris.
If you only ever act on one recommendation from this journal, make it this one. Order the Micro Climate. Grind it medium-fine, sixty grams a litre, and pay attention.