Komal, Espresso from India

Coffee Info

How We Brew This Coffee

We brew with the Maro Model 1 at 93 °C and grind with the Eureka Single Dose Pro.

What a powerhouse! According to Nadja, this year's harvest of this coffee is so balanced, harmonious, and round that you can almost brew it however you want. Be sure to try many different recipes, because the coffee shows a different facet each time and thus its extreme complexity. Caution: the coffee demands, like other heavily processed coffees, a finer grind size.

While last year's harvest was a roaring lion, Komal has tamed it this year. The coffee still shows its boozy character – if you want it to. Michel even found the first shot at 14 seconds already good.

For the standard 9-bar profile, we used a drink ratio of 1:2.1 and 29 seconds and are delighted with it. Sweet passion fruit, tropical fruits, extremely elegant and dense, very graceful and complex. Not sour, not bitter, not dusty. Maro Code: HTTRNBL

Those who prefer the more modern variant of an espresso can pull the coffee with the same drink ratio of 1:2.1 for 50–54 seconds and will be rewarded with a variety of flavors. The coffee now has plenty of room to unfold. The cup appears lighter and softer as a result. Nadja really likes this, Michel less so. Maro Code: ANAWEHZ

For the pressure profile, we remove pressure from the main brew and counteract that with a slightly elevated brew temperature. In other words: instead of 93 °C, we use 94 °C and can thus still extract the same amount despite lower pressure, but in a gentler way. With 20 g in and 42 g out at 29 seconds and complete puck saturation after eight seconds (3.5 bar), then up to just 7.5 bar we float on cloud nine: This cup is incredibly soft, balanced, structured with extremely much sweetness and a super juicy acidity. Maro Code: PBJUARV

Why Does This Coffee Taste the Way It Does?

After manual harvest, the cherries are sorted and fermented in a sealed tank for 5 days. This enables more precise control of the process as well as higher consistency and clarity in the cup. An extended fermentation time deepens the flavor complexity and also ensures complete breakdown of the fruit flesh (mucilage) of the coffee beans. Komal precisely controls this post-harvest process by adding a custom-made yeast. After that, the whole cherries are dried for 7–10 days in a controlled temperature environment. Before hulling, the cherries rest for another two months to slow down the water activity in the bean and achieve greater stability in the characteristic of the green coffee over a longer period of time.

Why Did We Buy from Komal?

In March of this year, Nadja visited Akshay and Komal together with Lennart from "Good Middle Man" This Side Up. "We were on the same wavelength right away," says Nadja, who is enthusiastic about their work and research in the field of coffee species. With their South India Coffee Company, the two function like our Claudia in Nicaragua with her company BridAzul. They process cherries from selected farmers in the surrounding area, invest in regenerative agriculture, and thus fight against poverty and emigration in and out of the region. All their practical know-how also flows into scientific work. We handle the purchase through Lennart and his company This Side Up. An importer from the Netherlands who not only speaks of full transparency but, like almost no other, also demands and implements it.

How Do We Roast This Coffee?

We roast the coffee as a 20 kg batch on our 30 kg Giesen roaster for 11:40 minutes with a development time of 69 seconds (9.8 %). We decided to roast the coffee lightly because this green coffee brings a lot of texture with it, which is further emphasized by its post-harvest process. Thus we can confidently roast "edgy" and focus on acidity and aromatics.