From Robusta to Specialty; From Azad Hind to the World

When Kirit returned to the estate after studying at St Joseph’s University in Bangalore, he was stepping into that history as the third generation of his family to take up life on the farm. He could not have known then how much of the estate would eventually need to change. The plants would grow older, labour would become increasingly expensive, and the methods that had once kept the farm running would no longer be enough on their own. Kirit's response would begin not with a plan for the estate, but with a question about the coffee it had been growing all along: could it be made better?

Revisiting the Estate Produce

Kirit had grown up around coffee, but returning to Azad Hind made him see it differently. The estate was predominantly Robusta, and for years the coffee had simply been grown, harvested, and sold. His father had already moved away from washing coffee on a large scale, though the old pulpers remained. Kirit began to wonder what would happen if they were put to work again.

Around 2001, he started pulping the estate’s Robusta. He washed the coffee without fermentation, working with what the estate already had and the limited knowledge available to him. But the more he learnt, the less he saw processing as a step that simply came after harvest. He began to understand that what happened to the coffee after it was picked could change what eventually appeared in the cup.

So he kept learning through classes, talking with people, and experimenting with what he could do at Azad Hind. The farm had always known how to grow coffee. Now Kirit was beginning to ask a different question: what if it could learn to make more of what it grew?

That meant convincing his father to change the way the estate worked. By then, the scale of the operation made the old system's limitations increasingly difficult to ignore.

When Processing Changed the Cup

Azad Hind was a large estate, and large volumes brought their own demands. By this time, Kirit and his family were processing between 12,000 and 15,000 kilos of coffee a day, with pulping beginning around two in the afternoon and sometimes continuing until two in the morning, stretching work to nearly twelve hours.

As coffee prices moved up, Kirit had a stronger case for investing in machinery. Around 2011 and 2012, prices moved from roughly ₹8,000 to ₹11,000 a bag of parchment, and that ₹3,000 jump gave him the confidence to tell his father that they needed to look at a different way of working.

A few estates in Coorg had already installed the kind of wet mills he was considering, although most were corporate plantations. Kirit and his neighbours went to see the machines for themselves, worked out what would suit their production, and eventually installed a system they had downsized to fit the estate. The same machine is still in use today.

What happened next was the moment when all those changes became tangible. In 2012, Kirit took a sample of the coffee he had produced through the new system to Ms Sunalini Menon. He had attended some of her classes, and they had helped him understand what he was trying to achieve, but he was still unsure how to present the coffee and didn't know what to expect from the sample. The coffee scored around 80, a result that surprised Kirit as much as anyone. The machinery had helped, but so had the changes he had made in processing. There was also something else already working in his favour. His father had maintained strong standards around post-harvest handling, particularly once the coffee reached the drying yards. Kirit realised that he did not have to build a quality system from nothing. Some of the discipline was already there.

The experiment had given him something more valuable than a score. It showed him that the estate could take what it already did well and push it further. Then, almost immediately, someone was willing to buy the coffee. A buyer from South Korea came to India in 2012 and was introduced to Kirit's coffee through Ms Sunalini Menon. South Korea was then moving from a predominantly instant coffee market toward a broader coffee market, and the buyer happened to be around Kirit's age. The first order was about 6,000 kilos, a market Kirit had not expected to find so quickly, though looking back, he puts some of it down to timing.

“I was there at the right place at the right time,” he says.

The Korean market became the centre of Azad Hind’s exports, followed by markets in Australia, Taiwan and China. Today, Kirit's coffee is predominantly sold abroad, with Korea still his main market. Much of it is washed Robusta, including CxR and Peradeniya. More recently, he has started experimenting with anaerobic fermentation of Robusta naturals, and he has also been working with small quantities of Liberica and pure Excelsa.

The coffee was changing, but Kirit wasn't interested in changing it simply to make it more unusual. The longer he worked with buyers, the clearer his own idea of what his coffee was meant to be became.

The Cup People Return To

Finding a market did not make Kirit want to chase novelty. If anything, it made him more certain about what he wanted the coffee to become. For him, the most important word is consistency. His coffees are used both in blends and as single origins, but he thinks of them largely as everyday drinking coffees: the kind of coffee someone can have regularly, sometimes two or three times a day, and still want the same cup tomorrow.

“My coffees are generally used for blends or as single origins for buyers who drink it as an everyday drinking coffee,” he says. “People want my coffee on a daily basis.”

That does not mean he is against experimentation. He has begun working with anaerobic fermentation himself, and he sees the excitement around unusual coffees as something that has brought more people into coffee. A new flavour might make someone curious enough to try a coffee once. What matters in the long run is whether they want to drink it again.

For Kirit, quality is ultimately about making a coffee that earns a place in someone’s routine, rather than making every cup more elaborate simply for the sake of novelty. Keeping that coffee going, however, is becoming a different kind of challenge. Many of the plants Kirit inherited have now moved beyond their most productive years. He has been replanting for around twenty-five years and has replaced nearly 50 acres so far, learning along the way which planting material works best for the farm. He predominantly uses indigenous varieties and raises his own plants and nurseries because he believes Indian varieties are better suited to the country's climatic conditions.

The problem extends well beyond Azad Hind. Across Coorg, Kirit estimates that roughly 40 to 50 per cent of the Robusta plantations dating back to the British period are now ageing, making replanting increasingly difficult to postpone. Yet replacing an old plantation is not simply a matter of putting new plants in the ground, because the farm that takes its place must also produce enough to remain economically viable.

The estate's economics have changed dramatically since Kirit first returned. Labour, which once accounted for a much smaller share of costs, now makes up around 60 per cent of the estate’s expenditure, while the cost of managing an acre has risen several times over. The challenge is therefore not simply to replace what is ageing, but to rethink how much each acre can produce and how efficiently it can be managed.

As Kirit puts it, “We have to think about planting differently, planting better plant materials, new generation plant materials.”

And that is where the next part of Azad Hind's story begins: with new plants, but also with the machines and methods that can make them viable.

Making the Farm Work Differently

The old plantation was changing, and so were the things on the estate. Labour had become one of the hardest parts of keeping the estate running. That was what led Kirit to a Pinhalense mechanical dryer from Brazil. Coffee would first spend a day drying in the sun before going into the machine, where it could reach the required moisture level in another 16 to 18 hours. But the dryer soon proved useful for more than reducing labour pressure.

Kirit began comparing coffee from the same batch, dried mechanically and in the sun, and found that the difference lay in the greater control the machine offered. In the drying yard, beans do not always dry evenly, whereas the controlled conditions inside the dryer produced a more uniform result. According to the buyers he worked with, the machine-dried coffee also retained its moisture more consistently over time.

It was another lesson on a farm that was increasingly forcing him to rethink old ways of working. A machine brought in because there were not enough hands had also given him another way to protect the quality of the coffee.

“I didn't expect it to do such a wonderful job,” Kirit says. “It's because of labour constraints that we bought it, actually. But then it seemed to have improved my quality.”

The machine became one more example of how the estate’s future was taking shape: not by abandoning everything that came before, but by finding where a different tool could make the old system work better.

But there was another question waiting beyond the plantation. If Azad Hind was changing, was the market for its coffee changing too?

When the Coffee Comes Home

For years, the direction of Azad Hind’s coffee was outward. When Kirit first entered specialty coffee, very few buyers in India wanted the kind of coffee he was producing. Looking overseas was therefore less a choice than a practical necessity.

“At that point, there were hardly any buyers in India at all,” he recalls. “So I had to go overseas.”

Now he is wondering what it might mean for some of that coffee to come back. India's coffee market has changed considerably since he started, and Kirit sees something familiar in its growth. In Korea, he watched younger consumers discover a new coffee culture and carry that habit with them as they grew older. He thinks India could follow a similar path, only on a much larger scale.

“The market has to grow exponentially,” he emphasises. “We may at some point become a net importer also.”

Kirit is now exploring buyers at home, even as he experiments with other coffees such as anaerobically fermented Robusta, Liberica and Excelsa. But bringing the coffee home also raises the question of how Indian coffee is seen in the first place. Kirit looks around and sees a story that should be easier to tell. Coffee grows beneath shade, surrounded by Coorg's flora and fauna. The plantations carry generations of knowledge, and the landscape itself has shaped the way coffee is grown here. Yet he feels those things haven't translated into enough value for the farmer.

Perhaps that is because the real story of coffee is more complicated than the picture of an estate can suggest. Behind every cup is the ongoing work of keeping an ageing plantation productive, making the economics hold together as conditions change, and finding enough reason to keep investing in a crop whose future can never be taken for granted.

In many ways, that has been Kirit's work at Azad Hind. He has not tried to keep the estate exactly as he found it. Instead, he has spent nearly three decades adapting it to what comes next, changing how the coffee is processed, replanting what has grown old, and finding new ways for the farm to keep moving as the market and landscape around it change. The coffee may travel far from Azad Hind before it reaches a cup, but its journey does not really end with the export container. For Kirit, the work comes back to where it began: understanding what the farm has, figuring out what it can become, and making coffee people want to drink again tomorrow.