Two Generations, One Estate: Carrying Attikan from Forest to Cup

At around 1,700 metres in the Biligiriranga Hills, Attikan is described as the highest-altitude coffee estate in South India. Mist, heavily filtered sunlight and steep, rocky terrain shape both the coffee and the work of growing it, with cherries maturing slowly and often ripening only towards the end of January and into February. Those same slopes make harvesting physically demanding, and members of the Soliga community, native to the Biligiriranga Hills, sometimes come in during the season to pick coffee across terrain where cultivation has always had to adapt to the landscape rather than overpower it.

That relationship with the surrounding forest extends well beyond the coffee fields. Attikan is flanked by reserve forest and natural wind belts; regular power remains limited, and food is still cooked over firewood. Wildlife is not something encountered at a distance here, but part of the landscape the family has learnt to live alongside. Perhaps the clearest expression of that understanding comes from something Shriya says almost in passing while speaking about the animals around them: “It’s their home, of course, at the end of the day.”

Living with the forest, however, is not something the present generation introduced. It runs through Attikan’s history, beginning long before there was a brand carrying the estate’s name. In 1882, Randolph Hayton Morris, a Scotsman believed to have travelled on horseback from Coonoor in the Nilgiris after becoming captivated by the Biligiris, began cultivating coffee on these hills. He made the journey through dense forest on his horse Akbar, establishing an estate in a landscape that was still largely wilderness.

One story from Morris’s years at Attikan has endured within the family. An avid hunter, he is said to have shot an Indian gaur and approached it believing the animal was dead, only for it to rise and gore him. His wife nursed him through his injuries while also taking responsibility for the estate, becoming part of an early history in which the demands of the land were inseparable from the lives of those tending it.

Attikan passed into the present family in 1958, when K. S. Vaidyanathan, a businessman from Madras, acquired the estate from Eric, Morris’s eldest son.

When that fourth generation began building Veer Attikan, much of the brand’s identity was drawn from the place the family had inherited. The estate's wildlife appears throughout its packaging, while the old Attikan house became the brand’s logo. Even the name remains rooted in the landscape and its stories: “Veer” reflects the courage it takes to grow coffee in Attikan in many ways; Attikan, meanwhile, takes its name from the wild fig trees that grow across these hills and, according to the estate, are part of the ecology influencing its coffees.

Yet creating Veer Attikan was about more than giving the estate a name and identity that consumers could recognise. By the time Shriya’s generation began taking the coffee further, Attikan’s beans had already been reaching international roasters for years, building recognition through green coffee long before the estate had a consumer-facing identity of its own. The question was no longer simply how to grow coffee in this landscape, but what happened to it once it left the farm, and how much of Attikan remained visible by the time the coffee reached the cup.

Veer Attikan grew out of that gap. Following the coffee beyond the estate took the family into quality control, roasting, café partnerships, and direct conversations with consumers, but moving closer to the cup did not take them further away from the farm. Instead, what they began learning at the other end of the journey began to find its way back to where the coffee had begun.

Beyond the Green Bean

A grower can spend months shaping a coffee before it ever leaves the estate. The plant is nurtured from seed, cherries are picked with care, fermentations are watched closely, drying is adjusted over several days, and moisture is checked before the coffee is finally ready to move on. By then, the grower has already made countless small decisions that will influence the cup, yet once the coffee leaves as a green bean, much of what happens next is beyond their control.

For Shriya and her family, that handover increasingly felt like an unfinished part of the story. They could know exactly how the coffee had been grown and processed, but once it moved beyond the farm, roasting, brewing and the final expression in the cup were no longer entirely in their hands. The decision to build a quality lab and roastery grew from that discomfort, not from a desire to control every stage for its own sake, but from wanting to understand how much of the work done at the estate could still be protected further down the chain.

“The whole point of setting up this lab and roastery was that being a grower, having our own dry mill and then doing all of this is that we don’t want to let go of quality,” Shriya explains. “Since we’ve nurtured the plant from the seed, we know how much this step matters as well.”

The family had already been cupping and assessing coffees at Lakshmi, their dry mill and coffee-curing facility, where an earlier quality lab had been set up. During the main season, particularly when buyers arrived, the pace of tasting naturally intensified. From December through March, the equipment was in use, coffees were constantly being evaluated, and the entire system came alive around the harvest. The difficulty came later, once the season eased and those routines became harder to sustain. A roaster might be elsewhere, a grinder might not be immediately available, and something they wanted to become a daily discipline remained tied to the months when everyone happened to be in the same place.

Bringing the lab closer changed that rhythm, allowing coffees to be cupped more regularly while clients could come in to taste different lots and the team could monitor parameters such as moisture, water activity, and colour before dispatch rather than treating them as occasional quality controls. Records provided a point of reference when a client returned, while nitrogen flushing helped preserve the roasted coffee before it left their hands. What had once depended heavily on the season gradually became part of the business's everyday working language.

The space also began to take on a larger purpose where potential partners could sit down and compare coffees side by side, taste how one roast differed from another, and work through what might suit their menu rather than choosing only from a description on a bag. The family hopes to develop that further through workshops, turning the lab into a place where clients can ask questions, test ideas, and better understand how processing, roasting, and brewing change what they experience in the cup.

The way Hamsini and Shriya work together reflects that same movement between farm and cup. Hamsini has traditionally been more closely involved with the farm and processing, while also working with samples and speaking to clients. Shriya’s role extends further into the laboratory, samples, business outreach, and the conversations that happen once the coffee begins moving beyond the estate. Their responsibilities overlap where necessary, particularly in processing and, more recently, roasting, but the division allows each to stay close to a different part of the coffee’s journey without losing sight of the whole.

Reading the Coffee Through the Roaster

Roasting gave Shriya another way to understand the coffees she already knew intimately from the farm. She is quick to describe herself as still learning and spends time shadowing their head roaster, whose technical experience allows her to observe the machine with a different kind of attention. Courses can teach the theory, she says, but standing in front of a roaster is another experience altogether because the coffee is changing as decisions are being made. Heat has to be adjusted in the moment, the curve has to be watched as it develops, and there is little room to treat what is happening inside the drum as something abstract.

Her years in processing make those changes particularly revealing. A heavily fermented coffee, for instance, may not move through the roast as predictably as a clean washed coffee or a straightforward natural, with the rate of rise behaving differently and requiring closer attention to heat. Watching those variations has made Shriya think more carefully about moisture, water activity, and the bean's physical structure, while also helping her recognise how decisions made during fermentation and drying can reappear months later in the roastery.

That connection becomes especially valuable when the learning travels back towards the estate. If a particular lot behaves differently in heat and eventually produces a specific flavour profile, the family can carry that observation into the next processing season and ask what might have caused it. Rather than looking at fermentation, drying and roasting as separate stages, they begin to understand how one decision continues to influence the coffee long after that part of the process is technically over.

“It might not make me a better processor,” Shriya says, “but I’m able to understand my processing much better.”

For the family, this is one of the clearest reasons for following the coffee beyond the green bean. Roasting does not replace what they already know about cultivation or processing; it gives them another vantage point for understanding those choices, while reducing their dependence on someone else’s interpretation of what happened after the coffee left the farm. When they speak to buyers, they can connect how a coffee was grown and processed to what they have observed during roasting and, finally, to what appears in the cup.

Coffee still travels from the estate to the roaster and the consumer, but what they learn there increasingly begins to travel back towards the farm.

When Experimentation Meets Scale

The family continues to experiment across nano lots, micro lots, and larger batches, but at scale they have become more selective about what is worth repeating. What works beautifully in a small lot does not always make sense at larger volumes. Across multiple farms, not every fermentation can be personally supervised, so the person on site may become their eyes and ears, calling in with a pH reading or describing how the coffee smells, feels, and looks. As volumes grow, consistency becomes part of the experiment itself, because a process has limited value if it produces one remarkable cup but cannot be replicated reliably.

They have worked with Robusta honeys for roughly three or four years and have also seen good results from naturals, while washed Robusta has required more consideration around water treatment and effluent. Honey processing brings its own practical complications, with sticky mucilage requiring closer attention to drying surfaces, mesh and cleaning between batches.

These realities are part of why the family is wary of treating process as an achievement in itself.

“Roasters should chase behind flavours, not behind processes”

A natural is not automatically better because naturals are fashionable, and a complicated fermentation is only useful if it creates something worthwhile in the cup. For them, the process matters only when the flavour justifies it.

What the Cup Brings Back

Following the coffee this far has also brought Shriya and Hamsini closer to what happens after it leaves the estate. A café of their own is not an immediate ambition, partly because hospitality feels like a very different business and they are conscious of the attention that quality and consistency already demand elsewhere. Yet if they ever did enter that space, both imagine themselves behind the bar, pulling shots and speaking directly to the people drinking their coffee, rather than stepping away from the final stage of a journey they have remained closely involved in from the farm onwards.

That instinct reflects how they work across the rest of the coffee chain. They can follow a lot from fermentation and drying through roasting, tasting and calibration, then hear how a buyer, café or consumer responds at the other end. Those responses begin shaping the questions carried into the next season, whether a roast reveals something about an earlier processing decision, repeated requests for berry-forward coffees sharpen conversations about what Indian coffee naturally expresses, or a Robusta judged differently once its identity is concealed exposes how much expectation can shape the cup.

Seen this way, Veer Attikan is not simply a historic estate building a roasted-coffee brand. It is the continuation of a much older relationship with coffee, carried forward by a generation that wants to remain close to what happens after the harvest leaves the hills.

At one end of that journey is the cup, where roasting, brewing, and the drinker's response can reveal something the farm could not show on its own. At the other end is Attikan, where the old house still looks out across the clearing before the land falls away, the reserve forest presses close to the slopes, and coffee continues to ripen slowly beneath filtered light.

For Shriya and Hamsini, taking the coffee further from the estate has never meant leaving the farm behind. If anything, staying with it all the way to the cup has given them another way to understand where it began.

When the Coffee Travels Further Than Its Name

Over the last decade, the family says, many Indian growers have developed their own relationships with overseas roasters, importers and traders. They have travelled, organised tastings, sent samples, and gradually created markets for their coffees, while Attikan itself had been reaching out to international speciality roasters for years before Veer Attikan was created.

Yet producing coffee that international buyers respect is not necessarily the same as building recognition for Indian coffee among the people who ultimately drink it. Shriya sees that distinction at international coffee events, where she has encountered people who are still surprised to learn that India grows coffee at all, and then has to explain that India also produces speciality coffee.

The gap, in their view, is no longer simply about quality. An Indian coffee can perform well in an international roaster’s programme while the person drinking it remembers the roaster more readily than the farm or country behind the bean. Other origins have built identities that travel alongside their coffee, while Indian growers have often created strong green-bean relationships without achieving the same visibility once the coffee becomes a finished product.

For Shriya and the family, that is one of the opportunities still ahead. The ambition is not merely for more Indian green coffee to travel internationally, but for the identity of Indian coffee to remain visible after roasting, packaging and retail have added several more layers between grower and drinker.

Veer Attikan is one attempt to shorten that distance. Instead of Attikan leaving the estate only as a green bean that eventually becomes somebody else’s finished product, the coffee can reach the consumer carrying the estate’s own name and story with it