Your cuppa, your way

A Delhi roasterie offers 'profile roasting' to extract the best flavours from coffee beans

In a small room tucked away in a bylane of Said-ul-Ajaib, a south Delhi neighbourhood, a group of women is poring over jute sacks full of Arabica coffee beans. They grab a handful and start the sorting process. The good-quality coffee beans land up in an insulated plastic bag, the rest — some embedded with insects and some over-processed ones — are junked. The stored beans then make their way next door to the Blue Tokai roasterie and cafe. You are greeted by the whir of machines and the heady aroma of fresh coffee in the roasting room, where the technical team is hard at work. In a country where you can count the number of coffee roasteries on your fingers, Blue Tokai is one of the pioneers.

What started out as a hobby for Matt Chitharanjan and Namrata Asthana three years ago has grown into a thriving coffee venture. Here’s what they do: the couple buys single-estate green coffee beans from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, roasts them fresh on order and grinds them to a perfect grain. Whether you want roasted beans or freshly ground coffee is up to you. “Two-thirds of our business comes from the latter,” says Chitharanjan. The coffee is shipped within 24 hours of being roasted and costs between Rs 350 and Rs 380 for a 250-gm pack.

Blue Tokai is also the first in Delhi to offer “profile roasting” to extract the best flavour from the bean. This means controlling the duration of the roast, the temperature and various other factors to achieve a predetermined flavour profile.

The idea to start a roasterie came to the couple when they moved from Chennai to Delhi in 2012. Chitharanjan, an economist, was used to having freshly ground coffee at the local coffee houses located near his office in Chennai — the shift to Delhi drastically limited his options. “A lot of major coffee chains have their beans roasted months ago down south. Ideally, the coffee should be consumed within three weeks of being roasted,” he says. Many of the flavour compounds that make coffee smell and taste good start breaking down within weeks of being roasted. The average coffee bought at stores goes through a chain of intermediaries before reaching the customer, and hence ends up getting stale.

  Although India is the fifth largest coffee-growing country in the world, there is little awareness about good-quality beans among consumers. “Most of the good-grade beans end up getting exported. We had to convince the farms and plantations to sell that high-quality grade to us,” says Chitharanjan, who started Blue Tokai as an e-commerce venture and has now moved into wholesale too. Today, cafes and restaurants — such as The Park Hotel, Oberoi Patisserie and Lodi-The Garden Restaurant  — source roasted beans from the couple, besides the thousands of coffee drinkers from across the country who order the ground coffee on the Blue Tokai website.

The packages feature the name of the estate that the coffee beans are sourced from. “Each plantation has its own unique flavour profile and that should get recognised. Some have a nutty dark chocolate flavour; others are fruity and acidic; some are floral. They vary in terms of the body as well — light, intense or buttery. I have seen people like to engage with the process,” says Chitharanjan, who sources from 10 plantations in southern India.

Coffee connoisseurs develop their own preference for a particular estate over time. For instance, Arijit Ganguly, owner of the Farmout Cafe in Gurgaon, which is known for its coffee and tea offerings, buys Blue Tokai beans sourced from the Yellikodige and MS Estates. “It was hard to get fresh roasted beans before they came along. Besides the two roasts we regularly order, we keep experimenting with other flavour profiles as well — say, during special coffee tasting workshops and other similar sessions,” says Ganguly.

It is to educate more and more coffee drinkers about quality beans that the Blue Tokai team conducts tours through the facility every Sunday and Wednesday.