Bring the Cafe home with India’s best coffee brands

More and more Indians are savouring their coffee the artisanal way. The focus is on high-quality beans that highlight India's single-origin estates. Increasingly, brands are now experimenting with new brews, blends, and flavour profiles. Craft coffees are making their way into cocktails, desserts, infusions, and more. Let's look at some such best coffee brands.

Koinonia Coffee Roasters

Koinonia's cold brews and specialty coffees are famous enough that customers flock to the cafe despite its unremarkable location in a busy part of Mumbai. All of the coffees are obtained from various plantations in Southern India and roasted by hand. The Marvahulla is a popular version. Additionally, they have a cask-aged coffee, where the beans are first stored in whiskey barrels before being roasted.

Araku Coffee 

Araku is earning international acclaim for its high-quality biodegradable coffee beans and blends, which are cultivated and processed by local Adivasi farmers in Andhra Pradesh. In 2015, Araku Coffee bested other international blends to take home the gold award at Paris's renowned Prix Epicures. The Signature and the MicroClimate are two of the brand's four coffee offerings in India.

Black Baza Coffee

Black Baza Coffee was founded with the intention of igniting "a local, participative, and meaningful movement for coffee." Their coffee can be traced back to the farm where it was grown and cultivated under the protection of trees (think employment, reforestation). They supply both Arabica and Robusta beans, as well as mixes of the two.

Halli Berri

This coffee plantation in Karnataka is owned by a family and managed by four women, all of the Kariappa community members. The Halli Berri family has been farming coffee for six generations. Their coffee is responsibly cultivated in the shade, and each cherry is harvested by hand. This premium coffee has a honey-dew taste and is made in small quantities using 100 percent Arabica beans.

The Flying Squirrel

Tej Thammaiah, a third-generation coffee grower, and Ashish D'Abreo, a former advertising executive, founded this Bengaluru-based company. Up to eleven varieties of coffee are available, with the menu changing with the seasons. Parama, a coffee with chocolate undertones, and Sunkissed are two of the most well-liked varieties.