India’s First Woman Coffee Taster says Branding will Help improve awareness globally.
I had no plans to be a coffee taster, says Sunalini Menon, the country’s first woman coffee taster. A post-graduate from Chennai, she was in fact eyeing a career in dietetics but landed up working at the quality control department of the Bangalore-based Coffee Board. Ms. Menon quit the board in the mid-1990 s after the latter disbanded the marketing function.
Although India currently has less than 10 coffee tasters, Ms Menon says Indian women are naturally qualified to be coffee tasters as they do not smoke or drink. For tasters, smell is more important than taste.
When she was with the Coffee Boards QC department, she was pained at the perception of Indian coffee globally. I have had several instances when in many international fora they routinely used to dismiss Indian coffee but no longer. Focus on quality has helped us to bring about this change in perception. There are several micro-roasters today who are willing to pay you a premium for the quality. Indian coffee is not just fruity but carries a distinctive chocolate/caramel flavour, she adds.
Indian growers need to realise the importance of their coffees to make a bigger impact globally. Branding certainly helps to improve awareness, she adds citing the example of Indonesia’s immensely popular Sumatran Mandheling variety of Arabicas.
The earliest instance of coffee branding in India came from European customers who took a fancy for the slightly different tasting, bloated coffee beans imported from India. The beans underwent physical changes after being exposed to the elements while being shipped. This demand led to the Coffee Board developing the highly-acclaimed Monsoon Malabar.
As the pointsperson on the quality front, Ms Menon was involved in developing other Indian brands like Mysore Nuggets extra bold and Robusta Kaapi Royale, though these brands came into being only in the 1980s several years after Monsoon Malabar’s debut.
We laid down criteria for the Arabicas/ Robustas focussing on the bean size, the method of drying and other factors. To qualify as Mysore Nuggets extra bold, for instance, the Arabica bean size needs to be more than 7.5 millimetre. For coffee connoisseurs, Indian coffee was very often called as Mysore coffee and we gave this name for this coffee, she adds. Both varieties are also sun-dried.
The Robusta Kaapi Royale is made from bold beans with size of 7 millimetres and the beans should be defect-free and bear a neutral taste in the cup. Thanks to the stringent quality norms, the quantum of such speciality coffees is extremely limited. The output of the Robusta Kaapi Royale is pegged around 4,000 tonnes while in case of Mysore Nuggets extra bold it is around 8,000-10,000 tonnes.
The Coffee Board has assigned the Nandi (the vehicle of Lord Shiva) logo to Mysore Nuggets extra bold while the Robusta Kaapi Royale logo features an elephant carrying a howdah.
In the initial phase, while Mysore Nuggets extra bold was sourced from regions like Bababudangiri and Manjarabad and parts of Chikmagalur (in Karnataka), Robusta Kaapi Royale was sourced from parts of Kerala (Wayanad and Travancore) and Chikmagalur.
Ms Menon believes the generic branding of India coffee through Muthamma (the woman coffee bean collector depicted in a Madhubani painting) has growing acceptability. Muthamma is India’s answer to the poser from Colombia’s Juan Valdez.
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