Journal
Green coffee, from the estate
Notes for people who buy green coffee: what an Indian offer list means, what the EU now asks you to hold before a container clears, and how a crop grown under shade in Chikmagalur behaves on a roast curve.
India as an origin
Where Indian coffee comes from, what it tastes like, and how it compares with the origins already on your list.
India's 2025/26 Crop and What It Means for Contracts
The headline is a record crop. The caveat is that the same rain that produced the estimate also raised disease pressure, and post-blossom estimates...
Indian Harvest and Shipping Calendar for EU Buyers
India picks on the opposite half of the year to Brazil. Knowing the calendar is what lets you position an Indian lot rather than react to whatever ...
Chikmagalur: The Region Behind the GI
Coffee in India started here, on the slopes below Baba Budangiri, and the district still sets what Indian arabica is expected to taste like.
Indian Coffee Varieties: S795, Sln 9, Cauvery and Kent
An Indian offer list names varieties most European buyers have never seen. They are not obscure — they are the product of a century of breeding for...
Where India Sits in the EU Green Coffee Market
Indian coffee already arrives in Europe in quantity. It mostly arrives without a name attached, which is why European roasters think they have neve...
What an Indian Lot Brings to a European Blend
Blend building is a different exercise from single-origin buying, and it is where most volume actually moves. Judged as a component rather than a s...
Indian vs Vietnamese Robusta
If you buy robusta in Europe you almost certainly buy Vietnamese. It is the sensible default. Here is where the Indian alternative differs, and whe...
Is Indian Coffee Any Good? What European Roasters Get Wrong
The usual European verdict on Indian coffee is formed from commodity robusta bought through a trader. It is a fair verdict on that coffee and a poo...
How to Buy Green Coffee From India
Buying direct from an origin you have never used is mostly a sequencing problem. Do the steps in order and very little goes wrong; skip one and you...
Indian Green Coffee: An Origin Guide for European Roasters
India is the seventh largest coffee producer in the world and the one most European roasters have never bought from. This is what the origin actual...
EUDR and certification
What an EU operator has to hold before December 2026, and what an origin should be able to hand over.
Chemical-Free vs Certified Organic: What You Can Claim in the EU
A great deal of the world's coffee is grown without agrochemicals by farmers who have never paid for a certificate. The farming is real. The claim ...
Demeter and Biodynamic Coffee
Biodynamic certification asks for everything organic asks for, and then a good deal more. Whether that matters to your customers is a commercial qu...
Importing Organic Coffee Into the EU: Equivalence and the COI
Organic coffee has its own import regime, separate from EUDR and older than it. If the paperwork is wrong the coffee still arrives — it just cannot...
Proving Legality: Indian Land and Export Documents Under EUDR
Deforestation-free is the limb everyone talks about. Legally produced is the one that quietly requires more paperwork, and it is origin-specific — ...
What a Due Diligence Statement Contains, and Who Files It
The Due Diligence Statement is the piece of EUDR that actually stops a container. It is filed by you, not your supplier, and it depends on informat...
EUDR Geolocation: Polygons, GPS Points and the 4-Hectare Rule
Geolocation is the part of EUDR compliance that has to happen on the ground, at origin, before anything can be filed. It is also the part most expo...
EUDR at Origin: What Your Supplier Should Already Have
The EUDR obligation is yours, but almost all the evidence sits at origin. This is the list to send an exporter before you contract, and how to read...
EUDR for Coffee: What You Must Hold Before December 2026
The EU Deforestation Regulation has been delayed twice, which has made it easy to put off. It should not be. The obligation falls on the importer, ...
Reading a lot
Grades, screens, moisture and defects — the vocabulary of an offer list, and what each number actually promises.
Fine Robusta: What It Is and How It's Graded
A category with no vocabulary cannot be traded on quality. Fine robusta grading gave the species one, and it is the reason robusta can now be bough...
Cupping an Indian Lot: What to Expect on the Table
Most buyers cup an Indian sample against the wrong reference and reach a conclusion about the origin that is really a conclusion about the comparison.
What Is Peaberry Coffee?
Peaberry is sold as a premium and explained as a mystery. It is neither — it is a well-understood mutation with genuine consequences for roasting a...
Defect Counting and Green Grading
A defect count is the only quality number on an offer list that is objectively checkable on arrival. It is also the one most often quoted without s...
Moisture Content and Water Activity in Green Coffee
Moisture is the most consequential number on an offer list and the one most often quoted without saying when it was measured. Water activity is the...
Screen Size and Bean Density
Screen size is the most quoted number on an offer list and one of the least predictive on its own. It tells you about uniformity. Density tells you...
Indian Coffee Grades: AAA, AA, A, AB and PB
European buyers read an Indian offer list through Kenyan or Colombian habits and quietly assume the wrong thing. The letters look the same and do n...
How to Read a Green Coffee Offer List
An offer list is the standard artefact of the green coffee trade and almost nobody explains it. Here is what each column means, which numbers are c...
Getting a container to Europe
Ports, Incoterms, duty, packing and paperwork between a Chikmagalur curing works and a European warehouse.
Type, Offer and Pre-Shipment Samples
The sample sequence is the quality control system of the green coffee trade. Each sample answers one question, and buyers who compress the sequence...
When a Lot Disappoints: Claims and Arbitration
Most exporters will not publish how they handle a quality dispute, which is exactly why a buyer should ask before contracting rather than after arr...
What Documents Travel With an Indian Coffee Container
Almost every delayed container is a paperwork problem, not a shipping problem. This is the set, what each does, and the two that most often go wrong.
Spot, Forward and Warehoused: How EU Roasters Buy
How you buy matters as much as what you buy. A roaster who only buys spot pays for the privilege in price and in never quite having the coffee they...
GrainPro, Vacuum and Jute: Packing for a Six-Week Transit
Packing is the cheapest quality control available on a long transit, and the one most often left out of a quoted price. It is also the difference b...
Container, LCL or Sample Bag: Minimum Orders Explained
The question small roasters most often avoid asking is how little they can buy. It is a reasonable question and every exporter has heard it.
EU Import Duty and HS Codes for Green Coffee
The tariff on ordinary green coffee into the EU is zero, which surprises people who have budgeted for it. The costs that do bite are elsewhere.
Incoterms for Green Coffee: FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP
Two quotes for the same coffee can differ by a fifth and both be honest, because they are quoting different Incoterms. This is what each one actual...
Shipping Green Coffee From India to Europe
Logistics, not cup score, is the usual reason a European roaster never tries a new origin. Here is what the route from India actually involves, and...
Processing and monsooning
Washed, natural, honey — and the one process only India performs.
Coffee Fermentation: Time, Temperature and pH
Two lots off the same block can taste completely different, and usually the reason is a tank, overnight, while nobody was watching. Here's what's g...
What a Curing Works Actually Does
In Latin America the mill is usually part of the farm or the exporter. In India it is frequently a separate business, and it is the step European b...
Drying Coffee: Patios, Raised Beds and Fibre Mats
Drying is the least glamorous step in processing and the one that decides most quality outcomes. It is also the step most exposed to weather nobody...
Anaerobic and Experimental Processing in India
Anaerobic is the most fashionable word in processing and the least consistently defined. It describes a condition, not a recipe, and almost everyth...
Inside a Monsooning Warehouse
Almost everything written about monsooning describes the result. This describes the operation — what the buildings are like, what the work is, and ...
Washed, Natural and Honey Processing in India
Processing is the largest single lever on flavour after the coffee itself. It is also where the vocabulary is least standardised between origins, w...
Monsooned Robusta: The Lot Nobody Talks About
Monsooned Malabar arabica has a reputation. Its robusta counterpart has almost none, which is odd, because robusta is the species monsooning arguab...
What Is Monsooned Malabar Coffee?
Monsooned Malabar is the only coffee in the world made by leaving green beans out in the weather on purpose. It began as an accident of sailing-shi...
Robusta, reconsidered
Why European roasters are looking again at a species they wrote off, and what India offers in it.
Roasting Indian Robusta Without the Bitterness
Most roasters approach their first robusta as though it were a dense arabica and get something aggressive. The adjustments are not large, but they ...
Robusta in European Espresso Blends
A large share of European espresso already contains robusta and comparatively little of it is discussed openly. The reasons for including it are te...
Indian Robusta: Kaapi Royale and What Sits Below It
India grows more robusta than arabica and grades it on its own ladder. Kaapi Royale sits at the top, and the prefix in front of every other grade t...
Why European Roasters Are Reconsidering Robusta
For twenty years the specialty position on robusta was simple: don't. That position was formed when the only robusta available was the worst of it,...
Shade, soil and traceability
The farming system behind the lots, kept to what can be counted rather than claimed.
Traceability From Block to Container
Every exporter says their coffee is traceable. The useful question is not whether, but to what — and at which handover the answer stops being a rec...
Agroforestry: Pepper, Cardamom and Coffee in One Canopy
An Indian coffee estate is not a coffee farm with trees on it. It is a layered system in which coffee is one crop among several occupying the same ...
Shade-Grown Coffee in the Western Ghats
Nearly all Indian coffee is shade-grown, which is unusual enough to be a structural difference rather than a marketing position. The agronomy is st...