Komal, Espresso from India

Coffee Info

How We Brew This Coffee

We brew with the Maro Model 1 at 93 °C and grind with the Eureka Single Dose Pro.

What a punch! According to Nadja, this year's harvest of this coffee is so balanced, harmonious and round that you can almost brew it however you want. Be sure to try many different recipes, because the coffee shows a different facet each time and thus its extreme complexity. Be careful, like other heavily processed coffees, this coffee demands a finer grind.

While last year's harvest was a roaring lion, Komal has tamed it this year. The coffee still shows its boozy character – if you want it to. Michel even found the first shot at 14 seconds already good.

For the standard 9-bar profile, we used a drink ratio of 1:2.1 and 29 seconds and we're delighted. Sweet passion fruit, tropical fruits, extremely elegant and dense, very graceful and complex. Not sour, not bitter, not dusty. Maro Code: HTTRNBL

If you prefer the more modern version of an espresso, you can pull the coffee with the same drink ratio of 1:2.1 at 50–54 seconds and you'll be rewarded with a variety of flavours. The coffee now has plenty of room to unfold. The cup appears lighter and softer as a result. Nadja likes this very much, Michel less so. Maro Code: ANAWEHZ

For the pressure profile, we remove pressure from the main brew and counter that with slightly increased brew temperature. Which means: instead of 93 °C, we use 94 °C and can thus extract the same amount despite lower pressure, but in a gentler way, so to speak. With 20 g in and 42 g out at 29 seconds and complete puck saturation after eight seconds (3.5 bar), then floating up to just 7.5 bar we're on cloud nine: this cup is incredibly soft, balanced, structured with extremely much sweetness and super juicy acidity. Maro Code: PBJUARV

Why Does This Coffee Taste the Way It Does?

After manual harvesting, the cherries are sorted and fermented in a sealed tank for 60 hours. This enables more precise control of the process as well as higher consistency and clarity in the cup. An extended fermentation time deepens flavor complexity and also ensures complete breakdown of the fruit pulp (mucilage) of the coffee beans. Komal precisely controls this post-harvest process by adding a custom-made yeast. The whole cherries are then dried for 7–10 days in a controlled temperature environment. Before hulling, the cherries rest for another two months to slow down water activity in the bean and gain more stability in the characteristics of the green coffee over a longer period of time.

Why Did We Buy from Komal?

In March of this year, Nadja visited Akshay and Komal together with Lennart from «Good Middle Man» This Side Up. «We were immediately on the same wavelength», says Nadja, who is enthusiastic about their work and research in the field of coffee species. With their South India Coffee Company, the two function like our Claudia in Nicaragua with her company BridAzul. They process cherries from selected farmers in the surrounding area, invest in regenerative agriculture and thus fight against poverty and migration in and out of the region. All their practical know-how also flows into scientific work. We handle the purchase through Lennart and his company This Side Up. An importer from the Netherlands who not only champions full transparency but also demands and implements it like almost no other.

How Do We Roast This Coffee?

We roast the coffee as a 20 kg batch on our 30 kg Giesen roaster for 11:40 minutes with a development time of 69 seconds (9.8%). We decided to roast the coffee light because this green coffee brings plenty of texture with it, which is emphasized even more by its post-harvest process. This way we can roast with a clear conscience "edgy" and focus on the acidity and aromatics.

Also Available for Shipment as Coffee Letter

All our coffees can be ordered as a coffee letter. It is treated like a regular letter and arrives in your mailbox. This reduces the shipping cost for 250 g of coffee from CHF 7.– to CHF 2.50. At checkout, you can choose between the Coffee Letter, A-Post, and B-Post options.