Coffee lore may not be marked by more than about a hundred years after the bushy crop made the three districts of the erstwhile Princely State of Mysore its home. Not many may recollect the happening of the centenary of its arrival in the State, if at all the event was celebrated. Residents of the old residential areas of Mysore city may remember the middle-aged, Khaki-clad, bicycle-borne, vendor sporting pith hat in the style of a hunter, peddling coffee seeds under ‘his’ brands of a) Chikamagalur Coffee, b) Giri Coffee (meaning Bababudangiri) and c) Coorg Coffee, delivering the material at the doorsteps nearly 60 years ago. The much-awaited coffee seed peddler vanished unheralded with the passage of time, leaving his captive customers, connoisseurs of refined tastes of Mysore, high and dry.
An unforgettable phase of the history of coffee in Mysore city, however brief, was marked by the presence of a) coal-fired, manually operated coffee-roaster with a capacity to roast a couple of pounds (equivalent to one kilogram) of coffee seeds and b) hand-operated grinding device in most of the middle-class households in order to brew fresh coffee, particularly to appease the grandpa and grandma in the joint-families, now not known to the younger generation of our times. The two most-prized equipments have since gone to the junk-yard (gujari).
The coffee planters may be concerned with a) the timely showers, particularly the April showers coinciding with the blooming of flowers on the bushes, b) the afflictions bugging the bushes and lately, c) the onslaught of jumbos devouring the lush green plants in a jiffy, but the city-dwellers are hell-bent on having their cuppa. The labour class (if there be one such class still in society) as well as the truant white-collared gentry in government offices must gulp the addictive drink more frequently than the limits prescribed by the physician. They couldn’t care less if the brew was loaded with the objectionable chicory and with disregard to right proportions of plantation ‘A’ and Robusta as well as peaberry, not to talk of adulterants.
Bangalore is shortly hosting the fifth edition of the India International Coffee Festival in which more than 1,000 delegates are expected to take part in the five-day global event, apart from attracting more than 10,000 visitors. The festival may augur well for MNCs of the coffee world, but the kick got out of the now-defunct coffee roaster and coffee grinder cannot be matched by brands such as ‘Starbucks.’ Coffee is unarguably the only unifying agent that abhors discrimination in society.
source: http://www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore / Home> Editorial / January 10th, 2014
