Visiting Ajoy and Pranoy Thipaiah at Kerehaklu

We have just released two coffees from Kerehaklu, an amazing coffee farm in the Western Ghats, Karnataka, India. Kerehaklu is a 97-hectare plantation run by the Thipaiah family who have been coffee producers for five generations. Today, father and son team Ajoy and Pranoy Thipaiah are at the helm. Ajoy is chiefly responsible for the agronomy side of things, looking after the coffee bushes, their shade trees, and the other plants, both in their plant nursery and other parts of the estate, while Pranoy is mainly responsible for processing and sales. Together the two and their team are producing some incredible coffee– coffee that was revelatory to us in terms of how good Indian coffee can be, but also just coffee that is generally interesting and exciting. I was lucky enough to visit the plantation back in December to interview Pranoy for Standart magazine (issue 35, check it out!) and it was a really inspiring trip for a lot of reasons. 

 I first heard of Pranoy in a very ‘coffee people who are chronically online’ way. I was scrolling Instagram and Christopher Feran shared one of Pranoy’s stories where he was using an experimental process developed by Feran. I’m always looking for coffee producers doing interesting things, so I had a look through Pranoy’s page and it was so refreshing. The thing that first caught my attention wasn’t just that Pranoy was producing interesting experimental coffees, it was that he was bringing people into his life on a coffee estate, with short videos, infographics, explainer texts and recordings where he would talk about all kinds of things. One day a video about the challenges of growing pepper vines, the next day Kivi, his beagle, playing in a stream, the next day an explainer on misconceptions about honey processed coffees. The content was interesting but also down to earth and really made me want to connect to the estate more, plus it made me pretty desperate to taste the coffees! I got a chance to do that at the London Coffee Festival in 2023 when Pranoy was cupping along with his import partner Osito. The coffees blew me away, from the washed coffees with a clarity of flavour and acidity that was unlike anything I’d encountered before in Indian coffee, to the honeys that were reminiscent of some of the best Costa Rican honeys I’ve tried, plus the anoxic fermented naturals that were big fruit bombs like some of the best I’ve tasted from those rock star Colombian processors (Wilton Benitez, Nestor Lasso et al.).

Visiting Kerehaklu was incredibly inspiring and humbling. Pranoy and Ajoy were so welcoming and open, showing me around the estate and explaining how they work. Ajoy explained some of the unique challenges of their environment, such as out-of-season rains knocking blossoms off their robusta, or elephants trampling coffee trees to get to their favourite delicacy, the areca nut tree. Ajoy also showed me a picture of a frankly huge tiger, picked up by one of their motion-detecting cameras. So much of the work of looking after the farm seemed to be dealing with forces that they cannot control– rain, heat, elephants… The approaches they take are measured, thoughtful and reasoned. If bison keep jumping over fences and breaking them, then maybe that part of the estate doesn’t need fences everywhere; perhaps the gap between the trees should be bigger to make room for their passage. If the elephant tramples trees to get to the areca, then hopefully he will move on and not damage too much more but at least he enjoyed his favourite snack. There is an understanding that they are part of an ecosystem that is bigger than them and needs to be maintained. The birds and squirrels eat the figs high in the canopy and then fertilize the coffee. The rat snakes that slither along the floor of the forest are harmless to humans but good for stopping the rodent and small mammal population from getting out of hand. Much of their work is that of stewardship and observation… meticulous note making and small necessary course corrections. That said, there are some bigger actions to be taken. This year they installed irrigation systems so that they could keep their robusta watered during the hotter months (which are getting ever hotter and longer). Even these bigger interventions are ones to maintain a robust ecosystem and insure its sustainability.

As part of this larger ecosystem, Pranoy is primarily responsible for the processing on the farm. Every day during the harvest he starts by heading up to the yard where they process cherry. There they have ceramic tanks to float and sort cherries, a depulper, a mechanical washer, several long raised drying beds and two large ventilated drying polyhouses. The yard used to extend further, as production used to be much higher back in the 90’s, when not only was the climate more reliable for growing coffee but there was also  a more readily available and abundant workforce. Now, production is more challenging but also more specialised, focusing on producing speciality lots both for the growing Indian specialty market with roasters like Blue Tokai, Quick Brown Fox and Subko, but also for international roasters, like us, Red Bank and Crankhouse in the UK and in the US big names like Verve and Passenger. Pranoy has a bachelors in Biology from University of Sydney and also worked on a farm that specialised in producing fermented products. He also attended Lucia Solis’ fermentation camp in Indonesia and regularly shares ideas with other leading processors like Aulia Kahfi (the producer/processor behind the Sesongot coffee we released earlier this year), Rani Mayasari and of course Lucia herself. He applies a lot of this understanding to his approach to fermentation in coffee and has an analytical approach that leads to exciting and well-executed ideas. While he does use some commercial yeasts occasionally for some lots, on the whole he prefers to use ‘local microbes’ (that is to say, ones that are found in the environment rather than brought in), his reasoning being that they have cultivated such an incredible microbiome on the estate through their farming and practices that they should take advantage of what he calls their “environmental niche” and celebrate it, letting it speak for itself in how the fermentations develop.