Is Coffee Grown in India? What Are the Flavor and Texture of India's Unique Monsoon Malabar Coffee?

Is Coffee Grown in India? The Story of Monsoon Malabar

Yes — and India produces one of the most unusual coffees in the world. Indian coffee is beloved by enthusiasts largely because of a distinctive post-harvest treatment known as "monsooning." The story begins centuries ago: when coffee traveled to Europe by sailing ship, the voyage took several months. In the ship's hold, exposed to intense humidity and salt air, the green beans changed — from deep green to a peculiar pale yellow, losing nearly all their fruity acidity and developing strong nutty, grainy flavors, almost like genmaicha tea. Full-bodied and mellow, this "aged" coffee became so popular in Northern Europe that consumers grew accustomed to it.

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and steamships cut the journey to a fraction of the time, beans arrived fresh and green — and customers complained that Indian coffee had "lost its flavor." Orders dropped sharply. Indian exporters traced the problem to the missing voyage and set out to reproduce it deliberately. They looked to the salty, humid winds that the Indian Ocean sends up the Malabar coast of southwestern India from late May through September, and after repeated experiments they succeeded in creating a golden, low-acidity coffee they named Monsoon Coffee — wind-aged coffee.

How the Monsooning Process Works

Every year, when the monsoon arrives in southwestern India in May and June, producers spread selected raw beans in well-ventilated, open-sided curing houses, in layers about 12–20 centimeters thick, where they rest for 5 days. Workers rake the beans repeatedly so that every bean contacts the extremely humid air. The beans are then loosely packed into jute bags and stacked so the monsoon winds can penetrate through them; the bags are repacked and restacked weekly for a total of 7 weeks, until the color and flavor transformation is complete. Finally, the beans are hand-sorted to remove any that were not properly monsooned, bagged, and readied for export. The ideal production window runs from October to February.

During the process the beans swell to nearly twice their original size and turn a yellow-white color — the unmistakable signature of Indian Monsooned Malabar.

Where Indian Coffee Grows

Beyond Karnataka, the country's best-known coffee state, high-quality coffee also grows in Tellichery and Malabar in Kerala in the southwest, and in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu in the southeast (the former Madras Province).

Fine Indian coffee is classified as Arabica plantation coffee, with grades of A, B, C, and T at the top. Monsooned coffee is sold as Monsooned Malabar AA and Monsooned Basanically, and India also produces some peaberry lots.

The industry has its structural problems: bureaucratic control, heavy taxation, and underinvestment. The Indian Coffee Board historically purchased and auctioned the entire crop in bulk, blending coffees together to reach trade volumes — a practice that erased differences between estates and regions and gave quality producers little incentive to pursue distinctive flavor. Reforms attempted from 1992 onward, built around A-grade plantation seeds from several premium growing areas, aimed to give growers a path into the gourmet market, which most of them genuinely wanted.

Origin/Plantation: Malabar Estate

Geographical environment: altitude above 1,000 meters.

Processing method: wind-aged (monsooned) sun-drying.

Flavor characteristics: pronounced sweetness, a thick and oily body, excellent chocolate sweetness, biscuit and fruity sweetness, smooth and delicious, with evenly sized beans.

Brewing Recommendations

Pour-over: Kono dripper, 17 g of coffee, water temperature 83°C, grind size 4 on the Japanese Fuji R440 (medium), water-to-coffee ratio close to 1:13. Technique: bloom with 30 g of water for 30 seconds, pour to 120 g, pause, then resume with a slightly larger flow to 221 g — that is, 30-120-221 — with total extraction time of 1:50 to 2 minutes.

French press: grind size 4, water temperature 88°C.

AeroPress: grind size 4, water temperature 85°C.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Monsooned Malabar's heavy body and low acidity make it a great entry point for drinkers who dislike bright, tangy cups — and FrontStreet Coffee's starter lineup covers the other classic profiles worth exploring. For florals and citrus, try the washed Guodingding (Chelbesa) cooperative lot from Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe region, with jasmine fragrance, lemon acidity, and berry tones, or the natural-processed Sidamo Huakui, a traditional dry-process coffee showing berries, florals, jackfruit, melon, and honey.

If you prefer smooth and balanced over fruity, FrontStreet Coffee's Cerrado Red Bourbon from Brazil delivers typical cream, peanut, and cocoa notes at an everyday price, while the higher-grown Queen Estate Yellow Bourbon adds sugarcane sweetness to its compound nut aromas of butter, melon seeds, macadamia, and almond — lovely black or with milk. For something bolder, the wet-hulled Lintong Mandheling and the triple-hand-sorted, machine-sorted PWN Golden Mandheling from Indonesia offer herbal, spicy depth with clearer wood and caramel notes and virtually no acidity — a natural next step for any Monsooned Malabar fan.