South Indian Coffee Beans | Araku Valley | SLN5 Rumi Sultan/Sultan Rumei

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation: India's Smallholders and a Precious, Low-Yield Variety

Grown without pesticides in untouched forest.

Origin: Araku Valley, Eastern Ghats, South India

Altitude of the tribal community's farms: 1,100 meters above sea level

Variety: SLN5 (Rume Sudan)

Harvest: the 2017 season

The Rume Sudan cultivar

It opens with a distinct yet gentle fruit acidity, which makes it unusual among Indian specialty coffees; most of them lean toward a mellow, rounded aroma with little acidity. That character makes it a natural fit for medium and dark roasting, which keeps some of the fruit acidity while building the body into something fuller and more mellow.

Flavor Profile

Sweet aromas of caramel and honey.

An aftertaste of dark chocolate, peach, and vanilla.

Background Story

In 1965, after the Andhra Pradesh Girijan Cooperative Corporation (GCC) was established, the Indian Coffee Board entrusted GCC with promoting coffee cultivation and related agricultural improvements. Working alongside the Girijan Coop Plantation Development Corporation (GCPDC), GCC began guiding tribal farmers in Araku through coffee growing and toxin-free farming practices.

Coffee cultivation now gives roughly 10,000 tribal families in the Araku region a stable income. Farmers who took up coffee have moved away from Podu, the traditional and ecologically destructive slash-and-burn method that involved cutting or burning large numbers of trees on mountain slopes. Today the Araku Valley has been transformed on a large scale into a coffee-growing region. At altitudes of 900-1100 meters, growers here cultivate SLN5, a rare variety found only in India. The acidic components in the soil give Araku coffee its distinctive quality and flavor.

Rume Sudan

Rume Sudan is one of the few varieties today that can stand alongside the extraordinarily beautiful Geisha. More than 70 years ago, botanists found Rume Sudan growing wild in the coffee forests of the Boma Plateau in southeastern Sudan, near the borders with southwestern Ethiopia and northern Kenya. It shows resistance to coffee anthracnose and carries delicious genetic traits, but its yield is too low, which is why farmers have long been reluctant to plant it. In recent years it has been used widely to improve the flavor of Catimor and Sarchimor varieties in Central and South America, and has also been crossed with Caturra to boost disease resistance while adding those desirable flavor genes.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Anyone chasing a rounded, balanced cup is usually well served by medium roast, and this is where FrontStreet Coffee's medium-roast range begins. FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate comes from Brazil, the world's largest coffee-producing country, and is a distinctive Yellow Bourbon. Medium roasting draws out aromas and sweetness of creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread, and sugarcane, leaving a clean, gently sweet cup that works for pour-over as well as moka pot and espresso machine.

For a sweeter medium roast, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy is a fruit-forward blend that unites two well-known regions of Central and South America: a honey-processed coffee from Costa Rica and a washed Geisha from Panama. A medium roast lets it show both orange-blossom honey notes and a round sweetness, and it suits cold brew, pour-over, and espresso.

Two more options complete the range. FrontStreet Coffee's 2013 Natural Typica, a Chinese specialty representative, carries the classic Yunnan small-bean character; roasted medium, it keeps gentle notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot. FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1, a Typica grown in the Blue Mountains, is also roasted medium, so its acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body fuse into an elegant whole with chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel.