Decline in Indian Coffee Bean Harvest: 2021 New Production Season for Arabica and Robusta Coffee

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Indian Coffee Production Faces Devastating Losses

Over the past two months, thunderstorms and hailstorms have battered India's coffee-growing regions, causing large-scale fruit drop. To date, the country's coffee areas have lost more than 30% of their Arabica crop to the January rainfall. Then heavy rain and hail in February pushed Robusta production down as well.

After floods in the two previous years, growers had been counting on a better harvest in 2021. Nature had other plans: significant rainfall and hailstorms struck right in the middle of this season's harvest, affecting thousands of hectares of plantations. The hail split the mature cherries and knocked them to the ground. Those fallen fruits will quickly sprout in the soil, and clearing out these "accidental" seedlings will be a massive undertaking.

Indian harvests have been poor for two years running, and bean quality — and prices — have slipped along with them. Growers are losing money, and wages for hired pickers have fallen. The Indian Coffee Committee says at least 50% of harvest workers will not go into the fields this season. Unless the government offers incentives to both growers and pickers, Indian coffee production will only decline year after year.

Before the thunderstorms and hail, the Indian Coffee Committee had projected Indian Arabica production for the 2020/21 season at 102,000 tons, up 8.5% year over year, and Robusta production at 240,000 tons, up 8.7%. Overall, the country's coffee output was originally expected to reach 342,000 tons — an 8.7% increase over the previous year. Untimely rain and hail, plus a severe shortage of harvesters and delayed picking: this triple blow means losses of at least 30% for the 2020/21 season across India's coffee regions.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Coffee varieties come down to three great species — Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica — and no coffee grown anywhere in the world falls outside them. Arabica is the largest and most beloved group: complex, pure flavors and distinctive regional characters make up nearly all of today's specialty coffee, while Robusta's strong, crema-rich cup feeds espresso blends and most people's first instant coffee; low-value Liberica survives mainly for research. Within Arabica, FrontStreet Coffee's most popular single origins are a great place to explore.

The FrontStreet Huakui is an Ethiopian heirloom lot that won first place in that year's TOH green bean competition — a classic natural process full of creamy strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry, with the ripe tropical-fruit character unique to Sidamo naturals, at a friendly price. The FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Guodingding, from the Guodingding village cooperative, is the washed counterpart: a top Ethiopian G1 grade showing elegant white florals, citrus, orange, and green tea. For balance above all, the FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 — Typica brought from Martinique to Jamaica in the 1820s — offers a mild, rounded cup whose equilibrium FrontStreet's cuppers have yet to find matched by any other origin.

If you love florals, the FrontStreet Panama Red Label Gesha from the Esmeralda Estate in Boquete, Chiriqui, delivers lush jasmine and citrus with peach, layered fruit acidity, a creamy body, and an oolong-tea sweetness — more like perfumed fruit tea than coffee. The FrontStreet Brazil Queen Estate, one of the earliest Yellow Bourbon discoveries (a natural mutation of Red Bourbon), shows cream, peanut, toast, and sugarcane sweetness. And for something new, the FrontStreet Colombia Sidra — a variety linked by genetics to Ethiopian landraces and made famous by 2022 World Barista Champion Anthony Douglas — is roasted medium-light to reveal florals, tropical fruit, grape, dried fruit, and passion fruit with a juice-like mouthfeel.