18 Nov 2021 | 04:38am IST
Ohh for a cup of coffee
Coffee that most stimulating of drinks is making its mark in Goa and the fact that one of top brands in the world of coffee in India is Goan should make everyone excited
Team Café
It originated in
Ethiopia all
those years ago.
According to one legend, ancestors of today’s Oromo people in a region of Jimma
in Ethiopia were the first to recognize the energizing effect of the coffee
plant. However, no direct evidence has been found earlier than the 15th century
indicating who among the African populations used it as a stimulant, or where
coffee was first cultivated. The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian
goatherd who discovered the stimulating effect of coffee when he noticed how
excited his goats became after eating the beans from a coffee plant, did not
appear in writing until 1671 and is probably apocryphal. Over the years it has
gathered its fans from all over the world. The first plants were planted in
Madras and it has spread in popularity all over the south of India. And now it
seems to be spreading in popularity in Goa too.
Shanti Gopalan is a regular visitor to Goa
from Mumbai for over twenty years. A advertising professional, she likes her
coffee. Filter coffee to be precise. Long hours spent creating artworks for
clients can make people very tired. Filter coffee keeps her up and sharp. With
coffee now increasingly available her visits to the state are no longer fraught
with anxiety if she will be able to get her fix.
Over the past few years, there has been a
mushrooming of café’s that specialize in serving coffee. Leela Matkar of Coffee
House, Candolim has been in the business for a while and has witnessed a change
in taste. She said the boom in tourism meant a lot of domestic tourists
especially from the south wee coming into her coffee house. Leela said “They
love the fresh ground coffee and we use south Indian coffee beans. It’s mostly
domestic visitors but yes we have locals too. It is usually the younger
generation and the middle aged ones who come in. They prefer Cappuccino. I
would like to say that because we serve filter coffee we get a lot of customers
who are from South India. Some of them tell us that they have traveled some
distance in Goa to come over to have our filter coffee. The love for coffee is
steadily growing.” She said they were shut during the monsoons because of not
too many people visiting them but for the rest of the year they were busy.
Anant Singh who runs Babka Goa, an outlet in Anjuna said it was
usually those between the age of 25-40 who frequented his outlet. The coffee
culture he said was growing in the state with people now getting increasingly
aware and were getting curious as to where it was being grown and people were
now open to trying more options. He said “ I see a lot of the young crowd
interested in different coffees like the filter drip coffee. I get customers
from all over the country. During the monsoons I had a lot of people from
Mumbai and Bengaluru. Locals like I said are coming and that trend will increase.”
Interestingly for Goa a local coffee bistro decided it wanted
its own coffee brand. Carlos Noronha Jr of Caravela Café and Bistro based in
Panjim went ahead to roast and blend their own signature into coffee that saw
the birth of Latin Quarter Coffee in 2019. The CEO of the company said “ We
source from a single estate so that the taste does not differ. We blend the
single light roast with robusta, giving a nice aromatic flavour, which in our
experience suits the Indian palette the best. We have two variants of medium to
dark roast and one light roast as well.” And now it is placed in ten top ten
coffee brands in the country. Not a bad start for a company that decided to go
ahead with its coffee brand only in 2019. Carlos said it felt fantastic to be in
such an illustrious list and he hoped this would mark the growth of the drink
in the state. He said around 70-75 percent of consumers in the state were young
and between the age of 20-40. People he said drank it for various reasons and
it was obvious coffee was growing in popularity.
That
should leave us all with a very pleasant feeling.
