016 - Kerehaklu

We anticipate that this coffee will be roasted for 2025 season subscribers the week of July 14, 2025 with public release to follow. 

The seventh coffee of our 2025 season comes from Chikmagalur, India, where Ajoy Thipaiah and his son Pranoy produce coffee under dense forest canopy at Kerehaklu estate. This washed Selection 9 microlot was processed using a fermentation inoculated with a mosto cultured from the farm's microflora and presents tropical and tangy with complex acidity and sweetness.

From Christopher: "While perhaps better known for its tea or spices, India's stature as a coffee producing country continues to grow—not for producing Robusta and Monsooned Malabar, but rather high-quality specialty Arabica. About a five hour drive west of Bangalore, toward the Arabian Sea, a group of coffee growers in Chikmagalur produce coffee that has, in recent years, caught the attention of quality-minded roasters in the U.S. and Europe: producers like Kerehaklu, who only began to focus on specialty coffee in 2019.

"After our collaboration for AVIARY#XX2, Pranoy and I were eager to find a new coffee to release under the Aviary moniker, so in February I boarded a plane to visit India for the first time.

"Kerehaklu doesn't seem like a place where high-quality coffee should grow; sitting at modest elevations of just 1100 meters above sea level at the foothills of the Mullayanagiri range in Southern India, temperatures in Chikmagalur routinely surpass 30ºC—far above the ideal temperatures for growing Arabica. Yet under the forest there, temperatures remain cool and comfortable for both humans and coffee.

"Agroforestry and Participatory Forest Management models of production are of particular interest to me (Aviary's earliest releases, from Finca Esperanza and Finca San Jerónimo Miramar exemplify this type of cultivation). Aroforestry can not only function to preserve local biodiversity but also sequester carbon and improve farmer incomes through diversification of products. But directly, as at Kerehaklu, agroforestry can also improve quality—by reducing temperatures, mulching the soil, and protecting from erosion of topsoil during heavy rains (such as during the monsoon season in India).

"As Pranoy wrote in a guest piece for my blog as a companion to this release, the focus at Kerehaklu is on the soil. the Thipaiah family converted the farm to a fully-organic and biological farm two decades ago and as a result, the biodiversity of the farm has grown. To honor and harness their native microflora, Pranoy made the decision to eschew all commercial inoculants for 2025, instead culturing 'mostos' that began with coffee cherry pulp, sugar and botanical materials collected from around the farm such as lime leaf, fig leaf and coffee blossoms. Overtime, these were fed with coffee cherry juice and pulp, creating distinct populations of microorganisms in each that Pranoy used as starters for fermenting coffee.

"Among its cultivars of Arabica, Kerehaklu grows Selection 9—a cultivar descended from an Ethiopian variety, Tafarikela (or sometimes Geisha and S.12 Kaffa), crossed with Hibrido de Timor—which was developed in India and has proven to be widely-adaptable with exceptional cup quality.

"For 2025, I wanted to continue to explore the intersection of plant genetics with human interventions and asked Pranoy to create a lot using SLN 9 for Aviary.

"During my visit, we cupped through three tables of samples from Kerehaklu's peak Arabica production, blind—in each set, I selected as my favorite coffees that turned out to be SLN 9 washed coffees processed using a method that Pranoy has been refining for Kerehaklu. One of those coffees, Lot E, became AVIARY#016 and presents in the cup with tangy, tropical, bright lactic-citric acidity and notes of tamarind, apricot, red apple and orange."

Read Pranoy's piece about India's coffee production, "We’ve been here all along."