Filter coffee, the South Indian way

Two vessels and a pour

Ask for filter coffee almost anywhere in South India and it comes as a pair: a tall tumbler standing in a wide, low bowl called the davara. The two belong together. The coffee usually reaches you too hot to drink, and the davara is how you fix that, tipping the coffee from one vessel into the other and back again until it is cool enough to sip and crowned with froth.

Older sets were often made of brass, and most you will see today are stainless steel. Watch a regular at a busy counter and the pour turns into a small performance: the tumbler lifted high, a long ribbon of coffee falling into the davara, then back again. It is practical, because moving the coffee between the two vessels cools it and works air into it. It is also a pause, a few seconds that belong to you before the day carries on.

Seven seeds and a legend

Almost every account of coffee in India begins with a story, and it is best told as one. Baba Budan, a Sufi saint, is said to have passed through the Yemeni port of Mocha on his way home from the hajj. Arabia guarded its coffee closely at the time, letting beans leave only once they had been roasted or baked so they could not be planted elsewhere. The legend says he hid seven raw seeds, in his beard according to one popular telling, and carried them home to the hills of Chikkamagaluru in present-day Karnataka.

The Coffee Board of India tells the story too, describing seven seeds of Mocha planted in the courtyard of his hermitage on the hills now known as the Baba Budan Giris. The Board dates the planting to around 1600, while other tellings place it closer to 1670. However it happened, the plants stayed a garden curiosity for a long time, spreading slowly as backyard plantings. Commercial plantations only began in the eighteenth century, and coffee is still grown along the Western Ghats in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

A young ritual that travelled far

For a habit that feels ancient, filter coffee is surprisingly young. Coffee grew in South India for generations before most people here drank it. As an everyday drink it took hold around the turn of the twentieth century, especially in and around Madras, now Chennai. The historian A. R. Venkatachalapathy, reading Tamil print from the period, found references to coffee cropping up in the 1920s and multiplying through the 1930s. It was a habit of the modernising middle class, spread through homes and through coffee hotels, which his work shows were also places where caste decided who was served.

From there it settled across the South, where it is now the drink many people reach for first, fondly called kaapi. The Coffee Board, with its head office in Bengaluru, promotes coffee drinking through India Coffee Houses of its own. We have written separately about coffee houses and the conversations they hold.

Decoction and the question of chicory

At the heart of filter coffee is the decoction, a strong, concentrated brew made in a filter of two stacked metal cups. Finely ground coffee goes into the upper cup, whose base is pierced with small holes. A perforated disc, known in Tamil as the kodai, or umbrella, sits over the grounds, and boiling water is poured on top. The kodai slows the water on its way through the coffee, so what gathers in the lower cup, drop by drop, is dark and intense.

The decoction is then mixed with hot milk and sugar to taste, which is why filter coffee can be adjusted cup by cup: more decoction for a stronger coffee, more milk for a lighter one. If you would like to try it at home, we have a separate guide on how to make filter coffee.

Many South Indian blends include chicory, the dried and roasted root of a Mediterranean plant. Blending it into coffee was first popularised in France and spread through Europe and its colonies, South India among them. It made coffee more affordable, and it gives the cup a deeper flavour and colour that stands up well to milk and sugar. Blends today vary widely, from about 10 to 40 per cent chicory.

Not everyone approved. Early on, some households prized pure coffee and treated chicory as an adulterant, partly because it was sometimes added without the buyer knowing. Over time it won wide acceptance, and today the choice between a pure coffee and a chicory blend, with its slight bitterness, is a matter of taste.

Bengaluru, the darshini and the by-two

Bengaluru gave filter coffee one of its liveliest stages: the darshini, a format a Deccan Herald column on the city's coffee culture calls unique to Bengaluru. The kitchen and counter sit on one side, where you can catch a darshan, a glimpse, of everything being made and served. You stand on the other side to eat and drink, having bought a coupon from the cashier first. The coffee counter usually faces the street, so drinkers spill out onto the footpath from early morning, when walkers, office-goers and auto drivers stop by, until late at night, for as long as the decoction and milk hold out.

Darshinis also gave the city its own coffee shorthand, built on easy trust between regulars and the person behind the counter. A few of the orders the column records:

• By-two: short for one-by-two, a single coffee divided between two cups.
• By-three: usually two coffees shared among three.
• Less and plus: without sugar, or with it.
• Strong and light: more decoction and less milk, or the other way round.
• Black: the decoction taken on its own.

A by-two is the smallest kind of hospitality: one coffee, two cups, and a reason to stand together a little longer.

The pause worth keeping

The by-two says something about filter coffee that a recipe cannot. It is rarely just a drink. It is a reason to stop, a small thing to share and an excuse to talk, whether you are splitting a cup with a colleague at a counter or making one for someone at home.

That pause is close to the heart of what we hope to make room for at Annara. You can read more about how we think of filter coffee and the pause. Wherever you drink yours, at a busy counter or at the kitchen table, we hope you take a moment over the pour.