For most of the last century, "Indian coffee" meant the Western Ghats — Chikmagalur, Coorg, the Baba Budan hills. Koraput changes that map.
Freshly roasted by Gray Cup, our roasting partner — ships across India.
Geography
Koraput district sits in the southern Eastern Ghats of Odisha, bordering Andhra Pradesh. The coffee-growing pockets — Pottangi, Semiliguda, Dasmantpur, Lamtaput — lie on plateau and hill slopes between roughly 900 and 1,200 m, with a few lots higher. The Eastern Ghats are older, more eroded and lower than the Western Ghats, with a shorter, sharper monsoon.
The farms
Koraput coffee is overwhelmingly smallholder and tribal-grown, often on land under a acre or two, frequently intercropped with pepper, banana and forest shade trees. Development agencies and farmer foundations have organised much of the recent planting and wet-milling infrastructure. This is closer to the East African smallholder model than to the Indian estate model.
Varieties
The workhorse is S795, a rust-tolerant Indian selection with a balanced, nutty profile. Chandragiri brings more sweetness and body. HSD (Hibrido de Timor) lots give a cleaner, more citric, more "washed-Ethiopia" character and are increasingly kept separate as specialty micro-lots.
Processing
Because the milling is new, Koraput has skipped straight to processing diversity: fully washed, natural (whole cherry dried on raised beds for 25–30 days), honey/pulped-natural, and small anaerobic-fermentation experiments. Washed lots are clean with cocoa, brown sugar and mild citrus; naturals push dark cherry and chocolate.
Try it as roasted coffee
Or source it green
Koraput green beans are graded A–AAA plus specialty designations, with export lots from named partner farms:
Roasters wanting these lots roasted to profile and delivered can also work with Gray Cup, which sources directly from the same Koraput farms.
Why it matters
Koraput gives Indian coffee something it was short on: a young, traceable, smallholder origin with real processing variety and lots still cheap enough to experiment with. That is exactly the profile buyers look for before an origin gets "discovered".