A new roastery in Chennai champions Tamil Nadu coffee

Vithai, a new roastery in Chennai, champions coffee from Tamil Nadu, promising aromatic cups of the morning elixir sans chicory-heavy bitterness

Conversations with Viggnesh V over a cup of coffee, quickly turn into an education about brewing, blends, moka pots and biodynamic farming. For someone who did not drink a sip of the beverage until 2015, this consultant is now fluent in coffee-speak. He can talk at length about his travels to obscure, forested hills in Tamil Nadu, and his meetings with coffee farmers there while also going over the process of pouring the perfect cup. “Who knew that great robusta could come from Kanyakumari,” he asks.

Over the course of his journey as a connoisseur, Viggnesh co-founded Davrah Coffee in 2022 — a kiosk-cafe focussing on specialty coffee from the State to ensure that some of the farmers he met during his travels, got their due. Much of the coffee was purchased directly from the estates up in Coorg, Palani, Kodaikanal, Yercaud and Nilgiris, Viggnesh says.

Vithai, his latest venture, is another effort in this direction. This coffee roastery is working with producers to use technology to elevate the quality of coffee at these estates. “Besides the payment directly going to the farmers for the beans, we will also be providing a quality bonus over and above the market value of the coffee. This automatically means that the quality of coffee increases,” he says.

Viggnesh says that though coffee estates might seem like indicators of wealth, coffee farming is not particularly profitable. Through Vithai, Viggnesh says that he has accumulated data that can determine the use of technology to improve soil management and promote organic and sustainability initiatives. This is hence an attempt to preserving great coffee quality while working around the evil that is climate change, he says.

The roastery functioning out of a small space inside Tuscan Table, a cafe in RA Puram, houses a top-notch coffee roaster that uses UV light to evenly roast the beans. Viggnesh hoists a bucket of green beans from Balmaadi Estate in the Nilgiris, and pours out a small batch for his morning roast. “These were grown in a farm that also grew avocados, oranges, cardamom, peppers, vanilla and kadukkai (myrobalan),” he says. A sniff of the raw beans proves that coffee seeds can indeed smell like fruit and flowers. Decoction is after all, bean juice. However, when the roasting is complete on this new machine, a familiar aroma of a full body coffee takes over. All that is left to do is pour a cup.

Vithai intends to be an entirely Tamil brand. “The logo has manjal and kungumam with a hand holding a coffee plant. The coffee will be sold in a manja pai (yellow bag) to ensure that we do not use plastic packets,” he says.

Viggnesh adds that he is only roasting in small batches and all of the coffee is sent by India Post. The new beans, partnerships with farmers, roasting style and grinds, today are all engaging experiments. “No two cups of coffee here are ever alike,” he says.