Rooting for Robusta: LastHouse Coffee

Naina and Binny at the coffee farm
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

It is rare to see a speciality coffee shop that celebrates robusta. With LastHouse Coffee: By The Lake at Hyderabad’s Jubilee Hills, founder Naina Polavarapu aims to change this with the city’s first coffee shop championing robusta beans. With cosy wooden sofas indoor, and outdoor seating under an old mango tree,

the 50-seater cafe is set beside Durgam Cheruvu lake. Naina, an architect-turned-coffee entrepreneur quit her job as an architect in New York City in 2019 to work with her family’s coffee farm, Sunrise Estates, in the Western Ghat of Karnataka. The idea behind opening a coffee shop in Hyderabad, she says, was to pave way for popularising coffee from robusta beans.

Why robusta?

Robusta tends to be an undervalued bean — in a country often dismissed as harsh — in comparison to the Arabica variant hat is prized by speciality coffee shops. This bean is robust in the sense that it is relatively inexpensive to cultivate, can be grown at lower altitudes and is resilient because its higher caffeine content acts as a natural pest repellent. Also, compared to Arabica, it is more resistant to erratic weather conditions and warm temperatures; a significant feature when talking about climate change.

Robusta, like Arabica, when treated properly too can be adapted to any brewing process like pour over, French press, aero press or syphon and also a cup of cappuccino, latte or a plain Americano. According to Naina, any drip-based method like pour-over is best suited for robusta.

Apart from taking care of the plantation as a coffee estate owner, Naina is also trying different processing methods. She explains, “For this year’s fermentation, we are experimenting with anaerobic naturals, honey pulped, koji fermentation, fermented washed, hydro honey, toddy fermentation etc.”  The fermentation process is one of the interventions that seek to improve robusta’s market profile.

Naina’s coffee trail

Serving coffee aside, Naina aims to encourage robusta farming and consumption by making the farmers’ presence felt at all stages of the coffee supply chain. On the robusta journey for two years, she has been working on farms and travelling across India to talk to farmers, roasters and brewers to understand coffee better.

Her narrative revolves around why the robusta bean, which is exported, has never been central to India’s specialty coffee movement. “No estate owner could tell me why robusta is not sold as specialty coffee. The more I started taking an interest in the crop, the more I discovered. I saw robusta produce cherries much more quickly than Arabica and yield more crops per tree. Even then, the price was a disadvantage. Since no one cared for robusta, the price for this bean never went up.”

LastHouse Coffee does its own roasting and brewing, showcasing the best of Indian robusta — grown, picked, processed, and roasted with care. Helping them to curate it all is Binny Varghese, also known as the Barista on Bike. “Binny is known in the Indian coffee community for working with farmers as a coffee processing expert, a trainer in coffee-related skills and also a marketing expert,” says Naina.

Binny exlplains why robusta was never the preferred bean for a speciality cuppa. “This is a global trend and not India-specific. The most important factor is that we have always considered Arabica to be better because the beans are delicate and with fruity notes, which is why Arabica has been researched extensively. Robusta never enjoyed that treatment. Because of its high yield, Arabica was looked at as a better coffee mix with a ratio of 80:20 with robusta.“

Naina shares, “At Sunrise Estates at Sakleshpur taluk in Karnataka, we are growing only robusta on 150 acres and expanding to 400 acres by this year-end.” She is presently happy with the response from coffee consumers at LastHouse. When

l I tried a pour-over robusta coffee — drip method, black — I couldn’t tell the difference from a cup of Arabica brew.