Understory

In parts of India’s Western Ghats, a mountain range along the country’s southwest coast, coffee doesn’t grow in neat, open rows under full sun. It grows under shade, in a living landscape of trees, plants, birds, insects, and animals moving through the land around it. Pepper vines climb trees. Fruit grows beside coffee. Monkeys and wild boar pass through the farm. Sometimes leopards. Sometimes elephants.

The idea of forested coffee is a less familiar story in specialty coffee, and India itself is a less familiar origin for a lot of drinkers. That’s where Understory comes from: the life beneath the canopy, the relationships around the coffee, and the parts of the story that are easy to miss from above.

The two coffees we’re sharing come from different expressions of that world. One comes from Hardoor Giri Estate through KaadKaapi, a collective working with farmers to keep forest-friendly coffee viable. The other comes from Ratnagiri Estate, one of India’s leading specialty farms, where a shaded growing environment meets unusually precise processing.

Here, coffee is part of the system, not the whole story. In the cup, that layered world comes through as fruit, texture, sweetness, and depth.

Sean Stewart

Folk Founder and Q Grader