Balanoor Plantations

High on the slopes of the Sahyadri ranges in the Western Ghats, in Chikmagalur, lies Balanoor Plantations — currently run by Mr. Ashok Kuriyan and his son Rohan, the fourth and fifth generations of the Kuriyan family to steward this land. Their flagship estate, Merthi Subhagudigy (M.S. Estate), was originally a British-era plantation before the Kuriyan family took it over in 1935. Since then, it's built a reputation strong enough to feature regularly in the lineups of some of the world's most respected coffee roasteries.

Great coffee here starts well before harvest. Balanoor grows its coffee under the canopy of naturally occurring jungle trees, which are deliberately preserved rather than cleared — a practice that not only provides shade but also builds up the soil's micro-organism activity, nourishing the coffee plants throughout their growth cycle. Their entire Arabica plantation is Rainforest Alliance certified, and they maintain a 50-acre IMO-certified organic Arabica plantation alongside it. Sustainability runs through the estate's infrastructure too, with effluent treatment tanks and check dams built to protect the surrounding ecology.

That commitment extends to the people who work the land. Balanoor provides housing and education benefits for its workers, and has recently remodelled worker housing to be larger and more comfortable for families living on the estate.

At harvest, coffee undergoes multiple rounds of selective picking before being processed using a range of innovative and experimental techniques. To protect quality and traceability all the way to dispatch, Balanoor cures its own coffee at Kotordie Coffee Curing Works, timing the curing just before shipment so the green coffee stays fresher for longer. The curing process runs through seven distinct sorting stages: a de-stoner removes foreign matter, a peeler-polisher and grading machine sort by size, a gravity separator removes underweight beans, two rounds of camera sorting catch discoloured beans, and — as a final check — two twelve-person teams hand-garble every batch, manually picking out spotted, cut, or borer-affected beans.

It's this level of care — from shade-grown trees to seven stages of sorting — that goes into every lot we source from Balanoor, including our Fermented Washed – Chandragiri and Fermented Washed – BBTC coffees.