MSP Coffee

The MSP Coffee story is one of India's great coffee dynasties, spanning five generations and over a century of unbroken dedication to the Shevaroy Hills of Tamil Nadu. It begins in the 1920s when MSP Senthikumar Nadar - a man of considerable enterprise and vision - migrated from a small town in southern Tamil Nadu to the cool, mist-covered heights of Yercaud and began trading coffee, cardamom, and spices. From these humble commercial beginnings, he recognised what the land was capable of and began planting. The hills responded generously, and a legacy was born.

His son expanded the business beyond Tamil Nadu, establishing trading relationships across Karnataka and Kerala. His grandson MSP Rajes took the enterprise to a different scale entirely, growing the plantation holdings to over 3,000 acres and establishing Hill Tiller & Co - which became India's largest coffee exporter, a position it held for more than three consecutive decades. It was under Rajes that MSP Coffee became not just a farming operation but a national institution, synonymous with the reliability, quality, and quiet ambition of Indian coffee at its best. The company earned a reputation for consistency that opened doors across the global commodity and specialty markets simultaneously.

Today, the fourth and fifth generations of the Rajes family operate nine farms spanning more than 1,000 acres at elevations of 4,300–5,000 feet - among the highest in Tamil Nadu - in the ancient bauxite-rich soils of the Shevaroy Hills. The combination of high altitude, acidic soil, cool temperatures, and a canopy of mixed indigenous shade trees creates conditions of exceptional quality for Arabica cultivation. Varieties grown here include the prized Selection 9, the distinctive Hawaiian Red Caturra, and the newly popularised Chandragiri - each processed with a precision that reflects five generations of accumulated expertise. Their Gowri Estate won the "Best Arabica Coffee in India" award in 2017, confirming what the family had long known about the extraordinary potential of their land.

What sets MSP Coffee apart in the contemporary Indian specialty landscape is its rare combination of scale and quality. At their size - nine farms, hundreds of acres, export relationships across dozens of countries - maintaining the meticulous attention to detail required for specialty-grade production is a genuine organisational achievement. The family has invested in cupping labs, trained their own Q-graders, and introduced lot-by-lot separation and traceability systems that allow roasters to source with precision and confidence. For El Bueno, MSP Coffee is the foundation upon which our Tamil Nadu offering is built: a family, a place, and a coffee culture that represent the very best of what five generations of devotion to a single craft can produce.