Ratnagiri Estate (Roaster's Choice) • India

This is our fourth year offering coffee from producers Ashok and Divya Patre of Ratnagiri Estate in India via Osito Coffee. The Patre family has stewarded their land for nearly a century and have become widely known in the coffee industry for their precise attention to detail and a very strong focus on coffee innovation. Over the course of the last half-decade, Indian specialty coffee has become exponentially more popular for roasters in the western hemisphere. This is in a large part due to a greater focus from coffee importers and exporters on bringing India’s coffees to US and European markets, as well as farms like Ratnagiri growing and processing exceptional coffees. For this lot, coffee cherries were fermented with Ratnagiri’s lab isolated microbes in sealed, stainless steel, oxygen free tanks (called bio-fermenters) for 36 hours. The coffee was then pulped and subsequently went through a thermal shock process. This process involves heating the coffee to a high temperature (in this case 100-113 degrees Fahrenheit) for 20 minutes, and then being rapidly cooled (to near zero degrees Fahrenheit!) in the bio-fermenters glycol cooling system for 20-25 minutes. Immediately after, the coffee is placed on raised beds and dried for 25 days. This coffee was selected by Commonplace Coffee’s Head of Coffee, Vikki Harris, to continue highlighting the exceptional experimentation being conducted at Ratnagiri Estate. This coffee is vibrant, plush, and balanced; with notes of assorted fruits like cherry, berries, lime, grapes, and cantaloupe; as well as the sweet earthiness that specialty Indian coffees are so well known for.