India Hulikere Estate

This is the third time we've bought and roasted the mild and smoothly rich coffee from Hulikere Estate. The farm is owned and run by the couple Shreedev & Sushmita Hulikere in the Baba Budan Giri Hills (located in the Chikkamagaluru district of the Karnataka region). The farm is biodiversity-friendly; it became completely chemical-free 10 years ago and has since become a home to numerous birds and small mammals from the nearby Bhadra State forest. All the coffee trees grow in the shade of native trees, along with pepper, ginger, avocado and citrus fruits, among others.

The coffee is a blend of 50% fully washed and 50% natural and has a soft, full-bodied and mild character, completely without acidity! The aftertaste has a hint of spiciness and sweet chocolate.

TOLD BY THE OWNER SHREEDEV HULIKERE

To be able to trace one’s history for 5 generations in the same area and having aspirations that my progeny continues to live & thrive on the very same lands gives me a great sense of satisfaction & belonging.
I belong to the Third generation of a coffee grower family, who is privileged to have lived on the estate, in the midst of the verdant Western Ghats of South West India, all my life. I have enjoyed working professionally for the past 30 years on the lands and am still being taught important life lessons from her, my Coffee Plant!

Being environmentally positive is a given on my gardens with the highest level of priority given to be welcoming & tolerant of the many co-habitants of our lands. Labour, Staff & Family are educated about the importance & role played by each habitant and how to, joyously, co-exist with them. 204 varieties of birds, numerous ungulates and the 3 major predators of the area; the Dhole, Leopard and The Tiger have all been documented on our farms. Efforts are specifically made to ensure that animals have a safe haven & free passage through our shared gardens.

The workers living & working on the gardens are people I’ve grown up with and some of whom have been with us 3 generations! They are treated more as relatives than as farmhands, with all of us coming together to celebrate festivals & important milestones in each others’ families. We also employ tribal ladies who come in from their homes, work through the day and return in the evenings.
To help our employees with their day-to-day travails is our look out and is well appreciated by them. Periodic educational, awareness & health camps are conducted for the benefit of my workers. The workers are encouraged to act as a meaningful communicator between my plants & I.

There is a no-use-at-all policy of any chemical that has been banned by ANY organisation or country. Further the contents of all material used is judiciously probed to ensure nothing that can cause even an iota of harm to my lands! Fertilizers & any material used on the gardens are carefully procured from the most reputed companies of long standing & a reputed worldwide presence.

My coffees are harvested with a lot of attention and care given to the optimum level of maturity so as to get the right flavours to accentuate. Post harvest, the fruit is processed in many different ways including the fully washed sun dried and the pulp-ferment-wash method.honey process) and sun dried method.
Some of the washed coffees are selectively tray raised and most coffees are slow dried, under regulated shade, on barbeque tiled yards where they are uniformly laid out in the required thickness & gently leg raked.
Moisture content is meticulously recorded using both modern, calibrated moisture meters as well as the very dependable traditional methods.
The coffees, once optimally dry are packed in clean jute gunny bags and transported to our family owned, certified coffee mill that’s steeped in history and located in the heart of Chikkamagaluru town.

My coffees are, proudly, traceable right from plant to cup.