Until the 17th century, Arab merchants kept a tight monopoly on coffee by exporting only roasted or baked beans that could never sprout. According to legend, the Indian Sufi Baba Budan broke it on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, smuggling seven raw coffee seeds strapped to his chest. He planted them in the hills of Chikmagalur in present day Karnataka, whose altitude, soil, and shade suited arabica, and the range was later named the Baba Budangiri Hills in his honor. By the early 1600s coffee was recorded at the Mughal court, and travelers described coffee houses in Shahjahanabad, today’s Old Delhi.

The Dutch East India Company took note but focused on Java, and in the 1720s a Dutch chaplain in Cochin wrote that Indian coffee grew in pleasure gardens but lacked the refined taste of mocha. The British built commercial plantations in Coorg in the late 1700s, making coffee widely available in South India. Locals adapted it to a dairy heavy diet with a strong, dark brew: plantation A washed arabica or peaberry, blended with 10 to 20 percent chicory, sweetened with jaggery, honey, or later white sugar, and dripped through a stacked stainless steel filter into a thick decoction.

• Seven is a sacred number in Islam, the same count as Baba Budan’s smuggled seeds.
• A peaberry forms when only one seed develops in the cherry, yielding a small, round, denser bean.
• The Coffee Board of India promoted chicory during the Great Depression and World War II to stretch supplies.
• A pressing disc compacts the grounds in the upper cup so boiling water seeps through slowly and extracts heavy oils.
• The finished coffee is poured back and forth between a steel tumbler and a dabarah saucer to cool it and whip up froth.