Coorg Coffee Country

Kodagu, still widely called Coorg, is a hill district in southern Karnataka where coffee grows under a canopy of taller trees rather than in open rows. Both arabica and robusta are planted, often interleaved with pepper vines trained up the shade trees and cardamom underneath, so a walk through a plantation smells of several crops at once. Flowering happens a few days after the first rains and lasts barely a week; picking runs from late in the year into the early months of the next. Many estates take guests in the farmhouse, which is the usual way to see the drying yards, the pulping sheds and the hand sorting.

What you actually see

• Shade-grown blocks - coffee under tall trees, with pepper vines climbing the same trunks.
• Drying yards - beans spread across concrete and raked through the day during the picking season.
• Pulping and sorting sheds - the wet processing that happens within hours of the cherries coming in.
• Estate walks - paths through the plantation, usually with someone explaining the crop cycle as you go.

When to go

Picking runs from around November to February, which is also the dry, cool season and the best time to be here. The flowering, triggered by early rains in March or April, is brief and hard to predict. The monsoon from June to September is very heavy in Kodagu, with leeches on the paths and roads that wash out.

Honest expectations

Getting there is a long, winding drive that leaves plenty of people carsick. Plantation stays range from genuine working farms to resorts offering a token coffee walk, and prices have risen sharply. Outside the picking months there is little processing to watch. Weekends bring heavy traffic up from Bengaluru on roads never built for it.

Nearby

Madikeri town, the Dubare elephant camp on the Kaveri and Abbey Falls are the usual short trips.