Wake up and smell the filter coffee!

As you travel on road across Tamilnadu, at highway rest areas you will notice a sign: “Kumbakonam Degree Coffee.” Or step into a Sangeetha or Saravana Bhavan type of restaurant in any city, and here too you can ask for degree coffee.

What’s special about this coffee? How did it get this unusual label? Why am I most eligible to explain? Will answer the last question first.

My father hails from Kumbakonam, a temple town near Tanjore in Tamilnadu. As a child growing up in Chennai, I have witnessed the elaborate, extraordinary and enchanting process of creating the perfect cup of filter coffee, the recipe for which has been passed down generations.

At our ancestral home in Royapettah, Chennai, Coffee Powder was never part of the grocery list. We made it at home. If we can travel back in time to the mid-1960s (when I was below age 10), you will see my mother and her co-sister (colloquial term for husband’s brother’s wife) getting set to make the powder with a few kilos of green coffee beans.

In the joint family kitchen, usually on a late afternoon, the beans would be roasted on a shallow pan - for a week's use for a family of two brothers, their seven children, their mother and father, a live-in cook, an older cousin who lived with us, and relatives from Tanjore district who will arrive unannounced for a short visit but stay for long. No one would notice or mind, such being family bonds in those days.

Back to the coffee. The ladies would take turns over a coal fire (cooking gas was not in vogue in Chennai then, and if you like trivia, Indane installed the first cooking gas cylinder in Kolkata in 1965). The beans were roasted until they turned dark brown. Next task was assigned to the endless stream of kids – warm beans would be poured into a cast-iron hand grinder, and we would take turns to rotate the handle.

Dark, grainy powder would collect at the top of the grinder and the aroma would envelop the entire ground floor. Menfolk on the first floor would catch the whiff and an air of expectancy would be evident, since everyone knows that the best coffee flavour is from fresh ground powder.

How is the daily prep done? Every morning, the cook or a family member would heat water and pour into a large filter, which would start its slow drip, drip. The first round was always strong, and the elders would be served fresh coffee in a tumbler. The “second decoction” was arrived at by pouring hot water over the dregs in the filter and served as “light” coffee to the older children who felt they had gone past Ovaltine and Maltova.

If you wanted a second cup, no chance, and if your coffee has gone cold, it’s your fault. Late morning visitors were rarely offered coffee because what the ladies refer to as “coffee kadai” was closed latest 8 am. Next brewing and serving would be around 3 pm.

Breakfast not being a habit in those days, many Tamil families would have lunch between 9 and 10 am. The next snack, known as “tiffin,” comprising of either rava upma or dosa for children returning from school, or savouries such as murukku and home-made banana or potato chips, would follow late afternoon along with hot coffee. Dinner was always early, and activity in the kitchen having wound down by 8:30 pm, all would gather in the Hall, ie. living room.

The older children will make sure the silver betel box had sufficient fresh leaves, lime (chunnam), scented betel nut, 'seeval' (finely sliced arecanut) and tobacco. Betel chewing being a family habit (betel leaves and nut are good for health if you leave out the tobacco) it was the job of the little ones to take the box from room to room or floor to floor depending on where the family members and visitors were gathered for the evening.

The only entertainment was Radio which played on a Philips Transistor or in some houses on what is called a Radiogramme, a valve-led electronic equipment that could tune in to Shortwave and Medium wave, and also had facility for playing LP records. Spool tape recorders had just come into India and only a few households had them.

Now that you have a sense of a bygone era, joint family living, and a time in which filter coffee was the norm and not a novelty, let’s return to the label's origin. As a town, Kumbakonam is famous for filter coffee, but where did the “degree” come from? In the post-independence era, milk to Kumbakonam town was supplied by cooperative societies. It was a practice for bulk buyers such as coffee shops of yesteryears to check the milk for dilution using a lactometer, which had degree markings like a thermometer. Over time, the town’s signature filter coffee, in which milk would be thick and coffee infusion high, was labelled as “Kumbakonam Degree Coffee.”

Wherever in the world you live, you too can make the perfect blend, if you have the right implements and ingredients. A coffee filter is a must, also get a set of tumblers and what we refer to as “Dawara” which is the round mini vessel in which the tumbler is placed. To mix the sugar or to lower the heat from piping hot to sipping temperature, you will have to transfer the liquid by pouring from Dawara into tumbler (as seen in video), and this swift exchange will help form the froth and foam without which it cannot be called filter coffee.

A friend of mine, GD Prasad, has made the entire process easier by manufacturing ‘instant filter coffee’ which is a rarity in a market dominated by instant coffee. He named the Company after his grandfather, V.S. Mani.

Hold your cup… V.S. Mani & Co. is now a VC-funded enterprise, which tells you that all the filter coffee powder and home style snacks they sell have high market potential due to their traditional appeal and sentimental value. This being the age of instant orders, Prasad is experimenting with coffee-on-the-go by delivering filter coffee in flasks to homes in Bengaluru since last month.

If you are a coffee lover, here are some quick tips for preparing Kumbakonam Filter Coffee at home:

If in Mumbai, buy coffee powder from Mysore Concerns at Matunga, and I am sure every city has a shop famous for good quality powder. You can also order online from V.S. Mani & Co. (https://bit.ly/3I1SsHA) They also sell the filter, tumbler set and snacks to go with the coffee.

Now to the instructions everyone is waiting for:

Using a spoon, fill the top part of the filter with coffee powder up to half its height but the filling should not be loose. Press with dry knuckles gently around the circumference of the filter so that the layer becomes firm.

Pour boiling hot water right up to the brim. Wait for a few minutes and you will find the level has come down by 15% since the water has seeped through the powder but the drip is yet to start.

Top up water to the brim and now move away. Pressured by the water and the heat, the drip will start and end in its own time (don’t try to touch or move the filter as it will upset the rhythm or can stop the flow).

Once you find the water has seeped down fully, disengage the bottom part of the filter by wrapping a cloth around it. Empty the warm liquid into a separate vessel. You can now fill hot water to the brim again (if you use the powder for just one run, you will go broke and retailers will become rich).

Here comes the trick to fix the weak second round. Pour the collection into the first round that you had stored, and the thinner decoction will even out by mixing with the first.

Final tip: Filter coffee is best served double hot, double strong and slightly sweet.

So there you have it - history of a most special brew, glimpses of life in the 60s, and a do-it-yourself guide for the beginner and connoisseur. It’s time to stock the powder, prepare decoction the previous night… and wake up fresh, to make filter coffee!?

#filtercoffee #flashback #contentwriting