Morning cup of sunshine into your lips.

/You can buy coffee powder in quite a few general shops and supermarkets (we are, of course, not talking instant here) and some places even sell beans. But to do so would be to deny yourself one of the simplest workday routes to sudden sensual pleasure. To step into a coffee roasting and grinding shop is to be assaulted by the strong seductive smell of fresh coffee, soothing, yet stimulating and dangerously liable to get you hallucinating about mornings in Paris with coffee and fresh-baked croissants or thick Turkish brews poured from brass ibriks.
That isn’t the only reason to buy from these places. Because coffee tends to be lumped with tea, we often forget there are some profound differences between the two products. Tea is the ideal grocery store product—light, dry, with a long (but not indefinite) shelf life and requiring little after purchase than adding it to hot water. Coffee is not the same. It needs careful roasting and grinding, and every stage in the process also decreases its shelf life.
Hence the coffee drinker’s dilemma: buy it in bean form and the coffee will last longer, but you’ll have to risk roasting and grinding yourself; buy it roasted and ground by a professional and it will soon go stale.
One common solution that does not work is keeping it in the fridge. As Harish Bijoor, marketing guru and coffee expert, tells us, ground coffee is highly hygroscopic, picking up moisture from the fridge and other odours along with it. “It absorbs every taint,” he says. “Don’t be too surprised to find notes of cabbage or tomato in your coffee. You might as well be drinking Dhansak!”
Real coffee enthusiasts will learn how to roast and grind properly and to do so every day. Bijoor gives us one tip for the amateur roaster: buy ‘peaberry’, a term for a technical defect where only one bean forms from a coffee berry instead of the usual two. Because round peaberry beans are more likely to be the same size, they will roast more evenly than unevenly sized regular beans.
You also have to be careful to grind just right—too coarse and water just slips through without brewing enough; too fine and it clogs to get overbrewed and bitter.
So direct is the effect of the roasting and grinding on the final brew that I’d argue they even outweigh where the coffee comes from. Of course, real coffee purists, who buy Blue Mountain direct from Jamaica and boast of drinking ‘kapi luwak’, made from the choicest coffee beans eaten, digested and excreted by civet cats, will never agree, but this column is hardly meant for them.
For most of us, who want a good cup without insane effort, you’re best off finding a good roasting and grinding shop, and buying from them in small quantities.
And to do this the answer is simple: head for the South—South Indian neighbourhoods, that is, like Matunga in Mumbai or Lake Market in Kolkata where you’ll find the small coffee roasters that have a high turnover so you know you’re buying fresh. In Mumbai the Philips Coffee & Tea chain of stores—South Indian owned, naturally—provides good coffee across the city, with many swearing by their Highlander coffee.
In South India itself, each city will have its preferred suppliers, like Leo in Chennai, Narasus in the Salem area and so on. Small, dingy, unpretentious and with none of frills of modern retailing like air-conditioning, they will still provide excellent fresh coffee—and that incomparable aroma in plenty.

HOME BREW

Storing ground coffee in the fridge does not work. It will pick up moisture from the fridge, as well as odours
If you are not confident of your skills in roasting the beans right, go for peaberry beans as their round shape ensures they roast evenly
Still not sure about roasting coffee? Head to the South Indians neighbourhoods in your city and use the services of any of the small coffee roasters that have a high turnover

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