One-of-a-kind coffee worth going out of your way to taste

Here's a photo of a kolam painted on the street in Pondicherry, India, from a lengthy trip through India and Sri Lanka we did 6 years ago. Even for a seasoned third-world traveller India is tough travel, but I've wanted to go back ever since. The direct encounter with humanity's highest highs and lowest lows turns travel there into a pilgrimage and brings one face-to-face with one's attachments, aversions and preconceptions like nothing else.

Indian coffee is something that first came into my life when I was an entry-level roasting plant worker at Starbucks in the early 1980's. The wonderful coffee buyer Jim Reynolds had been presented with a small lot of Indian coffee that had the body of a good Estate Java (and good examples of that coffee were rare and getting rarer at that time), but with a captivating aromatic profile that included nuances of black pepper, cardamom, clove and several other notes I couldn't put a name to.

It turned out that kind of coffee was and perhaps still is a rare anomaly amidst a sea of uninteresting to atrocious mostly dry-processed Indian coffees cupped since then, but the experience was haunting enough to make any taster keep searching. It didn't help matters that the only Indian "specialty" coffees promoted in the intervening years were the rivetingly defective "Monsooned Malabar" and a few manicured robustas for adding crema to espresso blends.

At Allegro we had several years of good experiences with washed Indian coffees bearing such names as Cauvery Peak and Pearl Mountain, and those coffees were life-savers during those years as substitutes for problematic Estate Javas, providing body without funk and some degree of the aforementioned spice notes.

A couple of days ago I was fortunate to taste an extraordinary Indian coffee called Poabs Organic Seethargundu Estate, which was just added to the offerings at Sweet Maria's. As usual with them there's a ton of info on the coffee and a description of it that really can't be improved upon:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.asia.india.php?coffee=IndiaPoabsOrganicSeethargunduEstate2011#IndiaPoabsOrganicSeethargunduEstate2011

So here you have a coffee that really has it all: a unique flavor profile that's broadly appealing, without the divisiveness of, say, an extremely acid Kenya or a wild or earthy natural. It's not only organic, it's certified Biodynamic - something I've only encountered at the old Santa Catarina and Nueva Esperanza fincas in Chiapas many years ago, and a story in itself. It's even seasonally appropriate, with an autumnal richness of flavor at many degrees of roast. The only downside of tasting it is that while it's an exemplary Indian coffee, it's anything but a typical one, so if you like it you may well join the ranks of the perpetual searchers once it's gone, possibly waiting for years to taste anything like it again.

Kudos to Sweet Maria's for going out on a limb to bring this kind of coffee to the market. Self-deprecating as they are about home roasting and their own efforts, the breadth and depth of their selections represent an ideal that to the best of my knowledge no roaster-retailer in the U.S. comes close to rivaling, while their information-packed web site makes books on coffee (including my own out-of-date tome) into relics. Amazing and inspiring.