Pambukkal: a farm that has been working since 1933

Pambukkal Estate sits in Assambur, outside Yercaud, and traces its roots to 1933. That is fourteen years before Independence, and roughly a century after the first coffee went into these hills. It sits at around 4,300 feet on the Shevaroys, in the fog that rolls through Assambur most mornings of the cold season, with 120 acres under coffee.

It is run by T. S. Karthik, who also roasts and blends at his own facility. That means our Morning Session is roasted where the coffee is grown, not shipped to a third party and sent back.

It is not a coffee farm

Or rather: it is not only a coffee farm. Pambukkal grows coffee, pepper, turmeric, spices and tea on the same land.

This is how the old Yercaud estates work, and it is worth understanding rather than romanticising. A mixed plantation is not a lifestyle choice. Coffee pays once a year and the price is set somewhere else; pepper and turmeric come off on different clocks. A farm with four crops can survive a bad coffee year. A farm with one cannot.

It also explains the canopy. The shade trees that cover arabica here, silver oak, jackfruit and native species, are the same structure the pepper vines climb. The farm is one system, not a coffee field with trees added for marketing.

And while we are here: the pepper does not get into the coffee. A coffee plant does not absorb aroma from its neighbours. The shade works by cooling the afternoon and slowing the cherry down. That is all, and it is enough.

The chicory question

Our Morning Session is a South Indian filter blend: 70% arabica, 30% chicory.

People assume chicory is in there to make the coffee cheaper. In a bad blend, it is. In a filter blend, it is doing a specific job, and anyone who has made decoction in a steel filter knows what happens without it.

Chicory root is roasted and ground like coffee but behaves differently in water. It extracts slower and holds the decoction thicker and darker, which is why South Indian filter coffee pours the way it does and why it survives being cut with hot milk instead of vanishing into it. It also brings its own bitterness, rounder and less sharp than coffee's, and that is a large part of what people actually mean when they say a filter coffee tastes like home.

The ratio is the decision. 80:20 is a common house blend. 90:10 leans towards drinking it as coffee. 70:30 is a filter-first ratio, built for the tumbler and the davara at six in the morning, not for a pour-over.

That is a choice, and it should be stated as one. We are not hiding the chicory. We picked the number.

What the roast is aiming at

The medium-dark roast is built for South Indian filter coffee drinkers, and it is built to keep that tradition alive rather than quietly replace it with something more fashionable.

Italy has its own coffee culture. So do Arabia, Vietnam and Japan, each with its own equipment, its own ritual and its own idea of what a good cup is. South India has one too, older than most of them, and it is usually treated as a regional curiosity rather than a culture in its own right. This roast is made on the view that the art of South Indian filter coffee deserves to stand with any of them.

A farm that also sells its own

Pambukkal sells coffee under its own name. We will say so, because you will find it in thirty seconds anyway.

What we do with it

Morning Session - The Champions Blend. 250 g, medium-dark, 70:30, built for the daily filter ritual rather than the weekend brew.

The name is the morning session: the first of the day, before anything has been decided.

The estate's arabica took second place in the Arabica Washed category at the Coffee Board of India's Fine Cup Award 2025, behind Grange Estate. The award belongs to the estate's lot, not to this 70:30 blend, and we will keep saying it that way.