BREW AWAKEING

India is in the fifth wave of its coffee journey with coffee lovers, planters and entrepreneurs promoting homegrown varietals in boutique settings

- Aravinda Anantharaman

Growing up in Bengaluru in the late 1990s, Suhas Dwarakanath wanted to open a coffee shop. "It was purely the cool quotient," says the founder of Benki Brewing Tools in Bengaluru, which he started in 2017, selling café equipment.

As a high-schooler, he often cycled past Café Coffee Day in Jayanagar, then a quiet residential neighbourhood. "It was where the rich kids would hang out," he remembers. "I would save 50 to go buy a cappuccino there. Everyone used to bring their fancy cars. It was nothing to do with coffee," he recalls. It was all about the vibe and the experience it offered.

After pursuing a course in business management and international trade, in 2011 he moved to Dubai to work. There, he hung out at cafés often but was galled to realise that his colleagues seemed to know so much more about coffee, which he had grown up drinking. It goaded him to learn more—the Speciality Coffee Association offered a programme that Dwarakanath enrolled in. Around this time, he got a job as a brand manager at Cafés Richard, the French coffee roasting and equipment supply company, in Dubai. He spent the next three years at Cafés Richard, travelling the world and teaching people how to use the equipment. In 2017, having saved up enough to start his own coffee shop, he returned to India, which was waking up to speciality coffee. Today, alongside his coffee equipment business, he runs a café, a speciality coffee academy, manufactures brewing equipment, owns a coffee estate in Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka, and trains coffee planters. Dwarakanath is also this year’s winner of the National Barista Championship. His is a story that seems to rise and fall with the “waves” in the coffee story in India.