In 2017, we set out to do something no one else in the UK was doing: build a roastery around Indian coffee as an origin. Not for cheap blend fillers or as an "also available" but with Indian coffee as the main event. We remain the only one to this date.
That same commitment led us to open the only coffee shop collective in the UK serving exclusively Indian coffee. And in 2019, it led us to champion a species almost nobody in specialty coffee was talking about: Excelsa.
The intrigue
Long before it was a business decision, Excelsa was a childhood memory. Growing up in India, visiting estates in Yercaud and Coorg, I knew it as Mara Kaapi i.e. tree coffee (I had no knowledge of species names back then). It wasn't grown as a crop in its own right. It stood at the boundaries of estates, marking where one plot ended and the next began. Nobody was cultivating it for what it was. It was just there doing a quiet, unglamorous job.
I won't pretend, looking back, that I saw climate resilience coming, or that I understood then what the industry would eventually say about Excelsa's role in a warming world (let alone knowing I’d build a coffee business). That wasn't the thinking. What stayed with me was simpler…if something exists, it exists for a reason. A tree that's been left standing at the edge of an estate for generations, ignored but never removed, has earned that place somehow. I wasn't sure what its reason was … maybe it was climate, maybe it was resilience, maybe it was simply a taste profile nobody had bothered to properly ask about. That question and not a conviction about the answer, is what led us to launch it in 2019.
The bet
Excelsa wasn't an easy sell. When we started, it wasn't even formally classified as its own species. For most of the last century it was folded into Liberica, treated as a variety rather than standing on its own. It's only through recent genomic work led by Dr Aaron Davis at Kew that it's been confirmed as a distinct species in its own right, Coffea dewevrei, separate from Liberica. We were championing a coffee before the science had caught up to say definitively what it was.
So, about Excelsa. It doesn't behave like Arabica. It doesn't behave like Robusta. It has its own character entirely… deeper, wilder, harder to pin down. There was no market for it in specialty coffee at all - we were the first to import it into the UK. We thought that unpredictability was exactly the point.
Our first move was P A N D Y A, Excelsa blended with Arabica. In 2022, it won 3 stars at the Great Taste Awards, the highest rating the awards give. For a coffee built around a species most people had never heard of, that was proof we weren't just being contrarian for its own sake.
Next came CLIMATE CHANGE, Excelsa blended with specialty Robusta, built explicitly to ask a question the industry was avoiding …what happens beyond Arabica, when the climate stops cooperating with the crop we've built an entire culture around? It was the first blend of its kind in the UK and won a Great Taste Award in 2023.
By 2024, we were ready to bring Excelsa into the coffee shop itself. K A D A M B A , Excelsa and Arabica, served in our 6 stores made us the first in the UK to put Excelsa in a cup across the menu, not just in a ‘future of coffee’ bag on a shelf. It won a Great Taste award this year!
And this past Christmas, we went further still: OM, the first three-species blend we know of – Excelsa, Arabica and Robusta together in one cup.
What we actually learned
Excelsa on its own is hard to love. Drunk solo, it can be blunt, even difficult. The qualities that make it fascinating in a blend can overwhelm a straight shot. It took us longer than we'd like to admit to stop fighting that and start listening to what it was saying.
What we found is that Excelsa isn't a coffee that wants to stand alone. It's a coffee that transforms whatever it's blended with. Put it next to Arabica and it adds weight and depth the Arabica can't reach on its own. Put it next to Robusta and it rounds out the edges. It doesn't compete for the spotlight, it changes the shape of the room and that’s what we love about it.
That reframing from "solo act" to "blend enhancer" is the real discovery of these past seven years. And it's been backed up where it counts: Pandya, Climate Change and Kadamba have all gone on to win Great Taste Awards.
We weren't wrong to bet early
Excelsa has since gone from a species nobody in specialty coffee wanted to talk about to one everybody wants a piece of. It's on Blue Bottle's menu now. It's become the novelty of the coffee world, the origin every roaster suddenly wants to claim as their favourite child, having ignored it for decades. It's talked about as part of the future of coffee menus, not a curiosity at the edge of them.
We'd just been at it for six years by the time that conversation started.
Seven years on
We didn't set out to prove Excelsa could stand alone. We set out to prove it belonged in the conversation at all (just as Indian coffee does, just as speciality Robusta does). Seven years, four blends, four Great Taste wins and one three-species first later, we think that case is made.
Excelsa can’t do what Arabica does, but it can do things Arabica can't.
We backed it before the science had a name for it, and before the industry had noticed it. Both have since caught up to where we already were. That's the whole point of championing an origin properly…learning what the origin actually is, and building something honest around that without flattening it into something familiar.