India Baba Budan Hills

Almost every history of coffee leaving Arabia passes through one specific hillside. Sometime around 1650, a Sufi pilgrim named Baba Budan carried seven coffee seeds out of the Yemeni port of Mocha, reportedly bound against his body to slip past a trade monopoly that punished the export of a living seed, and planted them in a cave-hermitage in the hills above what is now Chikmagalur, Karnataka, according to Coffee Review’s own history of the trade. The hills carry his name today, and the plantation grade grown there, Karnataka’s oldest, is still called Bababudangiri.

Modern Bababudangiri coffee is washed Arabica grown at 1,000 to 1,620 meters on hybrids bred for this coast, Cauvery, Chandragiri, S795, and SLN9, per DR Wakefield’s origin page for the appellation. Farms sit under mixed shade canopy, and cherries are hand-picked across a November-to-January harvest before wet-processing strips the fruit within a day of picking, the same washing-station discipline used across specialty South India.

The cup reads soft rather than bright. Driftaway Coffee’s own cupping of Ratnagiri Estate, a Bababudangiri farm running since 1920, scored 85.5 on the SCA 100-point scale, and independent trader and roaster listings for the same appellation converge on a similar register: chocolate, caramel, toffee, and citrus (grapefruit, sweetlime) over a full, creamy body and quiet acidity. Not every reviewer has been as taken with it: Coffee Review’s own tasting of a washed S795 lot from this exact origin scored it 77, calling it soft and creamy but “almost aggressively neutral,” with “little dimension.” That mixed record, more than the legend, is why washed South Indian Arabica became a staple of low-acid espresso blends long before “single origin” was a marketing word: full body and soft acid read as depth under pressure rather than sourness, even when the cup doesn’t stand out on its own.