Everyone who goes to Coorg is there for the coffee. This is correct. The Kodagu district's arabica — grown under shade trees at 1,000 to 1,700 metres, processed on small estate machinery, sold to roasters across India and increasingly internationally — is among India's finest. The plantation homestays that have become Coorg's dominant tourism model are built around the coffee experience: morning walks through the estates, the smell of drying beans, estate-fresh filter coffee served on the veranda at 7am.
But stay long enough, and you find the chai.
Pepper Estate Chai
Coorg grows black pepper on the same land as coffee — the pepper vines climb the shade trees, the two crops coexisting on the same property. The chai made on these estates uses freshly cracked peppercorns, sometimes along with cardamom grown in the lower, wetter valleys below the coffee zone.
The result is a chai with a pepper forwardness that is more pronounced than any city masala chai you will have had. It is not subtle. It is what happens when your pepper has been grown twenty metres from your kitchen and cracked this morning.
The Kodava Household
The Kodava community — the indigenous people of Coorg — have their own food culture that is distinct from the surrounding Kannada plains. Rice-based, heavily spiced, with a martial tradition that means the community has historically been outside the country for long periods as soldiers and officers. Chai in a Kodava household is served with the utilitarian purpose of warmth and energy rather than ceremony. It is strong, often sweetened with local palm jaggery, and consumed with the business-like efficiency of people who have things to do.
If you are staying in a genuine Kodava homestay rather than a resort, this is the chai you will be offered at dawn.
What to Do With Your Time
The drive from Madikeri to the Brahmagiri hills passes through cardamom and coffee country and offers the possibility of roadside chai at the small market towns along the way. Virajpet, Kutta, and the road towards Nagarhole have tea stalls that serve simple, spiced, estate-influenced chai to the estate workers and truck drivers who use this route.
This is not destination chai in the way that Darjeeling or Varanasi is destination chai. It is incidental chai — the tea you drink while doing other things in one of India's most beautiful hill landscapes.
But incidental chai in the right landscape is its own kind of perfect.