Incredible India 3

3pm was the alloted time to meet Jepu Uthappa at the bottom of the drive of Dalquarren. I have known Jepu for 27 years, 26 as Mr Uthappa. He is Mr Coorg to me.

The story of Mr Uthappa starts with Independence, as that was the time that many of the British coffee planting community retreated with the Viceroy and the estates were sold to Indian successors who have taken the industry forward to the success it is today. And a big success it is too, as there is so much IT money sloshing around Banagalore (Silicon Valley East I heard it referred to recently) that the latest 'must have' is a coffee estate, and prices have risen to £12,000 an acre for a top notch estate.

History as they say is written by the victors, and we haven't really got to the revisionist era yet if there is going to be laundering of the hitherto tarnished image of the Raj, or at least its closing stages dramatised by Attenborough's 'Ghandi', and I don't need to comment further on the rights and wrongs of independence and partition. The point I do want to make is that the handover of the estates in Coorg was by all accounts a gentlemanly affair, with properties passing from the hands of the old ruling class to the new, and those friendships between Indian and British families last to this day in the form of the Coorg Coffee Planters Association. Jepu Uthappa is prominent among those Indian gentlemen.

This wonderful association was formed in 1979 by Maurice Webb, succeeded by Mike Michell, who is one of the most indomitable characters I have ever met. Now well into his eighties, Mike has held the association together through thick and thin, and has organised well over 25 annual reunions since the early 80s.

I will freely admit right here that in 1981, when my mother invited (read required) me to attend this strange reunion of old planter families and a load of Indians in a curry house in Virginia Water, I was less than thrilled. I kicked off at the very idea, and then petulantly demanded that my then girlfriend Louisa should come, and at least we'd get a decent curry.

What an eye-opener that was, meeting Mr Uthappa in his full Coorg regalia, complete with ceremonial dagger that had caused a stir at airport security even back in those carefree days. I was also struck by the close relationship of all these old friends, irrespective of nationality, but still felt remote from the unifying bond they held. Just jumping ahead in this story, the next day we visited Mr Uthappa's house, where he showed us his treasured photo album, and there, carefully named, are Louisa and I in the full flower of our youth, idealistic vegetarians both, thin as laths with fine features and 80's haircuts.

It was perhaps a tad indelicate of Jepu to point out that I must be very successful to have expanded my girth so, but I was happy to confirm that when I last saw Louisa a couple of years ago, she remains as thin, beautiful and vegetarian as she was preserved in those pictures.

Being a mildly rebellious twentysomething, I didn't do another 'Coorg' until the late 90s, and that was really born of necessity for my mother's and others safety. It was her driving, you see. Minnie, as the entire world knew and loved her, was to put it bluntly, a nutter behind the wheel, but endearingly she was completely unaware of it. When advancing years took her idiosyncratic driving style to new extremes, it became expedient to offer one's services as chauffeur, which suited Minnie right down to the ground, as she got to show off her baby boy at the reunions.

Mr Uthappa only flew over on the odd occasion to attend the reunions, and I think it was 2001 that I finally met him again, and this time it was his turn to not look a day older than our first meeting in Virginia Water. All the latter reunions that I did attend were held at Jane Turner's fabulous home on the Hog's Back in Surrey, and over the years I finally put together some of the Coorg jigsaw of family and estate names that I had heard through my youth, Bucknall, Tumiaih, Rye, Somaiah, Humphreys, Tweedie,they sound down the years.

So that is the backdrop to meeting Jepu Uthappa at the gates of Dalquarren on that beautifully warm February afternoon. He must have thought me a real anorak when I insisted in sitting in the front of his car and filming the entire length of the drive, one whole kilometer, as I wanted to have my first glimpse of my mother's childhood home preserved on film (what a saddo!). So he climbed into the back, and his driver took us up the track.

The track gently climbs up the contours of the hill above Chetalli, escorted by well kept hedges both sides, with tall, thinned out trees beyond, falling away on the left side and rising quite steeply to the right. Beneath these trees are the coffee bushes, heavy with deep red coffee berries. The trees were thinned to provide shade, but not block light as a forest canopy does, as shade-grown coffee is a premium grade. Up the trunk of every tree is a carefully managed pepper creeper, as this is the other premium-priced crop the Coorg coffee estate yields. Half way up the track were wrought iron gates, that were padlocked. It felt like we were entering the estate as the first visitors for years, as the gates creaked their resistance to this uncustomary work. Then there was a sign that stated 'bungalow' and also 'office'. That made me wonder, as I perceived there could only be one building.

The track wound on and on, and I wondered how long this anticipation could possibly last, when there was a sweeping bend, then a short incline, and we were through the gateposts of Dalquarren!

It was horrible! But only to someone who hasn't loved the idea of the place for nearly fifty years of unvisiting, who hasn't pored over faded sepia photographs of the end of Victoria's reign searching for familial features in the starchy faces, with the Empire bungalow behind. I will qualify the horror immediately because it appeared one of subsequent owners had plastered a truly ghastly Sixties concrete edifice on the front of my beloved Empire bungalow



This story now has to split into two; the business and the personal. Getting the business out of the way first will give my tax inspectors the rest of the story off, as my entire trip was funded by work as a bona fide business trip, as I was genuinely there to source coffee as a new commodity. Dalquarren is a big estate as they go, 450 acres, and it has infrastructure to match. Jepu retired from Tata Coffee some years ago (yes, the same Tata as the cars, and new owners of Corus/British Steel) but still wields a big stick in the industry locally, so he was our expert as we took instruction on how coffee gets to Starbucks.

The first principle is that all the estates in these parts are on a hill, so gravity is used as the vector in the flow diagram.At the top of the process is a concrete pen with a hole in the bottom of the lower wall, with the floor sloping down to the hole. The deep red coffee berries are hand picked (the terrain doesn't allow for mechanisation, and trials failed as the machine savaged the bushes too severely) and tipped from the pickers' baskets into the pen



When the donkey engine starts up, it pumps water up a high pressure hose which is played on the heap of coffee berries, and carries them down through the hole into the second process



Then the beans flow down a concrete gully into a sump.



The idea here is that the four sides of the sump retain the beans that float, which are then discarded (or made into instant coffee, more like, won't have the muck on the premises)and the good stuff sinks to pass under the retaining walls of the centre section, and thus flows into the machine that takes their coats off.



I have dozens of pictures of the machine, but will describe it with fewer words. A series of wheels with coffee bean-sized indentations in them first of all pulls the jackets off, and then allows the beans to sit tight in the holes whilst the jackets are separated, ending up in a nice big heap outside



This is the David Bellamy shot of the "luvverly slushy slimy compost that will grow more luvverly coffee"



The next bit was a bit of a surprise to me. What colour are coffee beans? Wrong! They are white, or cream to be precise. The second process in the de-hulling machine is pressure washing the beans to remove the muscillate, the clear sticky glue that surrounds the dicotyledon inside the skin. The two beans inside each berry are thus separated and washed, and are then transported by water to the drying process. About 10% of berries contain a single bean, and this single 'pearl berry' is prized as the top grade, because its uniform shape affords more even roasting.



Then the beans go over the waterfall best described by this picture



And are spread out one bean thick over large concrete/tiled areas that are swept scrupulously clean for the purpose. During late afternoon, as we saw, or if rain threatens, the beans are windrowed and covered with plastic sheeting to avoid the ingress of dew.



There were three such terraces at Dalquarren, and the water is collected at the bottom and recycled back up to the holding pit at the top. And this is what puts the gold into Gold Blend:-



And this is a glum looking Man from Del Monte. Being a bloke, I can't multi task, but I can look stupid and concentrate at the same time. Jepu don't 'arf know some stuff.



The coffee takes three or four days to dry out to less than 10% moisture, and is then shovelled into whopping great hundredweight hessian sacks (try telling that to our nanny 'let's make the next maximum weight a bag of sugar' state, no wonder we've got an obesity epidemic, no one's allowed to lift anything anymore) and transported on ten tonne lorries to the curing works. There, the husk is removed from the bean, which is a very thin mica-like covering, and the naked bean is ready for curing. That is the state that coffee beans are shipped in, as roasting needs to be done as soon before consumption as possible.


Full marks if you're still with me, we now turn to the place, and the spirit of place. It is as well to start with the view. Like the Maharajah's Seat, it is breathtaking, but more enclosed by the tall trees surrounding and immediately below. It was almost as calm as meditation, quietly absorbing the vista, and was overcome with a feeling of wanting to end my days there.



Our family home in Essex was called Great Downs, and I was finally looking at its blueprint, a ramshackle rambling Empire bungalow, desperate now for major works exactly like Great Downs in the latter days, but still ringing with the laughter of the parties my step-grandmother was so fond of hosting. Quite bizarrely for an abandoned house, at least as far as habitation is concerned, there were chairs still set out in the sitting room



The office that George Parsons built on to the bungalow is still used for just that, but the house is unused.





I'll post more photo's as I get them from the girls, but for now I want to close with the spookiest thing that happened. I took myself off away from the rest of them, and found a wall to sit on outside the long room, that afforded the finest view. I was at my most wistful for a few minutes, when Mary joined me and was instantly on my wavelength. What I didn't realise was that Jules captured the moment through the filthy glass of the long room. The fella in the hat is my father.