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Wake up to a new aroma of coffee

Bangalore: Coffee lovers can soon relish their cuppa brewed from the seeds of a new Arabica plant variety called Chandragiri, developed by the Central Coffee Research Institute at Balehonnur in Chikmagalur district after 21 years of research.

The Chandragiri plant, with clusters of coffee fruits, was introduced to coffee planters for commercial exploitation by Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh at a function organised by the Coffee Board here on Friday.

Eminent scientists M.S. Swaminathan, MP and Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, and C.N.R. Rao, Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, were present.

Chandragiri is the name of the hill range in the district where the first seeds of coffee, believed to have been brought by Baba Budan after his pilgrimage to Makkah, were planted. The variety is hybrid derived by crossing Villa Sarchi, a semi-dwarf mutant of Bourbon coffee, and Hibrido de Timor, a spontaneous hybrid of Robusta and Arabica resistant to coffee leaf rust.

Coffee Board Chairman G.V.K. Rau, who explained the salient features of the plant, said the board would supply seeds for planting on 500 hectares. In five years, it would supply seeds for at least 15,000 hectares annually. With its large beans, the Chandragiri plant could yield 1,150 kg to 1,800 kg of clean coffee a hectare.

Mr. Rau said that field trials and evaluations had established that Chandragiri could be grown in all regions of the country.

Its semi-dwarf nature and the lose fruit clusters would enable more or less simultaneous ripening.

It had a relatively shorter gestation period and was suited for high-density planting.

He said that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, Madurai University and the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, were working on sequencing of coffee genome. This would open new varieties resistant to moisture change.

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