I drank instant coffee for thirty-four years.

Two spoons in hot milk, morning and evening, the same as almost everyone I grew up with. If you had asked me what coffee tasted like, I would have described that jar perfectly well. I was thirty-four and I thought I knew.

I am an engineer. I work for a large company in Delhi and I still do, so this is not a story about walking out of an office to follow a dream. It is a story about a holiday that went sideways.

In June 2025 I was in Bali. An estate visit was on the itinerary and I went along without much interest, expecting the kind of tour where somebody points at a plant. They showed me the trees and the cherries, the difference between arabica and robusta, and the luwak coffee that everybody photographs. None of that is what got me.

What got me was someone grinding beans in front of me and handing over a cup. It tasted of fruit. There was something like chocolate underneath it. I stood there running through everything I had assumed for thirty-four years, and then I thought about the jar at home.

The thing I could not put down on the flight back was a question. Why is this not happening in India? We grow the stuff. Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, hills full of it, a good deal of it shipped out to people who take it seriously. And most of us are drinking a spray-dried spoonful of our own harvest.

So I did the only thing I know how to do with a question like that, which is read until it stops being confusing. Arabica and robusta. Washed and natural. What specialty actually means, which turned out not to be a compliment but a score above 80 on a hundred-point scale that trained graders sit down and fill in. Altitude. Process. Roast dates instead of best-before dates.

Then I bought a moka pot and got it wrong for about a month. Too fine, too hot, too fast, bitter every time. The morning I finally got it right I sat with the cup for twenty minutes and did nothing else. I have been chasing that since.