INTELLIGENCE AND INQUISITIVENESS will always beat false marketing. (and bad coffee)
I am a coffee lover. All my life I have loved coffee. From different types of coffee to brewing techniques- arabica, robusta, medium roast, dark roast. Learnt espresso shots, and pour overs- I’ve done enough experimentation.
Then, when my mother fell ill and had some digestive issues, one yoga practitioner suggested her “Sukku Malli kaapi”. This surprised me, as despite being a coffee-lover, I’d never heard of Sukku Malli coffee. I was sure it as a marketing ploy. Skeptical, I still went ahead and got the coffee from a grocery story. After reading the labels, googling about it, I found out that the joke is on me.
Sukku Malli has been used for many years, by generations to cure digestive issues and treating cough and headache. And the original recipe doesn’t have coffee at all. Nowadays, we have started adding coffee to it to add to the kick.
Now where does the false marketing come in? It turns out that our normal south Indian coffee which tastes so much better than any starbucks or third wave coffee is made up of Coffee and Chicory. Chicory is a root of a plant (looks like radish at first). The chicory in the coffee helps in digesting the coffee. Turns out that the foreigners came in and tried to market the 100% arabica in a way that if you add anything to coffee other than 100% arabica coffee, then its mixed, its wrong. That’s basically untrue.
And then they started selling 100% coffee (without chicory). And we fell for it. We Indians had this figured out the right way to have coffee so so long back! And yet…
