We came to Kushalnagara (Kodagu/ Coorg) to meet coffee exporters and learn about the future of one of the world’s top commodities. This region produces and exports the bulk of India’s coffee, called humanity’s favourite drink.
But is it? We did some digging. The world’s most consumed beverage—not counting water, which has no equal—is actually a dark horse. It’s not coffee. It’s surprisingly not even beer. Tea the world’s top.
It’s tea.
Tea beats coffee in a lot of ways. It predates coffee by about 3,000 years, and is thought to have first been harvested in 2700 B.C. by the emperor ShenNung who was known as “the divine healer.” Coffee didn’t come until the tenth century at the earliest, first discovered in what is now Yemen.
Tea, meanwhile, came far earlier likely because (one imagines) it’s simpler to....
