If tea is the fuel that India runs on then coffee is fast becoming the new cup that cheers.

India drinks eight times more tea than coffee in a year. It is the beverage of the rich and poor alike, drunk at home and fancy tea parlors as well as on-the-go from roadside stalls and pushcarts.

Still, its 1,950 branded coffee shops are mostly bustling with young Indians. Last week, Starbucks opened its first store to a rockstar reception in Mumbai, reinforcing the country’s growing love affair with the burnt-bitter brew.

Coffee consumption in India has almost doubled in the decade through 2010 to 108,000 metric tons, but is still a small fraction of the amount of tea Indians drink every year.

So where does that leave tea, called “Chai” in Hindi ― of which India is the second-biggest producer and biggest consumer?

Parts of southern India have long been drinking coffee. In the rest of the country, coffee is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is urban-centric.

Over the past decade, as globalization and satellite television brought much of the world into Indian homes, its growing middle class experimented with everything from fashion to food. Cafes and restaurants exploded.

Much like in China, cafes are fashionable among young people looking for a friendly, relaxing place to hang out, away from the prying eyes and crammy homes.

“If you look around its mostly students or young professionals. They want to hang out, relax without burning a hole in their pocket,” says Aniket Sharma, a 19-year-old commerce student sipping an Irish coffee at a swanky New Delhi cafe.

Much before the likes of Britain’s Costa Coffee or Lavazza of Italy arrived here, two Indian pioneers, Barista and Cafe Coffee Day, succeeded in converting Indian youth from tea to coffee, luring them with an atmosphere decidedly youthful: You’ll find the music loud, and there’s even a guitar on hand for anybody looking to start a spontaneous sing-along.

In contrast, tea suffers from an “image problem,” experts say ― that of a fuddy-duddy drink consumed daily at home.

“Coffee is for special occasions. Tea is just the plain home beverage,” says Harish Bijoor, CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults, a branding consultancy.

Standalone tea bars, which try to put a contemporary twist to an ancient brew, exist in many Indian cities, but there are hardly any readily identifiable tea chains.

Yet Indians are slow to take their coffee seriously and the brew is still seen as a luxury drink. A visit to a cafe is treated as a fashionable outing. Indians consume only about 80 g per capita, according to the International Coffee Organisation, compared to 4.11 kg in the United States or 3.04 kg in Britain.

Once cultivated exclusively in the Arabian peninsula, coffee arrived in India about four centuries ago, almost on the sly.

Legend has it that an Indian pilgrim to Mecca smuggled seven beans and planted them back home in southern India, establishing the first coffee plantations in this traditionally tea-drinking nation.

By 1840, its British colonial rulers were exporting coffee from India.

Tea plants have existed in India’s history. The British first started commercial production in the 1820s, choosing the lush hills of northeast, now home to hundreds of tea gardens where mostly women in aprons work through lush plantations, plucking and chucking the leaves into large baskets on their backs.

The Indian cafe market is dominated by Cafe Coffee Day, which has more than 1,300 stores, where its large selection of cold, sweet milkshakes, teas and other beverages are more popular than traditional coffee.

Most Indian coffee chains sell beverages at far lower prices than their counterparts in the West. A small cappuccino typically costs $1, at Cafe Coffee Day. At Starbucks the cheapest drink, a plain espresso, comes for $1.50.

The pricing is also part of the reason why tea may never be a fashionable drink in India, where two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people live on less than $2 a day.

“A mental block is there ― price-conscious Indians don’t want to shell out that much for a cup of tea at a cafe. They think ‘we drink it at home anyway,’” says Mrs. Sneha Sahani, a 36-year-old marketing professional, waiting to pick up a latte from a Costa Coffee outlet in south Delhi.

The earliest coffee house culture in India dates back to the 1930s run by cooperatives that grew the beans in southern India. Their numbers were few and their patrons selective.

A handful of them have survived the onslaught of modernity, where bearers in starched white uniform with stiff, pointed turbans still serve beverages in chipped, white crockery covered with tea cozy.

Called as just “Coffee House,” perhaps the most famous of them exists in a decrepit university district in the city of Kolkata, where generations of poets, filmmakers, artistes, politicians and revolutionaries fought their intellectual battles over endless cups of coffee in its worn-out, smoke-filled ambience.

When rising costs threatened its future, leading city intellectuals petitioned the government to save the place once frequented by such famous Indians as Nobel-winning author Rabindranath Tagore, freedom hero Subash Chandra Bose and Oscar-winner Satyajit Ray.

“Today’s cafes are nothing like what we know by a coffee house,” says Mr. Shankar Chatterjee, a 63-year-old loyal patron of the Kolkata Coffee House.

Back at a Cafe Coffee Day store in Delhi, a group of young boys and girls lounge leisurely, sipping coffee, conversing and intermittently stepping out for a smoke.

“Somehow it’s more fun to get together in a cafe. The coffee tastes better and the atmosphere is unintimidating,” said Anamika Gupta, a grade 12 student, as her friends nodded in agreement.

By Krittivas Mukherjee

(The Straits Times)