What does an investment banker — and a self-proclaimed “hardcore coffee lover” — do, when his occasional visits home from New York leave him craving for the kick and flavour of artisanal brew that he’s grown accustomed to at the Big Apple?
He begins brewing his own coffee.
This, pretty much, is what Ajai Thandi’s story boils down to. Co-founded with friends Ashwajeet Singh and Arman Sood, his cold brew outfit Sleepy Owl coffee has been creating ripples for quite a while now, most recently for having raised a seed fund of ₹3.26 crores ($500,000) this April.
But for all their innovations and ingenuity, it’s only now that the two-year-old startup has managed to design a product that enables them to set their sights beyond the confines of New Delhi.
Explains Thandi over the phone, “Our original product — a 1.5-litre brew pack — weighed too much to make shipping feasible. Hence, we have come up with a smaller pack, called the Lil Brew, which is only 600 ml. With this, we can look at other markets.”
So what exactly is cold brew coffee? It’s basically ground coffee beans steeped in room temperature water, instead of being exposed to heat the way it would in a regular brewing process. It takes at least 12 hours for the taste and flavour to percolate through, says Thandi, after which it is brewed — again in cold water — for a further 30 minutes. The result is a black coffee concoction — for lack of a better word — that can be taken as ready-to-drink, or experimented with as per your taste.
It took the trio about eight months of experimentation to get their first product just right, adds Thandi. “We source our coffee from Chikmagalur,” he adds, “What you get is made from freshly ground, 100% arabica.” That Sleepy Owl has managed to take the middle man out of the picture and sources directly from coffee growers is a source of pride for the three.
What’s the difference? According to Thandi, everything, from aroma to flavour to the end product, if mixed with milk. “Whenever I came back, I would be dissatisfied with the coffee here,” says Thandi, insisting that this was not for lack of appreciation of quality. “I think there is a huge gap between the coffee producers and the kind of coffee that is produced here,” he adds, leaving it unsaid that the three of them are hoping to bridge just that.
