Davara

A Tradition

Three and a half centuries of filter coffee.

From a saint's beard to a brass tumbler on a marble counter — the story of how the South of India learned to love coffee, slowly.

Traditional South Indian brass coffee filter
  1. 1670

    Seven smuggled beans

    The Sufi saint Baba Budan returned from Mocha with seven coffee beans hidden in his beard. He planted them on the hills of Chandragiri in Karnataka — the origin of every cup of South Indian coffee that followed.

  2. 1900s

    The brass filter arrives

    Tamil households adopted the two-chamber brass filter — an Indian reinvention of the French drip — letting hot water steep slowly through a dense bed of coffee and chicory. The decoction it produced was thick, dark, and unmistakably ours.

  3. 1947

    Coffee houses of Madras

    Independence-era coffee houses became the salons of South India — places where poets, freedom fighters and clerks shared a tumbler of degree kaapi at the marble-top tables. Davara opened in a Mylapore lane that same year.

  4. Today

    The ritual continues

    We still pour from a height — the long stream cools the kaapi from scalding to drinkable, builds the froth, and lets you smell the chicory before you sip. Nothing about it has been hurried.