Aura Festival.
Three days inside a living system. You set one lot's protocol yourself, and it reaches you under your own name about four months later. Twenty places, three times a year.
The knowledge enters through the hands before it reaches the head.
We build the three days around the answers, so say the thing you want to see.
When
How many
Guests, including you
On the third day you build a coffee that exists nowhere else.
- Day one
Arrival / Wonder
- Four hours up from Bengaluru, and somewhere in the last one the canopy shuts over the road and the temperature drops six degrees.
- You walk the estate before a single person explains it — a hundred and fifty acres, four storeys of canopy, and more going on overhead than you will manage to name.
- Nobody owns a mountain. You arrive as its guest, which is the only way anyone arrives here.
- You come around a corner and the first long table is already there, cooked from the estate and laid outside. Almost everything on it grew within sight of where you sit.
- Day two
Hands / Discovery
- A hike before the light, up through all four layers to where the shade thins out.
- Down to the wet mill at five, before the pickers come in, to watch a fermentation being read — and to take the Brix yourself.
- Biodynamics from the people whose hands make it: the horn buried through winter, the fourteen compost pits, the quartz that goes in at midsummer. You bury one yourself.
- About fifty Malnad Gidda, indigenous and waist-high, and the looking goes both ways.
- The long table again, later and louder than the first one.
- Day three
Judgement / Authorship
- Back to the mill for whatever came off the tanks overnight, and the fermentation numbers that made the call while you were asleep.
- Cup the lots blind against last season. Nobody says which is which until everyone has committed out loud, and everyone is wrong at least once. It is the best hour of the three days.
- Pick a lot and set its protocol — varietal, ferment, drying, all of it.
- Then down through the Ghats. We build that exact coffee and send it to you under your own name, about four months later.
