El Bueno Coffee Roasters

Founded in Delhi by Manvi Gupta and Ketan Kamra, El Bueno Coffee Roasters is built around a deceptively simple philosophy: “Only The Good.” Working closely with carefully chosen coffee estates, they source high-quality beans and roast them in small batches, seeking to bring out each coffee’s natural sweetness, balance and individual character. Manvi brings the sensory curiosity and experimentation, Ketan a complementary commercial discipline, and between them they have created a thoroughly modern Indian roastery: serious about the coffee, certainly, but refreshingly free of the solemnity that can sometimes surround it.

Before the Pour

“We met Manvi and Ketan at their Delhi roastery, although ‘met’ perhaps understates the experience. We walked into a room redolent with that glorious, slightly intoxicating smell of freshly roasting coffee and spent the next couple of hours talking, tasting, sniffing and peering into roasting equipment while Manvi and Ketan explained what they were trying to achieve. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon in Delhi. What stayed with us, beyond that wonderful aroma which seemed to follow us out of the door, was their infectious enthusiasm for good coffee and their determination to get the details right without disappearing down the rabbit hole of coffee geekery. El Bueno means ‘the good’, and their motto is ‘Only The Good’. After an afternoon at the roastery, we thought that was a pretty fair description of both the coffee and the people behind it.”