CQ2

Origin

Descriptions of coffee origin can vary widely, from the very specific (”La Minita Coffee Estate, Tarrazu, Costa Rica”) to the generic (”Columbian”) to non-existent.  Indeed, most coffee is not described by origin and is in fact a blend of coffees from a variety of locations.  There’s nothing wrong with blends – think wine négociants in the Rhône — but there’s also lots to like about knowing exactly where your beans come from.

Species

The Coffea genus is taxonomically complex with wide variations within species and even between related individuals but the two most widely cultivated species are Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora var. robusta.  They’re commonly referred to as arabica and robusta.

Arabica is normally considered the finer of the two and it will be occasionally called out, especially in cheaper blends (100% arabica!).  It has half as much caffeine as robusta and accounts for about two-thirds of world coffee production.  Robusta, from west Africa, is grown primarily grown there and in Brazil and Vietnam — the latter being the world’s largest coffee exporter.  You can see the production breakout by country at the International Coffee Organization site; the blue column on the left has production by a/r (arabica or robusta) worldwide.

Varietal

The coffee varietal is analagous to wine varietals like zinfandel, cabernet sauvignon, mourvedre, etc.  Arabica varietals include typica, geisha, pacamara, and bourbon, although there are many many more.  Stumptown has a good description of coffee varietals.  Note that robusta is technically a varietal of C. canephora.

Growing method (non-exclusive)

Organic, fair trade, shade grown, and so on.  I’m not going to go all Wendell Berry on you here; suffice to note that some of these terms have specific designations and certifications and others may tend to be more aspirational.

Other green coffee characteristics

You occasionally see terms such as “SHB” for Strictly Hard Bean (grown at altitude) or peaberry, for a smaller rounder bean.

Roast

Light to dark, reflecting the amount of time that the green coffee bean has been heated in a coffee roaster.  A variety of terms are used to describe roasts, including:

• “Full City” for a light roast
• “Vienna” for a medium roast
• “French” or “espresso” for a dark roast

Starbucks has popularized a very dark roasting style, presumably to stand up to the giant containers of milk that their coffee gets dumped into, but that dark roast tends to obliterate any other more subtle details in the bean.  You can use cheap beans if you roast dark.

A good roaster will be proud of their craft and signal it with terms like “small batch roasted.”  Roasting is very much a craft and good roasters are craftsmen.

Grind

Coarse to fine, again with a variety of not very standard terms (espresso, french press, drip, etc.).  Roasted coffee goes stale very quickly and roasted ground coffee goes stale quickest of all.  So if at all possible you should grind just before brewing and avoid buying ground coffee entirely.  Real coffee nerds roast just before brewing, but that’s a little hardcore.  The type of grind depends on the brewing method, so terms overlap between the two categories; espresso, for example, requires a very fine (”espresso”) grind.

Brewing method

I’m very primitive in this regard — I don’t own an espresso machine and make my coffee by pouring water from a kettle over a drip cone filter — but there are as many ways of making coffee as there are grains of sand in a thousand Ganges Rivers.  In this category, the term “espresso” is widely abused.  To me, espresso requires a machine that produces high pressure to force a small amount of water through a compressed puck of finely ground coffee beans, the moral equivalent of hard liquor with a crema.

Easily the coolest — in an obsessively Japanese nerdy kind of way — brewing method is the siphon bar at the Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco.  They source pukka single estate beans and all but that machine is out of this world.  I seriously underestimated it; I thought I could drink coffee, but two cups of that stuff and I was practically hallucinating.

Flavorings

Gross, in my opinion, but cheap beans wearing lots of perfume are available in flavors ranging from amaretto to vanilla to baked alaska.

Via, of all places, China, I learn of a new craft brewery, Hanger 24, in Redlands, at the municipal airport. So much for that ten pounds I lost by not drinking beer.

[2 April update: So we went on Saturday afternoon and found it, finally, after asking around at the airport, but they were away for the day according to a note taped to the door of the nondescript unmarked building.  So it's a soft opening.]

Via FoodReporter:

In an effort to promote the eating of kangaroo meat (tastes sort of like auk), the Australian kangaroo meat industry association sponsored a contest to come up with a more, um, palatable name, along the lines of ‘ham’ or ‘pork’ instead of ‘pig meat.’  The eventual winner, from thousands of suggestions, ended up being ‘australus,’ which is fine but not interesting.  My favorite: ‘jumpmeat.’  Also, you can apparently buy ‘kanga bangas,’ sausages made from jumpmeat, in Australian supermarkets.

We had a nice dinner tonight at The Linkery in San Diego, which has a locally-oriented menu.  Their menu goes to great lengths to describe the origin of each ingredient, so it takes a long time to figure out what you want to eat.  But by the time you do, you know the name of the farm that grew the greens and the variety of pomegranate and the breed of pig that went into the making of your bacon.  They’re meat centric, which is unusual for that kind of place, but I had a great sea bass entree.

Best of all, we were there with our kids and the kindly staff took them in stride.

I especially appreciated the coffee menu, which described the origin and roast of each of their offerings.  It’s a pet peeve of mine to see descriptions such as “Vienna roast” and “hazelnut” and “Columbian” and “shade grown” listed in succession; they’re all different variables and you could easily have a Vienna roasted hazelnut flavored (yuk) shade grown Columbian coffee.  The Linkery got it right and I ended my meal with a great apple pie and coffee from a Sr. Juan Leon.

Very hip of them, they also have a blog, with a useful entry on their categories of meat.

Tesco’s new medium-format grocery has a name, “Fresh & Easy“, and a new location in my neighborhood, at the corner of Mountain View Ave. and Redlands Boulevard, in Loma Linda, CA. I had thought that they were going to build at the corner of Mountainview Ave. and Barton Road, a few blocks away; more importantly, the latter was on the all-important route to the kids’ school. Still, I’m curious to see how this expensive retail experiment is going to pan out, especially in the rapidly changing demographics of the Inland Empire.

Tesco, the big British grocer, has a secretive $1b plan to open medium-format stores in the US, starting in the Southwest. I read something about it in The Economist a while ago (PR here), but just figured out that the distribution center, near the old March Air Force base, is going to support, among others, a store in my town of Redlands. They’re planning to rapidly build out medium format stores, positioned between Whole Foods and Ralph’s, say. There’s some question whether the format, which has been wildly successful in the UK, will work in the US, but Tesco has decided to go big quick and trust that their ability to rapidly respond to changing customer needs will serve them. Just in the same way that a British family will pick up dinner and groceries at the Tesco store near the train station on the way home, the new Tesco in Redlands is going to be on the route from our house to our kids’ school.

Redlands doesn’t have a Whole Foods, much to my chagrin (but good for my wallet), but it does have a successful Trader Joe’s and the usual large-format players: Ralph’s, Von’s, Albertson’s, Wal-Mart and Cosco. Interestingly, my neighborhood also has an 0ld-school family-owned medium-sized grocery, Gerrard’s, that would seem to be in the cross-hairs of Tesco’s plans. But maybe not.

This should be interesting.

…single estate, often organically grown, light roasted fresh coffee from Terrior. I can still remember the first time I had a cup of La Minita (Tarrazu, Costa Rica) coffee at George Howell’s old Coffee Connection store in Harvard Square in the early 90s. Mind opening. He’s still selling La Minita, although they’re done for the season. Here’s what I’ve got lined up next instead:

• Sing Addis Ketema Cooperative, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia
• Daterra Farm Special Reserve, Cerrado, Brazil
• Elkhill Estate, Coorg, India
• El Injerto, Huehuetenango, Guatemala SHB
• Maria Santos’ Los Sauces, Cauca, Colombia (great great coffee from a tiny 13 ha farm)

And he’s on a mission to wake America (at least) up to lighter roasts, alternatives to the dark roasted style popularized by Starbucks. I suppose Starbucks roasts that way so that their coffee retains some flavor in their milk drinks.

The emphasis on single estates, of course, is an echo of vineyards and he uses the language of wine tasting to describe these coffees.

George Howell is the Emmet Eiland of coffee. More on this later.

This principle states that an ‘ethnic’ restaurant offering foods of two nearby countries will always be operated by people from the less-well-known of the two. Thus, “Indian and Bangladeshi Food” means an Indian restaurant operated by Bangladeshis and “Mexican and Salvadoran Food” means Salvadorans running a restaurant that may or may not serve Mexican food.

No Indian is going to say their restaurant serves Bangladeshi food, but the inverse is true because, they correctly assume, no one in the US knows what Bangladeshi food is.

We went back east for the holidays with the family, a trip that included some spectacular meals, notably my mom’s Christmas dinner, my aunt’s caldo Gallego, a couple of visits to Empire Diner, lunch at Balthazar, and dinner at Gotham Bar & Grill. But when we returned home to southern California late on Saturday night, my dear wife read my thoughts as we drove home from the airport: In-N-Out Burger?

I was Paris recently for work but snuck away for a couple of wonderful meals (at Au Bon Accueil and La Maison du Jardin, both highly recommended), drinks at the top of the Pompidou Center, and a quick visit to the newly restored Musee Guimet. The Guimet is stunning, for the breadth and quality of its collections and the beauty of the space, if not so much for its interpretative materials. I’ve never spent much time in Paris and I don’t think of it as one of ‘my cities’ like I think of New York or Bangkok, but it’s obviously a great, gorgeous city and I wish I had the time — and the money — to make it mine. If you don’t believe me, or especially if you do, check out this panorama of Paris at night.

For the Indology nerds: there are a set of clay tablets at the Guimet, I think on the second floor, which have as their provenance a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir. The panels have raised images on them which are clearly not Buddhist. I suspect they’re Ajivika and I seem to remember an article, which of course I can’t track down now, describing how the Buddhists reused the materials from an Ajivika complex as the flooring in their monastery, as an insult. But I can’t pinpoint the source and it’s driving me nuts.

[Previously, a useful Paris map from Wallpaper*.]