76% of cocoa comes from west Africa.  Another 17% comes from southeast Asia; Brazil produces the rest.  (Nominal values are in thousands of tons.)  This data is from the International Cocoa Association.

I’ve been collecting coffee/water ratios and experimenting on my own and I’ve decided that fifteen parts of water to one part of coffee is just about right for me, using a plain pour over method.  Coffee recipes — that is, the proportion of coffee to water — are best expressed in weight not volume.

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I just noticed today, but back in March, Ken Allen, the founder of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company, sold the brewery. I hope their products survive the change; I’m a big fan of especially their Boont Amber, a classic session beer.  The brewery is the 49th largest craft brewer in the country. I hope that Allen got a good price for his business; the fundamentals of the craft brewing industry look pretty good, given the expectation that craft brewing will supplant imported beer and in the long term replace it.

6th: Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Balanced food for body-mind-soul-spirit is our medicine! Full-truth our God, half-truth our enemy, hard work our salvation, unity our goal, free speech our weapon.

This dispenser is great for Dr. Bronner’s magic soap; you put in a little bit of liquid soap and a lot of water, and the dispenser produces a nice foamy lather that doesn’t, at least not yet, clog.  I’ve used and loved Dr. Bronner’s soap for years; it’s a camping staple and is credited with a very wide range of uses, from curing warts to cleaning the house to teeth brushing. I can’t speak for the warts but I’ve brushed my teeth with it in a pinch and use it daily as my shaving soap.

Out of the bottle the soap is really concentrated, though, and it tends to clog up other dispensers.  So I was glad to find this dispenser; for handwashing duty, this combination of foaming dispenser + Dr. Bronner’s works well in my family’s bathroom.  I get the soap at Trader Joe’s, but it should be available at any health food store, and probably Whole Foods too.

But who, you might ask, is Dr. Bronner?  Well:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/I7r0ogP91fA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

He has quite a life story, and a documentary, Magic Soapbox, about that life.  But the clip above, with the good doctor in full throat, is from a terrible Jimi Hendrix movie, Rainbow Bridge, filmed in Hawaii two months before Jimi’s death:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pPTP_JyQpl8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I forget why Dr. Bronner was there; the story around the Hendrix concert, which takes up way too much time in the movie, is very convoluted but involves a hippy transendentalist/back-to-nature cult that for some reason took over a beautiful old plantation estate in upcountry Maui. That estate, designed by CW Dickey, is now Seabury Hall, the high school my wife attended.

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap is also famous for its label [.pdf], which is packed full of the good doctor’s, um, sayings.  You can see for yourself at the handy-dandy Dr. Bronner’s Magic Quote-o-matic generator.

ENJOY ONLY 2 COSMETICS, enough sleep & Dr. Bronner’s `Magic Soap’ to clean body-mind-soul-spirit instantly uniting One! All-One!