Daniel's World of Coffee

Global Kitchen: Climate Change and Coffee

Here is an event upcoming for New Yorkers that promises to be very interesting.

Global Kitchen: Climate Change and Coffee

Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 pm

American Museum of Natural History

Linder Theater; first floor

Fee: $20

"Todd Carmichael, La Colombe Torrefaction Coffee Roasters & Blenders, and Danner Friedman, Rainforest Alliance, discuss growing coffee amid the realities of climate change at the American Museum of Natural History. Participants will learn how the coffee they purchase can help protect against deforestation, one of the leading causes of carbon-dioxide emissions. A coffee cupping will introduce several coffee varietals (plant strains) grown under different environmental conditions, from slash-and-burn farms to rainforests."

I'll be there. That's about the most interesting topic for a public cupping that I have ever heard of. For those of you that can't make it, I'll be sure to post here the next day... can you taste slash-and-burn?

For more information or tickets you can contact [email protected]

Coffee in the Dead of Winter

Has anyone ever been to Aruba? Because I'm curious about something. According to Wikipedia, Aruba has the second highest coffee consumption per capita in the world. What's up with that? Every other country in the top six is Scandinavian.

1 Finland 11.4 kg

2 Aruba 9.2 kg

3 Iceland 9.1 kg

4 Norway 9 kg

5 Denmark 8.1 kg

6 Sweden 7.9 kg

In the US, Chicago leads major cities in per capita consumption. Seattle is more coffee-obsessed, on the whole than any other city... not as cold as Chicago, but much, much darker. Check a map... Seattle is further north than Minneapolis, or Boston, or Portland, Maine. That means it is DARK in the winter time... practically sub-arctic in terms of the angle of the light and the early sunsets. (On that note, I notice Timothy Egan is bringing his non-hip, non-hippie, non-whiner original-style Seattle sensibilities to the NY Times op-ed page... It's so refreshing to have my hometown represented by something other than snark-harpies and tech transplants. Check out an oddly beautiful piece from yesterday).

When it's dark and cold, you want a coffee. Actually... you are reading this blog. You always want a coffee. But especially now. Coffee is hot and it's lovely. It tastes good in your mouth and warms your belly. It's strong and dark, and it comes from the tropics. It's roasted so hot it crackles and bursts in the drum, and when you grind it you smell chocolate and wood and fruit and caramel. The caffeine lifts your spirits; everything's going to be all right.

Today I had two cups. They saved my life. A sundried natural yirgacheffe. They are some beans I have been saving since last spring, when I brought them back from Ethiopia. I noticed they were starting to go a little yellow, so I decided it was time to sacrifice them to the belly gods.

Which brings me to my second point: winter coffee in North America. What a time to be alive as a coffee-lover! There are so many things going on, in espresso, in home preparation, in coffee shop concepts, in roasting, in pricing... it gets easy to overlook some really radical changes. We are spoiling ourselves.

But basically, up until very recently, if you wanted fresh green coffee to roast, in North America, in the dead of winter, your choices were Brazil and Indonesia. And generally not specialty grade stuff, either. In fact the one region most associated with high-grade coffee in Indonesia, Sumatra, is not available in winter, but in summer.

[For the uninitiated: Coffee harvests take several months, and begin in the fall and carry on through the winter in the northern hemisphere. Coffee must then be processed (much of it is processed while picking is still going on), and rested in warehouses. It must then be shipped, which can take weeks. Most of the good coffee in the world comes from countries in the northern hemisphere: all of Central America, most of East Africa (including everyone's favorites, Ethiopia and Kenya), much of Colombia, as well as Yemen, India, and the Caribbean. This means that the best time to get a wide variety of new, delicious, fresh coffees in North America is in May and June, generally speaking. The worst time has usually been oh, right about now.]

But thanks to work done by so many doing development projects in Bolivia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, that is fast changing. You can get, in addition to some lovely Brazils and Indos, some truly world-beating coffee from Rwanda, with all the character and spice of more famous East African coffees. Bolivian coffee, too has grown in leaps and bounds in the last five years... now die-hard fans of Central American coffee (like Daniel) can get a damn fine replacement in a cup of winter-time Bolivian coffee.

The glorious spring will return, bearing trees, bees, bonnets, sonnets, Guats, Sumats, and Sidamos. But winter's not so bad. I bundle up and I have a cup. And I rhyme shit.

Mercenary

(photo credit: Anne Nylander)

A few weeks ago I did a training for Intelligentsia in their super-slick Soho space. The trainees were a group of young people who had quit their Wall St. jobs to open a coffee shop, and they were enthusiastic, engaged, friendly, and seemed destined for success. As the hours slipped by and we sampled espresso after ever-improving espresso, I got to know them a little bit. They are Alex, Aaron, Katya, and the two Jeffs.

The theme of their cafe is Central Europe before the wars; Hapsburg days; the glory of old Budapest, Prague, Berlin, and Vienna. As they told me a little about the theme, I randomly asked if anyone had ever read The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig. Katya gave me one half-stunned look and opened up her purse; there it lay. Now that's a pretty obscure book... I knew we had all made a connection.

I helped Ost on their opening weekend, slinging espresso and pushing buttons. Secretly, that's all I want to do, but don't tell the guys that cut my checks. It's a really lovely place; I mean it. New York City, for all its decrepit glory, has a serious lack of inviting cafes. Places are often dirty, or they're really cramped, or (of course) the coffee blows. Ost overcomes all these problems. Already they are getting quite popular in their neighborhood. I went in on Tuesday merely for the pleasure of reading while I had a nice cup of Rwandan coffee; by the time I walked back out I had agreed to do a shift this coming Saturday, just for fun.

So come on by if you want to say hello and get an actual coffee. The espresso's lovely.

Ost Cafe

12th Street and Avenue A in the East Villagio.

(Get it? East... Ost...)

I'll be there Saturday, January 10th, from 10 to 4.

[... Stefan Zweig had a beautiful grace, and a heart the size of all Austria ... He was above all a man of culture and civilization ... World War One killed his soul a little, or at least it destroyed his childhood ... All that beautiful gilded civilization turned to systematic murder and brutality, the end product of which was political turmoil, economic depression, brutalist modern architecture, and finally another war, this one stronger and swifter than a demon spawn ... Zweig, a Jew, fled the continent in 1934 ... He stayed in the United States for a while before moving on to Brazil ... in 1942, in the darkest hours of World War Two, he and his wife Lotte killed themselves together, despairing of ever seeing civilization grace their homelands again; or perhaps they were just very tired ... ]

"Mon cheri ami, je suis content de vous avoir ici."