picasso brothers cafe, chehalis, wa

went with my cousin to picasso brothers for the first time yesterday on our way to the movies.  would have been content with decent espresso and was forced to make do with AWESOME.  had an 8 oz. double mocha, one of my weapons of choice for staying awake through a movie, and it was incredibly smooth, well-blended with a high quality chocolate, and the espresso was very sweet and mellow.  service was friendly and efficient.  i'm interested in trying out their food and cigar menus which  both look well above par. the interior design is good, sort of a 50's truck stop meets urban hipster feel, so lid well-chosen fixtures (lights, faucets, etc.), quite clean and uncluttered, plenty of seating, music not too loud, and a great outdoor patio.  and who can beat a retro-styled neon sign on the top edge of the building that says "ESPRESSO - TOBACCO - BEER"?  nice to have a new place to hang out, i love santa lucia but i was kind of wearing it out.

www.picassobros.com
http://santaluciaroasters.com/

coffee for others

my current routine, when i manage to adhere to it, involves getting up around dawn, cleaning the kitchen, and preparing coffee for my folks.  it's one of my little ways of earning my keep while imposing on them for the time being.

making coffee for others is a habit that infuses the very art with a different quality.  there's a certain way my folks like their coffee made, certain equipment they prefer me to use, and then they tend to savor a small quantity of it over a long period of time, well past the gone-cold expiration point beyond which i would have thrown it in the sink.  they live by a different rhythm than i do, with expectations of life different from mine.  i'm the kind of foodie snob that complains about there being "no real bagels" in our area; they are the kind of people who prefer eating dinner on their laps in front of the TV.  i like to buy coffee from VERY small batch artisan roasters by the half pound; they like to stock up with five pound bags from the mega-store.  at many points it's an exercise in stepping out of my miserable berkeley CA-bred whingery.

i think i need to make coffee for other people.  it's why i worked behind the bar all those years, from seattle to boulder to wherever.  it's a social ritual much more salutary than mixing cocktails in that it doesn't lead to impairment or loss of dignity or empathy.  now i don't want to go denigrating alcohol here, as inebriation is pretty much the religion of many people i know, but having my own sad history with it i've acquired rather a jaundiced eye for the so-called "social lubricant".  sometimes you don't need lubriciousness in your relationships -- you need friction so you can get a goddamned grip.  you need a social stimulant.

drinking coffee with people is pleasant any time of day, but it's particularly pleasant preparing it and sharing it.  it has an element of taking care of others, of providing space for an interaction.  serving depressant beverages seems medical somehow, as if one were a sort of social anesthetist; serving coffee is kind of like sounding reveille.  people get drunk and riot; people drink coffee and foment revolution.  i think there's a difference.

my favorite coffee fanatic quote comes from the late, venerable alfred peet: "you wouldn't take a LaFite Rothschild and turn it into a soft drink!" when asked about flavored coffees.  i think about that when i think about the drink-to-get-drunk, coffee-to-get-wired, fast-food, GPC-smoking culture of convenience without taste [bourdieu's deconstruction of taste as a structural aftereffect of class distinction notwithstanding].  a very close friend who finds my interest in coffee amusing when not annoying drinks coffee daily yet claims to dislike it, saying "i need it to work."  this is, in my opinion, a good encapsulation of the calvinism-run-amok of american culture: there is no value other than utility, and all else is a distraction, an affectation, even an abomination.  because nobody in america is supposed to actually enjoy anything any more, much less relax over a long lunch, read a good book or watch a thoughtful film, we're all fat and miserable.

there's a false stereotype of the non-urban american as being chronically obese and unwilling to go outdoors.  in the impoverished rural area i currently live, on a trip to the county fair where one expects to see hordes of fat white people, i saw instead a lot of wiry, lean, muscular (though poor) people, because they are farm people who get up early, work their asses off all day long, and do stuff outside for fun.  the other thing i saw at the county fair was espresso stands and ethnic food.  not very long ago this would have been UNTHINKABLE here.  it was all corn dogs and root beer, or real beer, and that's it.  where once it was only camels or marlboros, this low-income rural area offers romeo y julietas.  what once would have been called a "tavern" now says "PUB" in eight foot letters on the roof so you can spot it from the highway.

so when people tell you that only petit bourgeoisie get into things like coffee, wine, scotch and cigars, or obscure niche genres of music, or films that aren't all about explosions, you should send them out to my neighborhood.  i've got some good ol' boys and gals out here who would beg to differ.  and who would send back their espresso shots for not having a copper-red cap of crema just as quickly as they'd send back a porterhouse for being overdone.

coffee in celebration of life

My uncle Pete -- father, sailor, mountaineer, vagabond, poet -- passed away recently, and at the reception following his well-attended memorial, coffee was served. Specifically, it was Batdorf & Bronson -- a small-batch artisanal roaster in Olympia, WA, and his favorite coffee purveyor. Purchased from their retail specialty coffee operation, Dancing Goats, the varietal on offer was Costa Rica La Minita Del Sol. True to what it says on the package, the brew

features a brilliant acidity and luscious body that combine for perfect balance and illuminate flavors of maple syrup and freshly squeezed orange juice. This coffee is sweet and rewarding, with a crystal clean finish.

Pete would have enjoyed this coffee, I think. He had a great interest in Central American culture and history, and as highly trained a palate as anybody in our industry could ask for. He was a person who tasted life. It was very satisfying to share this coffee in his memory, and it will always remind me of him.

Coffee Exactitude

Some very good, very smart small batch/specialty coffee roasters/retailers or other reliable sources of coffee information will lay out highly detailed instructions for the "proper" way to prepare the "perfect cup", as if they were describing some kind of science project conducted in a laboratory. Some examples:

Stumptown Brewing Guide
Peet's Brewing Methods
And my personal favorite:
The Coffee Research Institute

My brother the professional coffee roaster, who has a good 20+ years in the industry, had this to say when asked why his holiday apple pies were so good: [With a shrug] "I just followed the directions."* He sometimes reminds me of Spock from 'Star Trek', always fighting feelings of irritation with people who refuse to approach every situation logically.

The thing is, coffee is passionate stuff - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this right now - and as such, somewhat defiant of things like logic, step-by-step processes, and rules. It's not alone in the world of food in this regard. If you throw a barbecue and invite any men, for example, you will inevitably hear an argument about the proper method of cooking meat with fire. Now, our ancestors just rammed a stick in it and put the damn thing on the fire - there wasn't any talk of "Seven minutes to a side at high heat, and then let it rest in its own juices for at least three". Of course it may be argued that our barbecue tastes better than theirs did, although I can't imagine many of us going hungry for as long as they did, much less killing and skinning it ourselves.

The reason I draw this analogy is that for me, while I am certainly educated in the "proper" way to prepare coffee, at 8 or 9 in the morning it's a much more visceral thing. I'm scratching my scalp, yawning, trying to twist kinks out of my spine, and trying to hold up beltless pants while pawing through a cupboard full of medications, boiling water for my wife's tea and trying to fix eggs for a picky three-going-on-four year old -- I lack the facility to multi-task to the level of holding all of this activity while simultaneously grinding with an eye on the size and symmetry of each grain, degrees Fahrenheit of the hot water, etc.

As soon as I am able to grab time and space to do my coffee thing, after everybody else has been fed, dressed, etc., I pour some beans from my canister into my cheapo Krups touch grinder up to about here (a little more than what's needed to cover the blades); fill up the kettle with water from the faucet while counting to about ten or twelve; put it on the electric stove turned on high and wait for it to whistle; when it whistles, grind the coffee for about twelve seconds while shaking the grinder to ensure more-or-less even grind consistency; thump the grinder upside-down so that most of the coffee falls out of the grinder and into the lid; dump the coffee into the press pot, moisten the grounds so that they swell and increase surface area for better brewing; pour the rest of the water in, filling it so that the crema rises to just above the metal band, and stir; set timer for 3 minutes; when timer goes off, press down on plunger, and then decant immediately into a thermos. My wife thinks that even this routine is pretty anal, and makes fun of me for whining about how long the grounds are supposed to steep even though she's made me plenty of awesome coffee without much consideration of the niceties.

To make a long story very short, these things don't require much measurement or consideration; they are habits I have acquired, and the product is continually monitored by color and smell during this procedure. I can and literally sometimes have performed this routine half-asleep. Do you follow a recipe when you make eggs? Toast? Pour yourself a bowl of breakfast cereal? Actually in a sense I believe that we do - it's just a sort of wordless mnemonic that doesn't contain much in the way of precise measurement.

Two of my favorite small batch roaster/retailers in Seattle are Caffe Vita and Lighthouse - both of whom brew coffee via press pot and decant it into thermoses to sell in place of "drip". As I watch them work, they pretty much prepare the coffee the way I do, or even less carefully if that's possible, and it always comes out fantastic. Might it be better if they did it slowly, cautiously, step-by-step as ordained in the standard industry texts? It might. But if I wanted it that much better I would stay home and do it myself. Or better yet, visit my brother and make him fix us coffee.

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*See "Pies, Apple" in The Fanny Farmer Cook Book

The Best Coffee In The World

I'm not going to mince words, split hairs, or serve you decaf on this one. The best coffee in the whole entire world is Arabian Mocha Sanani [a.k.a. Mocha Yemen], and is roasted by Peet's Coffee and Tea of Berkeley, California. [Second place - and it's a photo finish - goes to beloved artisan tiny batch roaster Lighthouse of the picaresque Phinney Ridge neighborhood here in Sea-Town. Hell, even the Great Green & Black Satan can't seem to screw it up.]

I have brewed this coffee as espresso, through paper and gold cone filters both "Mr. Coffee" and "Melitta" style, and [best of all] in a press pot or "French Press". I've even made "cowboy coffee" with it - i.e., boiled a pot of water over a campfire and then thrown a few coarse-ground fistfuls in, straining the product through a paper towel. It holds up under any and all circumstances.

Most coffee that you drink doesn't startle you like Sanani does. Usually you start with that roasted bean flavor followed by an interesting aftertaste, or the acid burn of No-Doz, or whatever crap you dump in there. The coffee of Yemen, however, immediately comes over you like an ancient and tawny port, a smooth single malt scotch, and a good cigar all rolled into one. You can taste the unique preparation method of this particular varietal, in which the coffee cherry is dried onto the bean in the blazing Arab sun rather than pulped and rinsed off beforehand.

Drinking this coffee has all of the flavor notes one looks for in any coffee, rolled into one - the tart acid on the tip of the tongue, the creamy fatty esters on the middle, the toasty oxidation somewhere on the back and sides - and then ties it all up with a nose like a particularly velvety Chianti.

How do Peet's manage to knock this particular bean straight out of the ballpark? It's a mystery, it's magic, more art than science - I imagine it's got something to do with the excruciating care they take on timing the different stages of the roast from first crack to cooldown - like any culinary craft, it's an alchemical thing, requiring a hermetic and gnostic sort of wisdom that cannot be written down. However it is done, I've found their roast has an unbelievably long shelf life, certainly far longer than any roasted bean has any right to. By contrast, Lighthouse's roast is very immediate, very NOW - you'd better drink it all this week if you know what's good for you. Of course it's delicious enough to drink a bag full in a few days, but you don't want to rush it.