Caffeinated Calm

Dia de Candelaria y sol in San Miguel

2012-02-02T15:04:00.002-07:00

Today is Candlemass, or Candelaria, day in Mexico (Groundhog Day in the U.S.). Up north it's the day the groundhog lets you know if there's still six more weeks of winter; here in San Miguel it means time for the huge sale of plants for spring planting in Juarez Park. I told Erin that 70 degrees on February second is an excellent criterion for choosing a place to live! Another, less trivial, factor might be living in a place like this that has a cinema showing the movie Groundhog Day today not once but twice, on the quite correct grounds that it's the greatest Buddhist film Hollywood has ever made!

Here are some photos from the plant sale:

From here we went up to the local botanical preserve called El Charco, which is high on a hillside above town. There's an extensive collection of native plants, marked and mapped trails (a rarity in Mexico), a sweat lodge and a lake. It's the dry season here but you can get a sense from these pictures of just how lush high desert can be, in its own way. I'm sure than in October and November at the end of the rainy season the wildflower display here must be spectacular.

The quote from H.H. the Dalai Lama translates roughly as: "like waves on the water, the vibration of peace zones produces a movement that in the not too distant future, will create a new consciousness in humanity, a sense of peace."

The architecture in San Miguel resonates deeply with Erin and me because it's so reminiscent of the hill towns of France and Italy in which we've spent so many of our happiest moments. The culture is of course completely different, but when your environment is itself a work of art, museums seem almost superfluous:

We're here at the peak of high tourist season, but easily found affordable accommodation in a sweet little guest house. There are 7 rooms total here, each equipped with a kitchenette and gas heater, with wireless internet in the lobby. High-season price is 3500 pesos per week, which works out to $38 per day. Monthly and off-season rates would be significantly lower.

There's plenty of less expensive accommodation to be had that's just as comfortable but without the convenience and cost savings afforded by being able to cook. We looked at a particularly nice place close by in the 400 peso per night range, with apartments for rent by the month for even less. That kind of affordable lodging doesn't exist at Lake Chapala, though it must be said that on the other end of the scale San Miguel has any number of places where you can drop $300-500 a night or more for unbelievably opulent lodging, as well as plenty of restaurants where you can run up a tab of $100-200 per person without much effort. We'll have a drink or a glass of one at one of those places from time to time, but we always look at prices and value received through what I call the "taco factor," namely how many fabulous tacos al pastor or barbacoa you can buy for the same money. With 6 pesos being the going rate per taco and a glass of forgettable wine in a restaurant costing 60-70 pesos and an average main course 160-250 pesos the tacos usually win out.

San Miguel de Allende in winter

2012-02-01T17:03:00.003-07:00

We spent just three days here over a year ago and had always wanted to come back to check out San Miguel de Allende as a place to visit for extended periods or possibly live, knowing that health care and insurance costs could force us out of the U.S. for good at any time (if U.S. politics and banal consumer culture don't do the job first).

So many who visit San Miguel stay within a few blocks of centro, which, while beautiful, is full of expensive gringo-oriented restaurants and shops. Walk six blocks in any direction though and the real Mexico is everywhere, with great street food, ladies selling seasonal fruit, nopales and pepitas, and 6 cent taco stands that sprout like mushrooms at nightfall.

San Miguel had had a glorious fall with highs in the high 70's and lows in the high 40's right up until our arrival, when we were greeted by heavy rain and daytime highs in the 50's - which sounds perfectly fine until you factor in high humidity and zero heating in the often dark, stone and tile built hotels and houses we've been staying in. We were quite cold the first few nights, but eventually fond a lovely guest house with small gas heaters in every room and have been quite content.

We spent the afternoon yesterday with our friends John and Sonia Garvin and their beautiful daughter Valeria. John is from Canada and Sonia is a Mexico City native, and as a bilingual and bi-cultural family they have a deep love of Mexico and an exceptional understanding of the positive and negative aspects of expats living in this particular part of Mexico.

We went to the regular Tuesday tianguis (market). Having been to the huge abastos market in Guadalajara as well as other smaller markets in many parts of Mexico we had some idea of what to expect, but the low prices, freshness and variety of the produce and bustling prepared food scene in this huge market blew us away.

Here's the gordita place where we ate lunch. Gorditas are thick tortillas made in this case from either yellow or blue corn masa, stuffed with any of a dozen or so guisados (stews). We had barbacoa de res con chile pasilla, long-simmered beef with mild chile sauce, plus chiles poblano con queso, a stew of poblano chiles with little pieces of fresh cheese. Two gorditas apiece plus a glass of the rice-based soft drink called horchata made us very happy; the total cost was 60 pesos ($4.50).

Aguas frescas are the healthy Mexican alternative to soda pop, made from fresh seasonal fruit, water and sugar.

Here's our Sonia about to buy a kilo (2.2 pounds) of fresa (strawberries) for 15 pesos ($1.25). A couple like ourselves who eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables could easily buy a week's worth at this market for about 100 pesos (less than $8) and the quality and freshness of the produce is far superior to even the best farmer's market stuff (let alone typical lifeless, shipped-1400-miles-plus produce from Whole Foods or mainstream supermarkets back home).

After two years at Lake Chapala and lots of time since in small towns in Colorado and New Mexico San MIguel feels like a Mexican Berkeley or Santa Fe, culturally speaking. This week alone there are a dozen lectures on books and political topics of interest, superb flamenco, classical music and jazz and a dozen or more meditation, yoga and dharma get-togethers to choose from. A block down the street from us is a world class French bakery, while a just across the street is an Italian place run by a couple from Rome, a coffee house serving French Press Chiapas organic coffee, a first-rate Lebanese restaurant and a tacos al pastor place that's a worthy rival to our favorite place in Puerto Vallarta.

San Miguel is a city of about 130,000. It's as hilly as San Francisco, but the architecture is reminiscent of our favorite places in Provence. Walk 30 minutes away from the center and you could be in New Mexico, with lots of cacti, juniper and other hardy small trees and vast vistas. Some say the place is too gringo-ized, but the 5-10,000 of us who inhabit the place are hardly noticeable for the most part, and the gringos we've met here seem to be genuinely excited about living in Mexico rather than cocooning in gated community ghettos and complaining about not getting enough U.S. cable TV channels as we've experienced at Lakeside and elsewhere. The weekly gringo-oriented paper, Atencion, is not only well-written but also completely bi-lingual, which speaks volumes about the foreign community here (check out their web site at http://www.atencionsanmiguel.org/).

We were particularly interested to check out the dharma scene here, having stayed at a meditation center last time we visited as well as corresponded with a well-traveled couple who live here and who've done more Buddhist practice and pilgrimage than just about anyone we know. We've attended a couple of sits and a dharma class at their meditation group and have been warmly welcomed by a diverse group of practitioners of extraordinary heart and intelligence.

World class medical care is readily available here at 10-20% of U.S. prices, and access to Mexican government health insurance is easy and free from the problems that folks at Lake Chapala have been facing thanks to a combination of the brokenness of the Jalisco IMSS system and an administrator in Chapala who's made excluding gringos from care her mission in life. A couple could live comfortably but simply here for a couple of thousand dollars a month all-in. The biggest cost difference I see between San Miguel and Ajijic or Chapala is there are so many more tempting cultural and culinary things to spend money on here, whereas at Lake Chapala (or small town America) the issue hardly arises.

San Miguel is also much further from a major airport than Lake Chapala: 1.5 hours to Leon, or more than double that to Mexico City. On the other hand, it's a 10 hour straight shot on the toll roads from here to Laredo by car, so you feel closer to the U.S. (although I personally join the Mexicans in thinking Texas in particular and the world in general would've been far better off had it remained part of Mexico).

San Miguel sees a surge in tourism on weekends, but it's mostly well-heeled and classy visitors from Mexico City (3.5 hours away) - a welcome contrast to the drunken partying of the "Guad. Squad" as the weekend invaders from Guadalajara to Lake Chapala are called. While Lake Chapala already is a de facto suburb of the city of six million a half hour away, San Miguel despite its growth in recent years, stands alone, with wonderful road trips and wilderness adventures in every direction. There's no sense of being trapped in a geographical or gringo bubble as there is at Lake Chapala, hemmed in as it is by mountains on one side, a vast and extremely polluted city just over those hills, and a body of water and the ultra-dangerous state of Michoacan on the other side.

Also worthy of mention - and of serious consideration by anyone considering Mexico as a retirement or snowbirding destination - is that San Miguel (unlike Lake Chapala) is far removed from the drug trafficking corridors and narco turf wars. Of course that could change at any time and no part of Mexico is removed from the disastrous drug war's effects on the national economy, but San Miguel does feel like an oasis in that regard, and while there is plenty of petty crime and property crime locals an tourists alike feel safe wandering the streets and going about their lives.

Erin and I really love the easy access to mediation teachers and retreats and to friends and family in the U.S., along with the sheer ease of being in the country and culture we grew up in, but there's certainly an underlying dis-ease in knowing that we need to bring in money regularly (from jobs that are hard to find in an economy that shows no signs of improvement) in order to live a far more basic and less culturally and culinarily rich life than we've had here in Mexico. It's great to know that if we do need a long-term Plan B San Miguel offers all that we need and more.

comida corrida at Dianita's, Puerto Vallarta

2012-01-20T18:09:00.001-07:00

Just a couple of blocks inland from the beach and tourist traps in old town Puerto Vallarta are dozens of simple restaurants and taco stands that cater to the locals. This photo is of one of our long-time favorites, Dianita's. We've eaten comida here three times during this trip.

Comida isn't lunch but rather the main, the one essential, meal of the day in Mexico, normally eaten somewhere between 2 and 4 p.m. Comida corrida is a set meal consisting of a first course, main course and usually an agua fresca - one of the numerous local in-season fruits combined with water and sugar, for a fixed price.

At Dianita's the price is 55 pesos - about $4 at today's favorable exchange rate. The selections (from the lower menu - the other is a listing of a la carte choices), for those who don't read any Spanish, are: choice of lentil, pasta or cream of potato soup, then a choice of the following main plates, all accompanied by rice, beans and tortillas:

Little sandwiches with chipotle-flavored chicken

Liver and Onions

Long-cooked beef with beans, bacon and cilantro in its own juice

Chile rellenos - choice of cheese or mushrooms

Beef steak in green sauce (with tomatillos)

Grilled pork chops

Stewed chicken Mexican style with tomatoes, chiles and onions

Pork chop cooked with beer

The menu changes daily, with little or no repetition of items during our visits.

After being back in the U.S. for the better part of a year the portion sizes here were almost as much of a revelation as the flavorful, affordable food. We both had the pollo a la Mexicana meal today, with Erin choosing the lentil soup and me the potato. The soup was a small cup, the chicken was one small thigh (a leg and a wing for Erin) with a few tablespoons each of rice and beans.

Garden variety Mexican chicken has far more flavor than even the best certified organic free range birds in the U.S., and this lean bird had been stewed for hours until it was fall-off-the-bone tender. We left satisfied but not stuffed.

This menu underlines the huge gulf between the fatty, unhealthy Tex Mex stuff that passes for Mexican food in the U.S. and the real thing. No chips and salsa, portions that are about a third the size of those in the U.S., no melted cheese glopped over everything. For us as New Mexico residents there's another welcome contrast: great variety of dishes and real skill in cooking, vs. the endless plates of mediocre red and green chili (and nothing else) that pass for "Mexican" food in our part of the U.S.

We've splurged a couple of times on gringo-oriented food during our time here, but otherwise have fallen into a happy pattern of breakfast of granola, local yogurt and fresh fruit on the mirador of our hotel around 9:30, comida corrida around 2 and some fabulous tacos from one of the innumerable street stands within a 5 block radius of our hotel washed down with a cold Negra Modelo. Our comfy hotel with wi-fi is 350 pesos ($27) per night and our total daily meal costs have been running $12-13 per person. We walk everywhere here - easily 3-4 miles a day - but the local bus at 50 cents a ride is certainly an option. Of course PV is full of wonderful things to blow money on, but it's pretty amazing to us how easy it is to get by with baseline expenses in the $55-70 per day range for a couple, in one of the best-known resort areas of Mexico at the peak of high season. It's quite a contrast to the U.S., where we feel lucky to score a passable hotel room on Priceline or Hotwire for what we spend for everything here.

New Year's resolution

2012-01-01T18:37:00.001-07:00

In the context of this blog specifically and writing generally, my resolution for the new year is to simply try to put this wonderful post (and mnemonic device) by Shaila Catherine into practice:

http://blog.imsb.org/?p=244

I don't think I'll ever achieve even the beginning levels of the practices she describes in her phenomenal new book/meditation manual Wisdom Wide & Deep, but this I can do. Doubtless there'll still be a few critical comments on the coffee business from time to time, but I'll do my best to make sure they're constructive.

One among many things to be grateful for

2012-01-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

I'm spending some of this first day of the new year catching up on 2011 and doing some planning. Three years ago we threw in the towel on our complex and supposedly conservative slice-and-dice investment allocation and converted to the Permenent Portfolio.

It took me a year before that of reading and mulling to come around to accepting this allocation and it's exceeedingly contrarian approach. It didn't help matters that the porfolio's creator was also a famous Libertarian and that some who subscribe to it probably have two year's worth of MRE rations and a gun collection stashed in a culvert in northern Montana. Still, it works, and after looking at finance boards full of far smarter and wealthier people than me posting year end results that are break-even or worse, I feel blessed. Here are the numbers for the PP and a good overview of the broader market:

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2012/01/01/permanent-portfolio-2011-results/

Now if we can just stop squandering our returns on moves!

The Practice of the Wild

2011-12-24T13:57:00.001-07:00

The title of this post is from an excellent book of essays by Gary Snyder that was published in 1990. It's also the name of a documentary on Snyder (interviewed by novelist and poet Jim Harrison), which we just watched a few nights ago.

The film and the book that accompanies it are full of rare photos of Snyder in his serious Zen student days in the 50's, the heady early days of the counterculture in San Francisco and much else. It made me want to go back and re-read some of his poems and essays, which were hugely influential for me in the early 70's. So much that has happened since, from the Buddhist peace movement to deep ecology and the vital importance of supporting local economies, would be unthinkable without Snyder's work.

While I was reading all of this I was also struggling to come up with a concise response to a well-meaning but naive article extolling the virtues of vegetarianism in the most recent issue of Inquiring Mind magazine. The issues involved are vast and complicated. As luck would have it, I found that Snyder had long ago summed things up better than I could have hoped to, in the last essay in his book:

"Everyone who ever lived took the lives of other animals, pulled plants, plucked fruit, and ate. Primary people have their own ways of trying to understand the precept of non harming. They knew that taking life required gratitude and care. There is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death. Some would take this as a sign that the universe is fundamentally flawed. This leads to a disgust with self, with humanity, and with nature. Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than the pain and suffering that is in the existential conditions they seek to transcend.

The archaic religion is to kill god and eat him. Or her. The shimmering food-chain, the food-web, is the scary, beautiful condition of the biosphere. Subsistence people live without excuses. The blood is on your own hands as you divide the liver from the gallbladder. You have watched the color fade from the glimmer of the trout. A subsistence economy is a sacramental economy because it has faced up to one of the critical problems of life and death: the taking of life for food. Contemporary people do not need to hunt, many cannot even afford meat, and in the developed world the variety of foods available to us makes the avoidance of meat an easy choice...Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.

Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time. We looks at eggs, apples, and stew. They are evidence of plenitude, excess, a great reproductive exuberance. Millions of grains of grass-seed that will become rice or flour, millions of codfish fry that will never, and must never, grow to maturity. Innumerable little seeds are sacrifices to the food chain. A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from each, air, water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive ourselves.

We too will be offerings - we are all edible. And if we are not devoured quickly, we are big enough (like the old down trees) to provide a long slow meal to the smaller critters. Whale carcasses that sink several miles deep in the ocean feed organisms in the dark for fifteen years. (It seems to take about two thousand to exhaust the nutrients in a high civilization)."

Fast forward 21 years to today and one finds a more detailed, albeit less cosmic, perspective on the same issues here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/eating-animals/250179/#.TvEuU7skPjN.facebook

The common thread seems to be looking unflinchingly at the depth of our interdependence with other life forms, reallizing that both plants and animals are sentient, and real - which is to say non-conceptual, non-urban - experience of where food comes from. It's the Jeweled Net of Indra writ large, in the way that hunter-gatherer societies always knew it.

Holiday Gifts for Coffee Lovers

2011-12-17T13:44:00.010-07:00

Recently I read a couple of nice posts by Ecco Café's Andrew Barnett and Counterculture's Peter Giuliano on home coffee brewing set-ups for holiday gift giving. Their recommendations were excellent but I noticed that neither seemed to have a particular user or size of household in mind, and it seems to me one size doesn't fit all. So here's another take on the topic.

Most versatile overall choice: An Aeropress. Makes a concentrate that at full-strength is excellent in a caffe latte or cappuccino and that when diluted to drip strength makes as good a cup of coffee as there is. $25 investment and it's also far and away the best travel brewer.

Add a $20 Aerolatte Moo:

and for about $50 you have a simple way to brew a delicious caffe latte or cappuccino. Clearly the Aeropress is no La Marzocco and the Aerolatte no precision milk steamer, but for the vast majority of folks out there who just want strong smooth coffee with frothy milk this is a far more realistic option than spending a couple of grand on a decent home espresso machine and grinder combo.

Speaking of grinders, it can't be said often enough that next to using enough coffee grinding your own beans at home just before brewing is the best way to exponentially improve the quality of your coffee. But in reading a lot of the coffee press lately it's easy to get the impression that a $200 Baratza grinder is the least expensive acceptable option.

Realistically for most brewing methods a basic blade grinder is sufficient albeit not optimal and still gets you the quantum leap from pre-ground coffee that's stale in a day to whole beans that last a week or more. A big step up from these $20 choppers - and all the grinder anyone needs at home unless they've got a professional quality espresso machine as well - are the $70 conical burr grinders from Cuisinart and Bodum. I especially like the new Bodum Bistro because it has a borosilicate glass grounds container that's much better at minimizing static cling than the plastic found on most grinders:

Anyway, for single person or couple who drink only a cup or so of coffee at a time the Aeropress plus a grinder seems to be the most useful set-up - and can be had for less than half the price of the aforementioned Baratza grinder alone, which wonderful as it is at $200 costs more than most consumers I know are willing to invest in their entire home coffee brewing set-up.

For a more meaningful quantity of drip strength coffee you want a brewer of a least a 1 liter capacity. The best set up by far remains the 1 Liter Nissan Thermos with #6 filtercone I've recommended previously (http://caffeinatedcalm.blogspot.com/2011/06/brewing-great-coffee-at-home-without.html). You can buy this for about $60 all-in - or spend five times as much for the luxury of automating the process via the Technivorm Moccmaster, the only home electric drip brewer worth owning.

In either case you've got a far superior set-up to the sundry Hario V60's, Chemexes and the like recommended elsewhere, since at one liter you're brewing just enough coffee to have the ideal 4-6 minute grounds:water contact time the drip method really requires - meaning you can forget about narrow-necked Japanese kettles, weighing your brew water and other such arcana better left to your local professional barista (or forgotten about altogether). Plus, since you're brewing into a double wall stainless steel thermos rather than a Hario or Chemex glass carafe you'll enjoy something else users of these methods won't experience: coffee that's hot rather than lukewarm to begin with, and that stays that way.

For those who want a more refined cup still - as well as for anyone who like me lives at high altitude - far better than fussing around with single cup drip brewers would be to invest the time and money in a delicate but incomparable vacuum pot. While the classic and expensive Cona is the best of the best of these, a more realistic choice that won't have you in tears when the inevitable happens and you break part of it is the venerable Bodum Santos at $90:

With no paper filter to absorb flavor and add undesirable ones of its own and a brewing temperature that by design is optimal throughout the brew cycle the vacuum pot is to even the best drip coffee what a well-recorded CD is to an old cassette tape in terms of clarity and precision of flavor and aroma. The Santos gets my nod over other alternatives because of its relative durability and, again, because it's designed to brew a full quart of coffee (though lesser amounts are fine), making it a viable choice for everyday use for 2-4 coffee lovers in a household.

What about the venerable French Press? Clearly the best are the double-wall stainless steel models made by Frieling as well as the Bodum Columbia, both of which can be preheated with boiling water to overcome the rapid heat loss during brewing that plagues glass models. You also really want to have a burr rather than blade grinder and keep the grind coarse for this method, in order to keep fine particles (aka sludge in the brew) to a minimum, and far more than for paper filter drip you want to brew only what you'll drink in 15-20 minutes since the fine particles and oils in the finished brew keep right on brewing as you sip. Still, if you favor coffees whose provinence and roast style showcase body and richness over aroma and acidity (e.g. full-city+ Sumatra, Sulawesi, Ethiopian Harrar, Yemen Mocha and the like) this may still be your go-to brewing method. Don't let the fact that it (along with coffees of the sort I just mentioned) have been shelved by some of the one-cup Hario'd drip persuasion stop you from liking what you like.

So this blonde walks into a Starbucks.....

2011-12-07T09:14:00.002-07:00

Okay it's not the lead-in to a bad joke, but like pretty much every other new product announcement out of Starbucks in the past couple of years it does read like one. Utterly lacking in a sense of humor (as Starbucks in general and Howard Schultz in particular are), their gift for unintentional humor continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

The latest bit of mirth is the announcement of the introduction of Starbucks Blonde Roast. Here's the story from the Seattle Times and one from the company (make sure to watch the hilariously self-congratulatory video):

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016540546_sbux19.html

http://blogs.starbucks.com/blogs/customer/archive/2011/10/18/introducing-starbucks-174-blonde-roast.aspx

Now as someone who's been a customer of the company for 35 years and who roasted coffee there back when they had only 9 stores this latest bit of marketing-driven mediocrity is full of ironies. The first thing that comes to mind is here is yet another example of how you don't do well what you're dragged kicking and screaming into doing. This supposedly "light" roast, according to the company blog piece, is arrested during second pop - so it's a full city+ or light Vienna roast, still quite dark. I get the sense that roasting at Starbucks has consisted of pushing a button on a Scolari video console for so long now that any visceral understanding of the actual roast process has long since left the building.

Another layer of irony is that back in 1993 Starbucks bought the best supplier of moderately-roasted coffees in the country, Boston's Coffee Connection, and had every opportunity (as well as the explicitly stated intention) to offer their exquisite full-flavor roasted single origin coffees to the sizable number of consumers with more interest in the taste of terroir than charcoal. As a peace offering at the time of that acquisition there was a trial run of Starbucks drip coffees being offered as a choice in Coffee Connection stores in Boston and vice versa, and predictably the Starbucks customers enthusiastically embraced the taste of real coffee while the dark roasts in the CC stores bombed. Perhaps that was the moment they decided to kill the brand and wonderfully rich culture they'd bought, which of course happened in short order.

Going back further the great rivalry in Seattle in the early days was between Starbucks and Stewart Brothers/The Wet Whisker (aka Seattle's Best Coffee or SBC). When I was learning how to roast the Starbucks way in the early 80's, I was warned to always err on the dark side, lest I inflict upon the world a sour, cereal-like SBC roast. I have fond memories of paying an anonymous visit to the Stewart Brothers store in Seattle's University District in the company of ace roaster Michael Dice, who innocently asked the employee behind the bar what he thought of Starbucks as he was paying for his SBC Costa Rican. "Oh, they just buy cheap coffees and burn them," was the reply, and Michael, thinking of the warehouse full of Costa Rica Bella Vista and Guatemala Antigua San Sebastian he worked in memorably replied, "actually we buy very expensive coffees and roast them just right."

For those coffee professionals reading this I'll mention that Starbucks was one of the first specialty coffee roasters to acquire an Agtron roast measurement meter, and the acceptable range (these are all ground coffee numbers) was 33-35 for Full City (what the marketing geniuses at Starbucks later re-named The Starbucks Roast), 30-32 for espresso, 25 for Italian Roast and below 20 (18 or lower ideal!) for French Roast. Now that's a narrow - and dark - range for sure, but bear in mind that in the minds of a lot of people at Starbucks back then the gold standard was Peet's, where the entire product line at the time was in a range from 18-25 on the Agtron scale. For comparison's sake, when I became coffee buyer at Allegro in '93 and had free reign the roast spectrum ranged from 18 for French Roast to 72-73 for the most delicate Ethiopian Yergacheffe, with single origin new crop Centrals all above 60. (Parenthetically Carl Staub at Agtron calls 45 on the scale "the death of fruit" and for any brewing method other than espresso I think that's very accurate).

In the interests of fairness I should point out that across the board these were pretty exquisite coffees being roasted within an inch of their lives, and in many cases were of a quality that hardly exists anymore. I'm thinking in particular of Kenyans and other washed East Africans. One of the wonderful guys who taught me roasting at Starbucks said that the hallmark of a great Kenya was that is should be bursting with blackcurrant fruit and acidity even when roasted to espresso - and that was undeniably the case almost all of the time, not only with small auction lots but with the high-end Dorman blends that were always available. Today that kind of fruit has become elusive in even the most costly Kenyan auction lots, and to have any hope of capturing it when it is present the roast must be far lighter - in the city to light full city range at most.

I should also mention that this roast style, at both Starbucks and Peets, could only have been developed in symbiosis with two other factors: naturally soft water in both company's hometowns and a preference for pressurized brewing methods. Soft water makes the slight acidity left in such deeply-roasted coffee perceptible, and drinking what you're roasting through nothing but French Presses and, especially, espresso machines, highlights the acidity that does remain just as surely as hard water and/or paper filter drip blunts acidity and calls for far lighter roasting for balanced flavor in the finished cup.

During my years at Starbucks I often - unsuccessfully - campaigned for much more tasting of our coffees in the cupping room on commercial and residential drip machines and formulation of our roasts and blends for that real world consumer reality. I finally realized what a lost cause this was when one of the founders of Starbucks mentioned that he'd only drunk our single origin coffees as straight shots out of the La Marzocco espresso machine in his kitchen for the past year, and as a result of that steady diet was finding our roasts pretty darn acidic!

Getting back to the original news item, Starbucks Blonde Roast is just the latest airheaded (sorry) idea from a company that is clearly completely adrift when it comes to any sense of competitive differentiation, let alone pride or respect for its own history. What made Starbucks and Peets (and for that matter The Coffee Connection and so many others from that era) great was a clearly defined style and a completely unwillingness to compromise it. It's almost impossible to believe that this is the same company that insisted on delivering just-roasted coffees three days a week to its stores and mandated that every bean be sold in a week, or that conducted a year-long blind taste comparison of just roasted and valve-bagged coffees among its tasters and store management in order to establish freshness standards for packaged beans. A company that dismissed light roasts, flavored coffee, Kona and Jamaican Blue mountain as the provenance of the First Colonies and Superior Coffees of the great unwashed in the Midwest. A company so concerned with integrity and authenticity that it offered Revolutionary Mocca Java ("what's revolutionary is we tell you what's in it") during frequent periods of ICO and US trade embargos with Yemen that kept us from offering the authentic item. From that to a corporation that clumsily attempts to have something for everyone while standing for nothing, in only a few short years.

If there is a method to the Blonde Roast madness maybe it's that someone at Starbucks has read the global warming writing on the wall and realizes that the dense, high-acid coffees that were the foundation of the old roast style are well on their way to becoming a thing of the past. "Our roast requires our coffees and our coffees require our roast," was an oft-repeated internal mantra back in the day. As the cycle comes full circle I guess the green coffees available require the roast style of Stewart Brothers - or The Coffee Connection? - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that particular second coming.

One-of-a-kind coffee worth going out of your way to taste

2011-12-04T09:31:00.001-07:00

Here's a photo of a kolam painted on the street in Pondicherry, India, from a lengthy trip through India and Sri Lanka we did 6 years ago. Even for a seasoned third-world traveller India is tough travel, but I've wanted to go back ever since. The direct encounter with humanity's highest highs and lowest lows turns travel there into a pilgrimage and brings one face-to-face with one's attachments, aversions and preconceptions like nothing else.

Indian coffee is something that first came into my life when I was an entry-level roasting plant worker at Starbucks in the early 1980's. The wonderful coffee buyer Jim Reynolds had been presented with a small lot of Indian coffee that had the body of a good Estate Java (and good examples of that coffee were rare and getting rarer at that time), but with a captivating aromatic profile that included nuances of black pepper, cardamom, clove and several other notes I couldn't put a name to.

It turned out that kind of coffee was and perhaps still is a rare anomaly amidst a sea of uninteresting to atrocious mostly dry-processed Indian coffees cupped since then, but the experience was haunting enough to make any taster keep searching. It didn't help matters that the only Indian "specialty" coffees promoted in the intervening years were the rivetingly defective "Monsooned Malabar" and a few manicured robustas for adding crema to espresso blends.

At Allegro we had several years of good experiences with washed Indian coffees bearing such names as Cauvery Peak and Pearl Mountain, and those coffees were life-savers during those years as substitutes for problematic Estate Javas, providing body without funk and some degree of the aforementioned spice notes.

A couple of days ago I was fortunate to taste an extraordinary Indian coffee called Poabs Organic Seethargundu Estate, which was just added to the offerings at Sweet Maria's. As usual with them there's a ton of info on the coffee and a description of it that really can't be improved upon:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.asia.india.php?coffee=IndiaPoabsOrganicSeethargunduEstate2011#IndiaPoabsOrganicSeethargunduEstate2011

So here you have a coffee that really has it all: a unique flavor profile that's broadly appealing, without the divisiveness of, say, an extremely acid Kenya or a wild or earthy natural. It's not only organic, it's certified Biodynamic - something I've only encountered at the old Santa Catarina and Nueva Esperanza fincas in Chiapas many years ago, and a story in itself. It's even seasonally appropriate, with an autumnal richness of flavor at many degrees of roast. The only downside of tasting it is that while it's an exemplary Indian coffee, it's anything but a typical one, so if you like it you may well join the ranks of the perpetual searchers once it's gone, possibly waiting for years to taste anything like it again.

Kudos to Sweet Maria's for going out on a limb to bring this kind of coffee to the market. Self-deprecating as they are about home roasting and their own efforts, the breadth and depth of their selections represent an ideal that to the best of my knowledge no roaster-retailer in the U.S. comes close to rivaling, while their information-packed web site makes books on coffee (including my own out-of-date tome) into relics. Amazing and inspiring.

Tasting Coffee vs. Drinking It

2011-11-29T11:04:00.004-07:00

I was about to delete my unnecessarily harsh post about some coffee experiences in L.A. but it continues to generate comments that may be of some help so will leave it up. I'll do my utmost from here on to be more positive and to make sure critical comments are constructive.

Nicholas Cho from Wrecking Ball roasters had a great article in a recent issue of SCAA's Coffee Chronicles that deals with the age-old and hotter-than-ever topic of the tension between coffee connoisseurship and the kind of coffee beverages customers actually drink:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/62935061/Doing-Good-and-Making-Change-Chronicle-Issue-4

My principle passion ever since I first started tasting and roasting good coffee has been to break down the barrier between the cupping room and the retail coffee customer - to give them the opportunity at least to taste the kind of coffees professional tasters take home to drink, rather than the blends and dark roasts that roasters historically have made their money selling. I know that same passion is alive and well among many roasters and baristas in today's specialty coffee community, which is exciting and inspiring.

Long ago I learned that this kind of education has to start with store staff. One has to make a distinction between tasting coffee, which is a skill one develops primarily to help others, and drinking it, which is for one's own pleasure. Whether one is talking coffee, tea, wine, whatever, the old adage about a connoisseur being someone who can say "that's very good - and I don't like it" needs to be remembered.

To build confidence in tasting I like to start off with a representative coffee from each of the most important growing regions: a top washed Central American coffee, an excellent Kenya auction lot or perfumey Ethiopian, a Yemen or Ethiopian Harrar and a classic Sumatra or Sulawesi. Back in the day I'd have used a French Press to brew these, but with better technology available would choose a 1 liter Nissan thermos and filtercone setup like this:

or an Aeropress for a small-scale tasting today. While the brewing method is obviously important, I've found over the years that the most important thing to remember in such tastings is to pour the samples into sampling cups kept under one's control and to not permit any tasting until the coffee is barely warm, explaining as one does so that while coffee has to be brewed with very hot water and served piping hot it can only be fully tasted when it has cooled (and our memories of its quality are, often unconsciously, based on the last, best, sip).

Another tasting which is arguably even more important than the world tour of basic origin-derived flavors above is one I call "the three ways coffee can be strong." For this one the ideal coffees are a light-roasted Kenya, a particularly heavy-bodied Indonesian such as an Aged Sumatra, and the darkest West Coast style French Roast (a Peet's or Starbucks sample with an Agtron well below 20 would be perfect). The coffees are brewed to the exact same strength - say 60 grams per liter in a drip brewer - and once cooled are tasted in the order listed. The revelation for first-timers, obviously enough, is that there is acid strong, body strong, and burnt strong, and of these three they and 99% of consumers have only ever experienced the last iteration of strong. Not only is this tasting eye-opening, but it makes the taster realize that all the coffee experiences worth having lie well outside the extremes of bland (cinnamon-roasted American canned coffee) and burnt (Starbucks-style dark roasts) that are still pretty much the only readily available choices in the mass market.

Such tastings give some basic tools to help customers find their way to coffees they'll enjoy, and here it becomes necessary to address the topic of additives. For those who invariably drink their coffee with cream and sugar why not steer them towards the Vienna-roasted Sumatra that can handle such treatment? I'd no sooner suggest the city-roasted Kenya I prefer to drink to such a customer than I would recommend a delicate green tea to someone who'd grown up with Irish Breakfast.

Professional cuppers left to their own devices invariably end up doting on ever-more-refined, nuanced, terroir-driven washed coffees, lightly-roasted and recently harvested. Such preferences are a function of habituation, unique levels of access to coffees and - last not least - a professional responsibility to make sure defective (fermented, hard, dirty, etc.) coffees don't make it through the door.

Having had the responsibility myself for ensuring the integrity of high volumes of coffee blends where both consistency of quality and tightly controlled green coffee costs were key requirements, I count myself among those who developed such a strong abhorrence for the flavor defects that plague natural and semi-washed coffees that I gave up on drinking them - and tried to avoid tasting them - for years. Fortunately a good part of this time I was required to visit multiple Starbucks retail stores on a daily basis rather than holing up in the cupping room as I'd have preferred, and invariably when I did so I found our most seasoned employees and longest-time customers waxing eloquently about the joys of a particularly blueberry-like Ethiopian Harrar from two years past, or asking me when the Yemen Mocha or Aged Sulawesi would be back in stock.

The catholicity of taste and the appetite for fruit and funk of the folks running the retail stores and the customers paying the bills helped to keep me in line - something that unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case with the buyers for some of today's Third Wave roaster-retailers, many of whom only offer 3-4 manicured washed coffees as their entire single origin selection. I wish such folks would have the full courage of their convictions and simply ban milk and sugar from their stores. While they're at it, they could do the cause of terroir an even bigger flavor and yank the commercial espresso machine from the store, since that brewing method, by design, uses pressurized extraction and concentration to optimize the flavor of mediocre-to-awful coffees and simply isn't a suitable vehicle for experiencing the nuances of great ones (or to put it more simply, quoting Ric Rhinehart: "there's only one problem with an espresso machine: espresso comes out of it.").

Bad jokes and Swiftian modest proposals aside, what does seem to me to be critical is doing everything we can to get the pure taste of origin coffee into the mouths of consumers, to give them an opportunity to taste, be thrilled by, and support quality and uniqueness of flavor. Clearly there's no reason for farmers to labor to provide coffees with subtleties of flavor and aroma that won't be perceived by the consumer anyway due to blending, over-roasting and the like, and we (and they) are facing overwhelming odds given the dumbing down of specialty coffee going on at the hands of Starbucks, Green Mountain K Cups, instants and the like.

I think there's an excellent case to be made for banning blends and dark roasts altogether from one's offerings, and for championing single origins loudly in one's drip strength offerings as well as offering a staple or rotating series of single origin espressos, while scaling back the size of espresso drinks to as close to the classic Italian 5-6 ounce cup as commercial survival will allow, in hopes of getting at least a modest percentage of one's customers to actually taste the coffee in the drink.

Retail Coffee Revival and some ancient history

2011-11-29T09:54:00.001-07:00

Especially after my last post I realize I need to do a better job of acknowledging some of the great things that are happening in the coffee world, as well as sharing some perspectives from someone who was involved in specialty coffee back when there was still a pure retail scene, and who then experienced the convulsive changes wrought by the introduction of the beverage business.

Clearly one of the good things about the recent mania for pour-over drip brewing is that there's someone modeling a brewing method that customers can realistically use at home. I've seen many newer roaster-retailers taking advantage of the opportunity to have what they sell on their retail shelves mirror what they do behind the bar to one degree or another, but this new-to-me company from Portland's incredible coffee scene is clearly doing things on a much more in-depth level:

http://www.clivecoffee.com/

The good folks at Clive Coffee have done their homework and are clearly committed to carrying only stuff that works and doing the tremendous amount of education work required to explain why, for example, the only electric drip brewers they carry are $300 Technivorms.

My first exposure to really great coffee was on a visit to Starbucks' Pike Place store in 1977, where as luck would have it some employees had brewed up a plunger pot of Yemen Mocha behind the bar to drink. T'hey offered me a sample cup (no brewed coffee of any sort in the store, of course) and for the first time there was total correlation between smell and taste, with over-the-top complexity of flavor. Starbucks was 6 years old at that point, and was Starbucks Coffee, Tea & Spice (they had saffron and Tellicherry peppercorns, whole leaf tea and catnip for your kitty, at a time when none of those things were available anywhere else in town!).

Back then drip coffee at both Peet's (where the famous 50 cent cups from the 3 gallon urn at Vine St. were already a tradition) and Starbucks came to be seen as more of a sampling tool and way to build whole bean sales than a business, and in retrospect how wonderful it would've been if we'd left it at that. Unfortunately the first espresso machine was installed in a Starbucks store in 1985 (at 4th and Spring in downtown Seattle) and the transformation from roaster-retailer to fast food joint was underway, unbeknownest to many of us.

Along the way, many of us involved with coffee tried a lot of things to keep customer knowledge of and love for the taste of origin coffees alive. I rememeber well how successful we were with a program I called Strategic Drip Brewing in our Vancouver stores in the late 80's, where we had enough volume in the mornings to offer two caffeinated coffees plus a decaf. I chose a "mild" and an "intense" coffee for each day, so one morning there'd be Guatemelan Antigua paired with Sulawesi, while the next might feature an Ethiopian Yergacheffe paired with Kenya. Great-cupping, lesser-known coffees were the rule, and of course blends, Colombian and dark roasts were banned from the rotation. In addition, the stores offered pre-packed half pounds of the coffees being brewed that day at the register so people who liked what they tasted could take it home.

Unsurprisingly, the result of all of this was an employee and customer base that delighted in the variety of coffees on offer and a marked increase in whole bean coffee sales. A bit later on I had the idea of having someone on staff brew up plunger pots of one of the day's drip coffees and take it around to customers queuing in line or sitting at tables as free samples, so they could taste the same coffee brewed two different ways. We sold more than enough plunger pots to pay for the extra labor!

These initiatives ended up being a flash in the pan due to a lack of strategic planning and discipline in the broader organization. Retail is something you really have to work hard at in a beverage store context, because the business that's coming at you - or to you - is a queue of customers wanting drinks. We experienced a huge culture clash during the early days of forced integration of Il Giornale, the fast-paced espresso bars founded by Howard Schultz, with the extant 9 retail-only Starbucks stores, and much of that clash had to do with the entirely different sorts of skills required by the two businesses. The classic Starbucks employee was an over-educated artist and/or liberal arts major, and I well remember how the old employee questionnaire insisted that you describe (in writing) the best meal you'd ever eaten, the best one you'd ever cooked and so on - a way of screening out people who didn't already know and love food and have some palate education. Meanwhile on the beverage side the motto was Q.S.S.C. (Quality, Speed, Service and Cleanliness) and one made sure to screen out people who didn't drive or otherwise were uncomfortable with operating machinery, while looking for folks with high energy, the ability to multitask and plenty of fast-twitch muscle fiber.

The best of the early Starbucks stores were places like University Village, Pike Place and Bellevue that had strong whole bean coffee and retail brewing equipment sales to which small but very busy espresso bars were added. It's probably hard to believe today, but when I started with Starbucks there was a box of index cards kept near the register filled with custom blends of coffee developed for and with long-time customers over the years, and avid discussions on daily basis about whether the new crop of Guatemala was better than the previous year's, or whether the Hao Ya A Keemun was as viable a choice for breakfast as the second flush Assam that had just arrived. Stores like these were by far the most fun to work in, as one could alternate between the intensity of running a four-group La Marzocco solo with 25 people in line at 8 a.m. and the relaxed friendliness of demo'ing entry- to professional-level home espresso machines on the retail side.

Another thing that ought to have been written in stone were the simple espresso bar menus of those days: espresso, cappuccino, caffe macchiato, caffe latte and caffe mocha - small or large (8 or 12 oz!), whole milk or 2% (and the latter grudgingly, with much talk about whether it was too much of a compromise of our standards) and almond syrup as the only other permissible additive (though it was mostly used for "steamers" for children, as an alternative to hot chocolate). The default for the "good" drinks (i.e. straight espresso, caffe macchiato and cappucino) was a real Italian demitasse or cappuccino cup, and in bar training we (and I in particular, I must confess) very much encouraged the mindset of "the quality of the drink you receive will be in direct correlation with the quality of the drink you choose" - meaning that if you order a straight shot it will be prepared with the utmost care in a pre-warmed demitasse, whereas if you order a large Mocha you'll take what you get and most likely not know the difference (though it must be said that even those drinks were in fact prepared with great care, and topped with hand-grated bittersweet chocolate). More on this topic in the next post.

The Luddite Regression: A Brief Taste of L.A. "Third Wave" Coffee

2011-11-28T16:43:00.002-07:00

Had a rare couple of days in LA a couple of weeks ago, after an even rarer week in Santa Barbara. I have mostly very happy memories of growing up in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and San Diego, but due to cost rarely make it back that way anymore.

We were in the company of an old and dear coffee industry friend I've known for decades, so in addition to some wonderful food and wine in his company I got a brief tour of the current state of the art in retail coffee in the area.

LA's hip and rapidly gentrifying Silver Lake neighborhood is apparently as good at it gets these days for coffee. We went to Lamill Coffee (http://lamillcoffee.com/) first, a coolly luxurious space that was packed at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon. There's espresso of course and a very small (3-4 choices) selection of single origin coffees, brewed by a (too) wide choice of methods, from Clover (they have 3 machines) to Hario to Chemex to Vacuum pot.

I ordered a cup of Clovered Kenya ($6 - the $20 price for a small vacuum pot seemed a bit much!) and my companions ordered the proprietary Valrhona-based hot chocolate. The Kenya was a bit cereal-like from slight under-roasting but clearly an excellent auction lot. I think the other choices were a Rwanda and a Colombia.

The hot chocolate might as well have been Hershey's given how overly-sugared it was - about as far removed from authentic French or Italian hot chocolate as one could imagine (and I say this having had the genuine article at Valrhona’s home city of Tain l’Hermitage). Service was as unfriendly as it was uninformed, but apparently the food is good and the wine and beer lists were attractive. Lamill also does tea but the list is heavy on flavored and blended stuff and so lacks appeal. Lots of hand-tied show teas but not a single estate-grown black tea worth drinking.

The overall feeling here is of a place long on attitude and short on product knowledge (pretentious menu descriptions notwithstanding), though I have no doubt that customers paying more for a simple cup of coffee than a sane person would pay for a full pound feel they’re drinking the very best.

Next we visited Intelligentsia (http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com) where there was a line out the door, though that may have had as much to do with the tiny space and the half-dozen or so seats available inside the bar being occupied by laptop-enthralled latte sippers as it did with sheer volume of trade. The choices were equally limited here: Black Cat or Kenya based espresso drinks or Kenya, Colombia and one more choice that escapes me brewed by the cup in a Hario or Chemex.

The cost of the single cup of Kenya (made in a Hario V60) I ordered would’ve been $6.50, had not an old coffee industry friend (who now does sales work for Intelli) very kindly bought me my coffee, which was perfectly roasted though slightly inferior as a green coffee to the lot at Lamill. A very good but not great Kenya auction lot. I noticed the asking price for a roasted pound was $32 - a scandalous margin even given this year’s high auction prices.

Tasted an espresso here as well and it was the usual Third Wave case of a very well-selected and roasted blend brewed so as to be undrinkable except with milk (or by masochists). From the look and flavor it was the now-standard 20+ grams of coffee with a bare one-ounce yield: thick, bitter uber-ristretto that is the coffee equivalent of Herb Caen’s old joke about the ideal cocaine substitute (smear the inside of your nose with battery acid and burn a hundred dollar bill). It's particularly sad to see state-of-the-art machinery and skilled baristas offering something so atrocious when a reduction of about 5 grams in the dose and a half-ounce or so more yield would produce something worth savoring straight, instead of drowning in steamed milk

Intelligentsia is for me perhaps the extreme example of the snobbery, hypocrisy and narcissism of today’s third wave coffee scene at its worst. The spare menu (and insufferably pretentious web site) purports to feature only “seasonal” coffees, yet the coffees on offer were no more seasonal than many others that could easily have been available, from top quality Central Americans to Indonesians to Yemens or Ethiopians.

Given the volume they're doing they could clearly be offering a couple of excellent single-origin coffees batch-brewed in a top-of-the-line 1-2 gallon commercial brewer for a couple of dollars per cup (and with far better extraction and temperature, especially if they upgraded their grinders to a small roller mill), but that would of course involve factoring the interests of the customer and some level of concern for value into the equation, and why start now, especially with a line out the door?

The sad theater of employees painstakingly brewing individual cups of drip coffee when that method's whole raison d'etre is to efficiently brew a pot of coffee to be shared among friends perfectly mirrors the alone together isolation of the customers on their iPhones and Macbooks (all with ear phones!) sitting at the bar during my visit, drinking coffee together while communing with invisible others in the virtual world. This 21st century café is as removed as one could imagine from the rich tradition of the coffeehouse as a place for lively exchange of ideas and with it the creation of community.

Earlier in the day I visited a busy Peet’s in Santa Monica. The only caffeinated choice in the urn was Italian Roast, which I of course scolded them for even brewing (“the only thing worse would be French Roast”). Surprisingly they willingly brewed a pot of Ethiopian Fancy and in addition had a plunger pot of limited edition India Peaberry for sampling. The Ethiopian was perfectly brewed but as is so often the case these days simply couldn’t handle its roast, with only the slightest bit of residual acidity to mark it as something African. The India was a bit better but lacked the multidimensional spice of previous years, coming across more like a decent lot of Estate Java from years gone by.

On the other hand, the Peet’s was impeccably brewed on good equipment at a tiny fraction of the asking price of the other cups of coffee, by employees with actual training in customer service.

All-in-all what a wretchedly narrow range of poor choices these experiences represent. This kind of retail scene is a huge step backwards from ten or even twenty years ago, when places like Pannikin and The Coffee Connection were in their prime. No wonder consumers are throwing in the towel and going for their Dunkin' Donuts drip, Keurig K Cups or Starbucks Via. And what an opportunity for anyone with the temerity to offer fresh, moderately-roasted and professionally brewed coffee at a fair price.

Hafiz poem by way of Tara Brach

2011-10-31T09:59:00.000-06:00

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, "I Surrender!"

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think

You have a thousand serious moves

The Cat Walk

2011-10-23T18:43:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we drove up Hwy. 180 to an area attraction we've long intended to visit: The Cat Walk. It's a 1.1 mile trail that follows a river through a fairy tale landscape of water-sculpted rock formations, a wide range of vegetation and several microclimates. A good part of the walk is on metal suspension bridges, some perched quite high over the river.

I hope this small selection of photos gives some sense of how gorgeous this short hike really is. The drive up had its breathaking moments as well, with mountain vistas that rival the best of Colorado's San Juans juxtaposed with high desert vegetation.

The area around Glenwood looks to me like the most ideal place for a retreat center I've seen anywhere in the U.S. Land prices are quite cheap, you're fairly remote yet only 90 minutes from all goods and services in Silver City, and the climate on a year round basis is far superior to any place in Colorado or even northern California. There's a majestic power and sense of solitude as well to this terrain - easily as much so as other power spots such as Crestone, Colorado or Telluride.

We are so blessed to live here!

Settling in, venturing out

2011-08-27T14:59:00.002-06:00

Now that the house is mostly looking like home, we're getting out into the community.

The weather since we arrived has been such a blessing after the incessant winds and heat of Cañon City. We've had rain (with plenty of lightning and thunder) every day but one since we've been here, and one night we must've gotten a couple of inches in the middle of the night starting around 3 a.m., with so much lightning we were awake for hours. Haven't had that experience since Mexico.

Our friend Katy, who's lived here for 13 years and as a biologist and hiker knows the native flora and fauna well, has never seen it this green this late here. She recently took us hiking nearby on the Dragonfly Trail in the Arenas Valley.

It's flat to rolling all the way down to the river. Apparently this is prime horned owl habitat, but we didn't spot any this time.

Eagle-eyed Katy had to warn us not to step on what turned out to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of baby toads in the river bed, each only about a quarter inch in size.

The beauty of the land and the variety of hiking and biking options within a few minutes of town is mind blowing. We're slowly starting to learn the names of the plants - so different from what we are used to. Mountain mahogany, ironwood juniper, cacti and agave, delicate reeds and, amazingly to us considering it's almost September, wild flowers everywhere:

You can be 15 minutes out of town here and feel like you're hours into the wilderness. When you pause there's a sense of silence and peace here that's deeper and more calming than any other place we've lived or visited. No wonder the area attracts so many contemplatives.

Georgia O'Keefe of course helped make New Mexico's sky famous, but I must say it's well-deserved. We're at 6100 feet here but town itself is undulating and hilly, and the clouds and changing colors seem much closer to the ground here than in Colorado.

This is a typically complex cloud pattern, looking out from our front porch

Sunset

The Saturday morning farmer's market is a happening place, especially now with summer produce at its peak and chiles from Hatch coming in. Chile is of course serious business in New Mexico, and particularly in our area with the lion's share of the state's chile farming being little more than an hour away.

There was a line 20 people deep at the Albertson's supermarket last Sunday morning because 30 pound bags of chiles were on sale for $13 instead of $22, with free roasting. The limit was 2 bags per customer, and every cart had two bags in it. The chiles are stacked on pallets in the produce area, and are labeled mild, medium, hot and extra hot. The "mild" pallet went untouched, as you might expect. We think we may be the only household in Silver City without a dedicated freezer for chile - something we may have to remedy.

The farmer's market opens at 8:30 and you have to be there then to have any hope of snagging a local melon. Too many U.S. farmer's markets have so many non-food vendors (from arts and crafts to soaps and rugs) that food seems like a sideline, but not so in Silver City, where in addition to the full range of local fruits and vegetables you can buy pastured heirloom chickens and pork, local grass-fed beef, goat cheeses, organic herbs and local herbal tinctures.

It's the best farmer's market we've seen in the U.S. but today both here and at the local food co-op down the street they were conducting surveys to see how to do even better:

With too many daily hikes to choose from and larder full of green chile and pintos we're ready to venture out for music and art now, where again in sharp contrast to our former home there's so much happening we realize we need to be selective or we'll go broke and/or exhaust ourselves in short order. It would take a couple of days to scratch the surface of the local art galleries, and every weekend there seems to be some musical event or lecture or yoga workshop we want to attend.

We just joined Mimbres Arts, the wonderful local arts council that's won multiple awards at the best organization of its kind in the state. Next up on their calendar is a roots, folk and bluegrass festival called Pickamania:

Hopefully you can see why we wake up most mornings wondering what we did to be lucky enough to live here.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma: Graduate Course"

2011-08-21T16:00:00.001-06:00

"Last week I went to hear Noam Chomsky in Oakland and on a table outside the theatre I found The Vegetarian Myth. I've been reading it for the past week. I think it is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on. Or rather that we are on because of our abuse of the planet. It's a wonderful book, full of thoughtful, soulful teachings, and appropriate rage. My admiration for Lierre's sharing of life experience and knowledge is complete. Thank you."--Alice Walker

I just finished reading one of the most deeply unsettling books of my life, The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith. It's available as both a paperback and Kindle download from Amazon, where there are plenty of reviews. Here's the most balanced and helpful one I've found:

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=HerbivoresDliemna

Interestingly I first read about this book on the Simple Living web site when looking for something else, and was surprised to see a book that questions vegetarianism recommended on a site that surely attracts vegetarians and vegans disproportionately. The enthusiasm I found on that site was mostly based on people reclaiming their health, but The Vegetarian Myth is about far more than that. If the teachings of the Buddha are the most radical (in the sense of going directly to the root of human suffering) spiritual teachings, as I believe them to be, this book is the agricultural and dietary equivalent, going right to the root of problems that other, better-known authors (Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver come to mind) have addressed much more superficially (albeit with far more polished and less polemical prose).

Keith, a vegetarian for three decades and a strict vegan for 20 years, has written a book that is compelling on so many levels, starting with her obvious love and tenderness towards animals and the planet as a whole and her fearlessness in sharing her own journey and mistakes. As harried modern Westerners divorced from the realities of farming and its history our food choices tend to be made on a purely conceptual or emotional basis. Keith opens up a window into the Jeweled Net of Indra of our total interdependence with other species while exposing the depth of our betrayal of our planet like no one else I've read.

I was a vegetarian for only a few short years myself but despite including carefully-sourced pastured poultry and beef in my diet always bought into the idea of a grain-based, complex carbohydrate driven diet as the ideal. This book blew my mind and will change how we eat and what we support forever. Reading it brought to mind so many friends and family members with serious health conditions, ranging from diabetes to rheumatoid arthritis to gluten intolerance and celiac disease whose true root causes are made abundantly clear in its pages. This is a book that will make you sad, make you shake your head in disbelief and scurry to check its references, make you angry, and make you change the way you live. Everyone who eats should read it, and for the sake of their health and that of their families anyone who's vegetarian or vegan should read it immediately, cover to cover.

Gratitude

2011-08-17T14:27:00.002-06:00

We're mostly unpacked and starting to venture out into the community here. The sense of grace is palpable, which in my case is saying something since I'm one of those people who's usually so caught up in his personal soap opera that the obvious often eludes me.

We overslept but got out for a short hike on Boston Hill, accessing it for the first time from the south end of town:

Silver is as green as we've ever seen it, thanks to the daily monsoon rains we've been relishing ever since we arrived.

After our hike, we did our errands downtown, following our noses to parking lot in front of the fabulous Silver City Food Co-op (established 1974!) where this lovely young lady was roasting the famous chiles from Hatch, NM - chile capital of the world and only 45 minutes from us:

Next into the co-op itself for some shopping. The quality of the produce and the strong emphasis on supporting local farms is almost as inspiring as the soul and kindness of the people who work there:

Then on to our local tortilleria - something every town should have, but too few do (unless you live in Mexico!):

They have fresh corn tortillas daily, classic New Mexican blue corn on Fridays, tamales and enchiladas and respectable barbacoa (long-stewed beef for tacos).

By then it was time for lunch, so we headed off to The Curious Kumquat (http://curiouskumquat.com/), an astonishing store and restaurant run by our old friends Rob and Tyler. Part of the store is a phenomenal specialty foods grocery, while the other is a world-class (and I don't bandy that over-used phrase about lightly) restaurant. Rob Connoley, the chef here, is the rarest of rare birds in the food world, combining boundless passion and energy with creativity and (rarest of all) humility, kindness and humor. He's turning out food that would be the talk of the town in Berkeley or Chicago - in a tiny burg of less than 10,000, in the high desert, 3 hours from the nearest big city.

Here's the al fresco lunch we had today, thanks to Chef Rob and the farmers who showed up at Saturday's farmer's market (where we joyfully spent over $100 - a personal farmer's market record by a factor of 4 - on local, pastured pork, beef, chicken [heirloom poulet rouge!]) and veggies:

In the foreground are "dragon" green beans from the market dressed with olive oil, lemon and smoked almonds. Center of the table are Chef Rob's baguette - the best bread between Chicago and Berkeley (I kid you not) - with wonderfully stinky French Delice de Jura cheese, Reggiano Parmigiano and slivers of Beretta brand bocconcini salame, a few superb (and dirt cheap!) dry-cured black olives (both also from the Kumquat), and a couple of glasses of good Spanish red wine.

You might find cheese this well-selected (might is the operative word) at double the price at your local Whole Paycheck (Whole Foods) if you live in Albuquerque or Boulder, but forget about finding bread good enough to go with it. Even if you do, what are your chances of having something good enough for dessert to conclude a meal like this? We shared one of Chef Rob's chocolate chip cookies, which, like all of the pastries and baked goods we've sampled from the Curious Kumquat, so thoroughly French (and so delightfully un-American) in style that they brought tears to our eyes. Instead of sugar you notice the smell of good butter, and as you taste there's the richness of not chips but rather a pain de chocolate-like layer of high-quality bittersweet chocolate. To be able to have bread, cheese and baked goods of this quality without flying to San Francisco or Paris is amazing.

Erin and I both commented that there is no food business (retail or restaurant) anywhere we've lived (including decades in Seattle and Boulder) where we've had the experience we have every time we shop in or dine at The Curious Kumquat: total trust that anything we choose will taste great and be a phenomenal value. We're both quite frankly in awe of what Rob and his partner Tyler have done to create and build community here in Silver and can only hope to follow in their footsteps in some small way. We are so blessed to be here.

Our last U.S. home

2011-08-12T17:03:00.001-06:00

Nearly six months after determining that Silver City, New Mexico was the one place in the U.S. where we had a real chance to create a long-term U.S. home we are finally here!

Silver is a remote and quirky place with great natural beauty and some amazing people. It's in the mountains in SW New Mexico, nestled right at the foot of the 3.3 million acre Gila National Forest. Culturally and politically it's kind of a mini Santa Fe, with art galleries and strong progressive political and spiritual communities against a background of more conservative ranching and mining cultures.

The weather is about as good as it gets in the lower 48, assuming you can't afford Santa Barbara or San Louis Obispo (places we can't even afford to visit). "Four gentle seasons" says the Chamber of Commerce, and it's true: the forested hills and nearly 6000 foot altitude mean dry summer highs in the 80's and 90's with 50's and 60's at night and mild winters with less than a foot of snow and January highs in the 50's. The hiking and biking are unbelievably good, putting even Boulder, Colorado, where we've lived most of our married lives, totally to shame.

I have a very good chance to open a small scale coffee roasting business here, Erin will certainly find her niche doing massage, and there are lots of local activities we're eager to jump into, from supporting the wonderful local food co-op (established 1974) to the vibrant Mimbres Arts Council, the Tour of the Gila bike race and the yoga and dharma communities, which are strong and incredibly diverse for a town of less than 10,000.

Here are some photos of our house and town taken today:

view northwest from our house

our late model mobile on its own land. we aspire to be "high class trailer trash"

the zocalo or town square, complete with tortilleria and bakery

the food co-op and Nancy's, one of a half dozen places serving the local staples
of green and red chile

window display at Guadalupe's. The Dipa Ma book (the most inspiring bio you'll ever read) greeting us on our arrival confirmed "we are home"

our used '07 Toyota Yaris. We've looked for this bumper sticker for years.

I said "last U.S. home" in the caption for a several reasons. One is, we've been haunted by this place since we lived here in '05 and always wanted to come back. Another is that we are so, so done with moving - beyond weary, and really want to put down roots and just be. Lastly, there's a definite element of hedging our bets because we are all-too-aware that further economic implosion and/or health care and insurance costs could very well drive us back to full-time life in Mexico at some point, and when and if it does there'll be no coming back. That's not a prospect that exactly scares us - we love Mexico and our friends there - but we so want to make a go of it here if we possibly can.

Silver's remoteness is part of its charm, but also makes getting here quite a challenge. We're three hours from Tucson and the same from El Paso. There are a couple of daily puddle jumper flights from Silver to Albuquerque (a half hour flight vs. a 5 hour drive). On the other hand, once you're here the place is quite self-sufficient (though one of our local friends, in light of the many Trader Joe's and Costco runs that occur, sums things up by saying "everything you need is in Silver, but everything you want is in Tucson"). We have a guest/shrine room with a comfy bed and welcome visitors!

Not just a coffee blog

2011-08-12T16:36:00.000-06:00

Thanks to some buzz generated by a few controversial posts this blog, which started out as a way to keep friends and family in the U.S. appraised of our lives in Mexico, has recently morphed into a coffee blog. Curmudgeonly as I may be, I don't have any desire to make CC into just a place for coffee rants, so it's going to return to being a place for a more eclectic range of posts and its original role as a way to keep friends and family posted on our lives.

Many thanks to those professionally involved with coffee who've added themselves as followers and/or contributed comments over the past few months. I realized in retrospect that one reason some of my posts attracted such strong feedback was that we simply have no venue for critical, independent writing on specialty coffee. People are so used to infomercial style writing in the trade journals and fawning, uniformed praise in Saveuer or The New York Times that critical comments from an insider come as more of a shock than they ought to at this mature stage of the specialty coffee trade. We don't have any coffee equivalents to Robert Parkers or Anthony Bourdain - but we sure could use them.

I'll look for other opportunities to share my thoughts on the industry from time to time.

Road Tested Travel Coffee Kit

2011-08-06T13:49:00.000-06:00

For long road trips I've gotten used to taking whole leaf tea, an infuser and this compact, dual-voltage kettle:

http://www.goinginstyle.com/European-Travel-Instant-Hot-Water-Heater-P2308.aspx

Tea has an almost infinite shelf life compared to coffee, our longer trips have been in Asia where tea is the staple and coffee is dreadful, on and on.

I must say though that thanks to the good folks at Sweet Maria's I've gotten used to drinking the best coffees of my life - better even than those available to me during my coffee buying days - at prices that despite today's high coffee market are about on par with what you'd spend on good tea.

I balked at spending $75 for a hand grinder for travel, but I have to say the Pourex tall mill SM's is selling is worth the money. AND it fits right inside the Aeropress:

For minimalist travel if you know you'll have access to a microwave (you can boil water right in the Aeropress) or kettle this kit and some freshly-roasted beans are all you need. Grinding enough coffee for a 12 ounce mug takes about a minute.

Grinder + Aeropress: $100. Not having to drink swill at the in-laws - priceless.

Direct Trade and other buying models: some thoughts

2011-06-21T14:07:00.001-06:00

Visiting Origin, Getting Inspired

Over the past two decades there’s been an exponential increase in travel to origin on the part of small and medium-sized specialty coffee buyers. For those with a passion for coffee quality such travel is transformative, since they see first-hand the incredible amount of work involved in growing and processing coffee and the poverty, environmental degradation and sociopolitical challenges faced by third world farmers. One’s concern for quality in the cup quickly expands to include a desire to ensure quality of life for those who grow coffee and preservation and renewal of the lands in which it’s grown.

Honoring the farmer and the coffee: Passion for Transparency

On the roasting and retail side such travel naturally inspires a desire to honor the farmer’s work through greater transparency in both trade practices and how the coffee’s roasted and sold. On the business side this means negotiating either an outright or differentially-based price that rewards the farmer for quality and helps to de-commoditize an artisanal product.

The degree of roast chosen continues the impulse towards transparency by being dark enough to fully develop the coffee’s flavors, yet light enough that no roast process flavors intrude. In some cases this means two roasts: one in the city-full city range for drip and vacuum pot brewing, another darker (but still well within Northern Italian espresso ranges) that corrals the often-abundant acidity of the best coffees sufficiently for the high pressure extraction of a commercial espresso machine.

At retail, the old business model even in specialty was first of all proprietary blends promoted with much mystique, and then origin coffees identified only by country name. Taking Peet’s, one of the great pioneers, as an example, the menu board traditionally has listed only the country name (“Guatemala” or “Ethiopia”), and while a bit of further description of provenance and flavor was available in a brochure, the clear message was “trust us to select and offer only the very best.” This is in many respects a continuation of the old colonial model of the coffee business, where green coffee is anonymous raw material used by roasters to promote their own brand. In my opinion that’s the clear message at retail of such positioning, even though in the case of Peet’s I know full well that they’ve been buying superb coffee, paying excellent prices for it and doing a great deal of work behind the scenes to improve quality of product and life for their farmers for decades.

Contrast that approach with what you see at today’s leading “third wave” roasters. Origin coffees are sold by country and farm name, with cultivars used, altitude, processing method, GPS coordinates and every other detail short of the name of the farmer’s pregnant wife’s unborn child all clearly posted on the web. Florid flavor descriptions straight from the pages of The Wine Advocate abound, and careful brewing, often a cup at a time, is the rule.

Advantages and Challenges of Current Approaches

Buying models and scale of commerce

In many respects the ideal model for buying coffee is probably the Kenyan auction system (sans its historic problems with corruption). Ideally one would like to be able to cup samples of coffee from any farm in a country of interest, bid on it in competition with other interested buyers and know that the lion’s share of the proceeds would go directly to the grower. Lately a few elite farms (Panama’s famous Esmeralda Estate, for example) are conducting auctions of their own coffee, which while it isn’t a broadly applicable model is a great example of innovation, transparency and price discovery.

This is an entirely different kind of auction than the influential Cup of Excellence competitions, where tiny lots of coffees from a small handful of a country’s farms are bid on by juries composed of individuals with widely varying palates and skill levels. COE and the like are fantastic for promoting cupping skills both at origin and for buyers but they aren’t price discovery mechanisms, since tiny lots of coffee can and do go for astronomical prices that in no way translate to what a container (33, 500 lbs.) of coffee of the same quality might fetch.

Having been a buyer for a company that was large enough to bring in full containers of most coffees I want to underline this point with a personal story. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to be on a COE jury in Guatemala, where we tasted many excellent coffees. After the competition, I cupped three tables of top new crop samples at one of Guatemala’s leading exporters, and included on the table were trays of coffees from farms who’d also submitted samples to COE. Every sample represented a full container or more of coffee available for immediate shipment, and many, if I didn’t step up and buy them, were to be tendered in fulfillment of hundreds of containers of “generic” SHB (Strictly Hard Bean) contracts for Starbucks. There were at least a half-dozen lots between the three tables that were significantly better than anything I’d cupped at COE, and they were going for differentials (premiums over the New York C) of between 45 and 75 cents per pound.

My point in telling this story is that scarcity, novelty (including “microlots”) and being a small buyer don’t necessarily mean higher quality coffee, though it does almost invariably mean paying a higher price for it than larger players. A small roaster is only going to get so many pre-shipment samples overnighted from origin, is only going to be able to spread their limited volume among so many importers. As a small player who cares about quality - and I certainly felt like that myself during my buying days at Allegro when confronted with the likes of Starbucks, Peet’s and Illycaffe in every origin - all you can do is be willing to act more quickly and offer a higher price for the comparatively few pounds you can afford to buy.

Another reality check on what “small” roaster vs. “small” farm can mean: the famous finca San Sebastian in Antigua produces about 6000 bags of coffee in an average year - and it’s but one of a half-dozen or so farms run by the same family. That’s a fairly small farm by Guatemalan standards, but it’s giant compared to a 1 acre family plot in Oaxaca and tiny compared to many good farms in Brazil. But think about what it would mean as a small specialty roaster to buy enough coffee to be a meaningful customer to even a farm this size - and then also think about the fact that Starbucks and others can and do sign multi-year exclusive contracts for the entire production of hundreds of farms producing coffee of this quality and are on the lookout for more.

The indirectness of “direct” trade

The supply chain includes a number of important players who not only get the coffee from farm to roaster but also allow all parties involved to manage financial risk. Exporters in-country typically have exclusive relationships with specific farms, and in turn importers in the U.S. often work with only one exporter from each country they import coffee from. Such companies employ expert tasters but of more vital importance is their expertise in price negotiation, hedging and options and transportation logistics.

Few smaller specialty roasters are in a position to take on full containers, so what happens is that the interest of several like-minded roasters is pooled by the importer in order to assemble the full container needed for cost-effective shipment. With the separation of coffee types now common thanks to keen interest on the part of today’s buyers, a container might contain multiple coffee varieties from the same farm separately harvested and sorted, peaberries kept apart from flat beans, and so on.

Financing arrangements for coffees bought in this manner are highly variable and complex. Sometimes grower and buyer negotiate an outright price per pound, for just the crop year in question or perhaps for multiple years. Roasters who are in a position to buy full containers often want to hedge their purchases against future price fluctuations, and larger growers have the same interest, in which case pricing may be based on an agreed-upon differential over the New York “C” market price.

Yet another layer of complexity for mid-size and larger players has to do with pre-financing. Access to credit in the developing world is far more difficult, and interest rates much higher, than in the U.S or Europe and farmers incur substantial expenses each new crop year long before the harvest comes in. Roasters who are in a position to provide a portion of the purchase price months in advance have a major leg up on less well-heeled competitors when it comes to pursuing this type of face-to-face approach to buying.

To my ear “direct” trade brings to mind the old ads from discount stores that claim to cut out the middleman, but none of these buying approaches do this. Unless you are Wal Mart - able to pay cash to a farmer who then roasts his own coffee on-site at his farm, packages it and puts it in a bonded warehouse where you take possession of it and arrange its transport - or a huge roaster with dedicated green coffee and export logistics staff in every origin country in which you do business, there’s really nothing “direct” about this kind of buying. The role of the exporter and importer are vital, and they often include not only risk management but a great deal of education and hand holding for the buyer, translation and tour guide services and, last not least, pooling your relatively small buying power with that of others and financing the whole container in order to make it possible for you to bring in the coffee.

Relationship Coffees and Exclusives

One of the top European espresso roasters, legendary for their quality, seems to strike what is arguably the perfect balance in their buying. They know the lay of the land and key producers in all of the countries they buy from very well and are happy to pay a high price premium for the full containers (often multiple full containers) of coffees that they buy. However all of their coffee contracts are subject to approval of pre-shipment sample - no pass, no sale - at the buyer’s sole discretion with no replacement. In addition, they leave a lot of room open each year for opportunistic purchases from new farms, while also tracking climate conditions, ownership changes and the like at established suppliers. Not a single bean of the coffee they buy appears under any name but their own.

This probably sounds pretty cold compared to the “we have a close personal relationship with this family farm, send our baristas there to pick coffee and bring their pickers here to pull shots” marketing of direct trade I’ve seen, but let’s take a closer look at it from the farmer’s end as well.

If you’re growing great coffee and have been doing so for more than a couple of years in a row you’re highly unlikely to go unnoticed. Since (unless your farm is on the equator) you have just one crop per year to make it or break it, you’d prefer to have your coffee pre-sold at a high price to a buyer you trust who always pays on time and in cash. If they’re nice people and you like each other, so much the better.

The savvier strategy, just as in investing, is to spread your risk among non-correlated “assets,” which is to say to play the various prospective buyers off one another, selling some coffee to roasters in the U.S., some to Europe, some to Japan, maybe reserving a choice small lot for an online auction, and so on.

An exclusive deal for all or part of your crop might be in both roaster’s and farmer’s best interests, but often it’s not. For the roaster, the hard fact of the matter is that the goals of always having the best possible coffee in any crop year and the desire to have a relationship with one farm in one region are antithetical.

Ink a multi-year exclusive on coffee X from Antigua and it turns out to be a year (as is often the case) when all the best Guatemalans are from Huehuetenango and you’re out of luck. Pay a high price to a farm whose coffees have gotten lots of buzz at Cup of Excellence and then be offered a pre-shipment sample of incredible coffee from an unknown farm at 40% less and you have no budget to champion the new underdog.

Farm Designated Coffee: What’s in a Name?

If designating a coffee at retail only by country name is too little info and too little credit to the farmer, what does the opposite extreme look like and what’s the right balance? Clearly the name of the farm and perhaps even the name of the grower are great to have, and after that, from a customer perspective, the most important thing is what does it taste like, how is it optimally brewed and (often forgotten by today’s roaster-retailers) what does it cost and is it a good value?

Certifications (organic, fair trade) are an issue for a small but vocal minority of customers, while feeling confident that the roaster they’re buying from cares about these issues and generally does the right thing is far more universal. Other information often presented - cultivars used, type of milling, GPS points and the like - might be appropriate for deep background info on a particularly ambitious web site but in my opinion are distractions at retail or in a mail order listing.

Over-emphasis on farm names also creates the mirror situation to that created by not crediting the grower at all, the customer can easily get the impression that all coffees from, say, El Injerto or Kenya Nyeri Co-op are excellent. The roaster who goes to the trouble to avoid both early and late shipments and cups every lot could easily be perceived as offering the “same” coffee as a competitor who buys a few bags of lesser or even past-crop coffee from the same farm on the spot market. You want to credit the farmer, but you also want sufficient credit for the acumen of the buyer and skill of the roaster.

At the end of the day, and however much we want to champion the hard work of the farmer, as a customer what you care about most is the roaster’s ability to deliver excellence and value. Farm names can come and go and as long as the level of supporting information for the new choice is as good as the old and the coffee tastes great, you’re fine with it. On the other hand, the moment you sense that the quality has gone downhill but prices are up and the name remains, it’s time to think about shopping elsewhere.

The Globetrotting Buyer

Romantic as the image of the traveling coffee buyer negotiating direct purchases with growers worldwide in their native tongues and skillfully improving their growing practices may be, the reality is that the most important tools for buying coffee are a well-trained palate, a cupping room, a FedEx account and a checkbook tied to an account with substantial assets.

This isn’t to say that visiting producing countries and knowing the circumstances under which coffee’s grown isn’t important, but delivering quality and value to your customers depends much more on cupping dozens and in some cases a hundred or more samples of coffee for each that makes it into your offerings. With limited time and finances, the lion’s share of the coffee dollars of a company dedicated to quality should go into tasting samples sent from origin, tying up the necessary sums in inventory of great coffees that are only available once a year and - last not least - ensuring that one’s roasting, packaging, delivery and brewing procedures capture all of the flavor one is paying for.

I can hardly count the number of times, for example, that I’ve visited the roasting plant of a small craft roaster only to find them packaging roasted coffee in valve bags without either drawing a vacuum or back-flushing with nitrogen, or grinding coffee for their stores or wholesale accounts on a retail-sized burr grinder hot enough to fry an egg on because they didn’t want to spend the money for a roller mill.

I’m also unimpressed with the argument that constantly visiting farms helps to improve quality, because I don’t know any American specialty coffee buyers who are trained chemists or agronomists. Expert cuppers know what they’re looking for in a coffee, but know very little about what causes those flavors in the cup, and so are in no position to help farmers in delivering them with greater consistency. (I’m very much in favor of collectively funding research in these areas).

Clearly this comment doesn’t apply to Illycaffe, a company founded and run by chemists, or to larger companies that employ their own scientists both at home at origin. These companies also have the great advantage of being able to spread the cost of the travel they do choose to do over millions of pounds of coffee.

Another irony that seems never to register or get any press scrutiny is that we have small roasters specializing in organic, fairly-traded and responsibly-grown coffees contributing signficantly- and almost completely unnecessarily - to global warming with their massive air travel carbon footprints spread over relatively tiny numbers of pounds purchased.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, talks about how each family member was granted one imported, non-local exception to their decision to grow their own food and support their local economy. No surprise that coffee was the first choice (and chocolate the second). As people involved in the importation across great distances of a non-nutritive stimulant drink that many people love but no one actually needs, one would think that care and sensitivity about our carbon footprint would factor in much more than it does into travel budgets and priorities.

Where do we go from here?

I find the level of camaraderie and informal collaboration between today’s leading edge roaster-retailers very inspiring. The recent Green Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI - see link: http://gcqri.org/) is a fantastic program dedicated to funding some of the vitally important research we need to ensure quality coffee in the face of changes in consumption and production and the tremendous challenges of global warming.

On the retail side, I hope that we see a renewed focus on the role of the customer as one of the vitally important stakeholders in coffee’s long journey from seed to cup. We’ve gone from an old industry model that built profits for the roaster on the backs of both the exploited, anonymous farmer and the hoodwinked consumer to one that puts farmers on pedestals and buyers on airplanes.

We’ve explored the upper limits of what consumers will pay - and farmers can receive - for a pound of coffee, but we haven’t meaningfully grown people’s confidence in their ability to brew as good or better a cup of coffee at home as we sell them in a coffee bar, at a price they’ll happily pay every day. Here’s hoping for more emphasis on value and less on exclusivity, rarity and coffees that are as mediocre as they are “seasonal.”

The opportunities in coffee, in spite of industry consolidation and the palate-dulling mediocrity of the large chains, are many and the passion and talent of the new generation of buyers and roasters is inspiring. The challenges we face both at origin and with consumers are significant, but it seems clear to me that there’s more than enough intelligence and imagination at the leading edge of the industry to surmount them.

an excellent new-to-me single cup drip option

2011-06-15T13:53:00.000-06:00

Just came across this very cool flat-bottomed single cup (and I do mean cup, not even a mug) brewer being brought in by the expert taster and general troublemaker (and I mean that as a high compliment) Nicholas Cho at Wrecking Ball:

http://shop.wreckingballcoffee.com/why-kalita-about-coffee-brewing-design

It's a really cool little brewer and the explanation of ideal drip brewing principles is great. I hope they come out with a slightly larger size that might fit on a thermos, but as it is this Kalita is way cool. With the three-hole design and filter set-up it gets the contact time and extraction very close to the range of much larger brewers. The travel size filter/cone setup looks great too, though it's not likely to replace my Aeropress with Coava disk and Hario slim mill setup anytime soon.

From the headlines to the cup

2011-06-08T13:33:00.002-06:00

This full-page ad from Starbucks in the late 70's is one of the most prized items in my coffee files. It's hard to believe Starbucks was once the kind of product-driven company that took pride in offering obscure, wonderful coffees like Yemen Mocha, but it's true.

During the frequent months and years when trade embargoes and political strife kept us offering real Yemen Mocha, there was Ethiopian Harrar and, for a couple of bucks less per pound than real Arabian Mocha Java, Revolutionary Mocha Java (as Jerry Balwin quipped, "what's revolutionary is we tell you what's in it!").

Today Yemen is in the news once again, the unstable autocratic veneer stripped off and laying bare the country's unstable and fundamentally tribal nature. Meanwhile, the good folks over at Sweet Maria's
have just gotten in a couple of small lots of the rarest regional Mochas:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.arabia.yemen.php?coffee=YemenMokhaIsmaili2011#YemenMokhaIsmaili2011

enabling me to have the experience this morning of reading the latest sad news from over there over an incredible cup of home-roasted Mocha. This coffee, with so much range of aroma and flavor at a wide variety of roasts, has more complexity of flavor than any other, be it single-origin or blend. I'm enjoying it while it's here, realizing that the way things are going over there this could be the last such experience for a long while. As a straight cup and as single-origin espresso it has few rivals.

Wine in a Box Part 2: Make Your Own

2011-06-05T14:20:00.000-06:00

This is the Platy Preserve from well-known hydration bladder maker Platypus. It's intended for backpacking but ideal to have in your kitchen as well. Now you can ditch the vacuum pumps with plastic corks that often fail to hold a vacuum and suck most of the aroma out of your wine anyway. Ditto with expensive nitrogen sprays like Private Preserve. You just pour your leftover wine into one of these, squeeze out the air and reseal. Great for travel of course and in daily use they chill in a snap.

Here's a link to one supplier: http://www.rei.com/product/781836/platypus-platypreserve-wine-preservation-system-package-of-4

From rehashing ancient history to the present & future

2011-06-04T10:24:00.000-06:00

Clearly over the past 15 years a range of direct trade buying models and farm-designated coffees have largely replaced certified organic and fair trade coffees among the leading lights in American specialty coffee, though many such firms are friendlier to such certifications than I am. When you look at the web sites and retail menus of Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Counterculture, to take three prominent examples, you have to be impressed by their dedication to transparency in both trade and flavor in the cup, their love of their farmer partners and their hard work and innovation.

I suspect most coffee folks who read this blog are well-acquinted with Sweet Maria's and the work they do, but for those who don't I wanted to share the link to Tom's latest newsletter, which does a very good job of covering some of the positives and negatives of farm-designated coffee and the direct trade model:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/library/tinyjoy/mayjune-2011-farms-brand-names

As it happens I've been working on an article on this topic myself, which will take a look at what's working, what isn't, and how the ongoing effort to source the best coffees and support those who grow them might unfold amidst the realities of sustained high C market prices, industry consolidation and yield and quality changes caused by global warming.

Chocolate

2011-06-03T14:07:00.000-06:00

If you live in a food mecca like Portland, Oregon or the San Francisco Bay area you'll easily be able to find first-rate chocolate at retail, but otherwise - and for the best selection - mail order is key. I wish I could say "go to your neighborhood Whole Foods," but chocolate is one of many product categories there where groovy marketing, low price points and silly "cause" products ("Endangered Species Chocolate Bars") fill the shelves in lieu of anything that's best-in-category.

The best mail order source I've found is Chocosphere in Portland, Oregon (http://www.chocosphere.com/). Prices for the quality are fair, staff is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and they're careful to provide temperature controlled shipping.

If you're unfamiliar with chocolate I recommend starting with one of the single origin tasting kits from MIchel Cluizel or Valrhona, two of the greatest French producers who unlike most brands source, roast and conch all of their chocolate from the finest heirloom varietals, and who know the complex world of cacao growing very well. Amedei from Italy is another no-compromise brand, as is Domori, which has particularly wonderful tasting kits and wonderfully rough-hewn (not overly-conched) bars.

For blended chocolate, Valrhona's Manjari (64% cacao) and Guanaja (70%) set the standard. All of these chocolates are in an entirely different universe from Chocolove, Theo, Scharffenberger, Lindt and other premium mass-market chocolates. I find that a couple of squares of a Cluizel or Valrhona bar, slowly dissolved and savored, are far more satisfying than an entire bar of something lesser, so ultimately it's both cheaper and healthier to buy the best!

Beyond the aforementioned established brands, with chocolate as with microbrewery beer and coffee roasting there's been an explosion of new companies and brands that are almost impossible to keep up with. Look for companies that can trace their cacao from farm to bar, do their own roasting and conching and abjure common additives such as soy lecithin and vanillin. A few standouts from recent tastings:

Patric Chocolate (http://www.patric-chocolate.com) has a 67% cacao bar from Madagascar with only 3 ingredients (cacao, cane sugar and cocoa butter) that is easily as good as the best from Domori or Cluizel, with an intense, vinous fruitiness that persists on the palate for several minutes.

Askinosie (http://www.askinosie.com) is another fanatical bean-to-bar company. Their 70% bar with cacao nibs from San Jose del Tambo in Ecuador is incredible.

Claudio Corallo (http://www.claudiocorallo.com/) is a vertically-integrated producer on the island of Sao Tome & Principe, whose distinctive chocolates also rank among the best in the world. The chocolate here is purist to a fault, as Corallo avoids even the pure vanilla and cane sugar used in other premium brands.

Of Charity & Commerce

2011-06-03T08:50:00.004-06:00

I'm following up on my recent post on certified Fair Trade coffee and subsequent conversation in the "comments" section with Peter Giuliano. Our exchange was pretty heated, and during the course of it Peter accused me of being, or at least sounding like, a Tea Party member or Libertarian. Nothing could be further from the truth: my feelings about the Tea Party are best summed up by my favorite bumper sticker from last year: "Tea Parties are for Little Girls with Imaginary Friends."

As for Libertarianism, I appreciate its entrepreneurial spirit but among other faults it fails to take into account that ever since we let multinational corporations take over our country and the world economy there is no such thing as free enterprise or free markets. On a practical level I've seen the disastrous effects of applied Libertarianism first-hand at Whole Foods, where in the supposed interests of employee empowerment newly-hired entry-level staffers were given just as much decision-making power about product quality as category experts. It's one of the biggest reasons I quit Allegro, since quality in coffee requires strict standards and a top-down structure.

My actual politics are so far to the other end of the spectrum that it makes these accusations doubly ironic. You're probably not familiar with the phrase "dhammic socialism," but it might be worth a look:
http://www.suanmokkh.org/ds/what_ds1.htm. This sums up my politics very well.

Getting back to certified Fair Trade vs. trading fairly, I should've made it clear that I'm strongly in favor of charitable aid projects in coffee-growing areas, as long as they're geared towards empowering farmers rather than giving them false hope or getting them committed to growing products there may not be a long-term market for.

At the recent SCAA symposium Chris Thorns led a panel discussion that included famous (and relatively well-off) farmers Aida Battle and Price Peterson, and the topic was how do they achieve stellar quality year after year and what can others learn from them? The answers are of course pretty obvious: they have the great good fortune of owning land with ideal altitude and microclimate; they're exceedingly knowledgeable about which coffee varieties best express their terroir (and are experimenting and learning more all the time); they're passionate about quality and savvy about the market; and - last not least - they have the means to have the state-of-the art centralized wet and dry milling facilities required to produce excellent coffee consistently. I forgot to say "and they only let people pick truly ripe red cherries" yet that's another one of those decisive differences, something everyone talks about but so few actually do.

The chasm in quality between farms like these, or Costa Rica's Dota Cooperative or a well-established co-op in Kenya or Yergacheffe with a central wet mill, and what one sees all over Oaxaca, Chiapas, Peru and Colombia (which is to say wildly variable harvesting combined with backyard fermentation in vessels that are often smaller than a bathtub, with wet parchment from a dozen or a hundred tiny farms combined to make one lot of coffee), is huge. My point is it takes capital investment and infrastructure to deliver excellent quality, and so I'm especially delighted by aid projects that help farmers to have and properly use the necessary equipment to deliver such quality.

Historically the first certified Fair Trade Coffees aimed at the U.S. market were Perus and Mexicans processed in exactly the haphazard way I described, and of course the folks exporting and importing them were social activists with no cupping skills or knowledge of coffee quality. In places like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, the archetypal (and best-selling) FT coffee was (and perhaps still is) certified organic Fair Trade French Roast, preferably from a groovy pot-smoking piercing-possessing small roaster in Northern California, reeking to high heaven of rank ferment (the coffee, I mean).

When you consider that the founders and many of the senior managers of both of the aforementioned health food store chains think that coffee - and caffeinated anything - are unhealthy addictions that ought to be kicked, it eventually dawns on one that perhaps offering only stale, over-roasted, usually defective FT and FTO coffee is part of a grand strategy to convert customers to herb teas and Jamba Juice.

Nonetheless, we worked hard with co-ops like Prodocoop in Nicaragua and the excellent Santa Adelaida farm in El Salvador who had the capability to produce organic and FT coffee that cupped well, and I wrote at the time that our marketing slogan ought to be "it doesn't have to taste bad to do good."

I had a number of conversations with folks involved with Transfair in the early 90's where I made it clear that our intention was to trade fairly for all of our coffees, and that certified coffees could be included under that umbrella if two things happened: 1. clear quality standards were set for specialty grade FT and FTO coffee with a different set of price criteria than commercial coffee; 2. family-run, independent farms that met the labor, pricing and environmental standards would have the right to the FT designation.

Much discussion ensued but in the end nothing happened, for two reasons: 1. roasters had already shown willingness to buy (or had been bullied into buying) commercial-grade FT coffee at a specialty coffee price; 2. the FT co-ops already had far more coffee to sell than they could sell at FT prices and were unwilling to include farms producing not just more coffee but far better and more consistent coffee under the FT umbrella. Thus, in a nutshell, was the "relationship coffee" or "direct trade" model born, though truth be told companies like Peet's and Starbucks had been buying container loads of superb green coffee from farms they knew well and visited regularly at high outright or differential prices for decades, and doubtless roasters in Germany and Scandinavia, as well as Illy of course, had been quietly doing so for far longer.

We sometimes forget that the specialty side of the business is still tiny - less than 5% of the market if we're talking coffees that meet SCAA's green coffee standard. Our job on the specialty side is to push the quality (and price paid to farmers) envelope, and I think we've done a great job with that. "We" in this case includes not only dinosaurs like Peet's, Starbucks and yours truly but much more so George Howell, who's been fighting the good fight for almost 40 years and delightfully fails to mellow with age, Peter at Counter Culture, Stumptown and Intelligentsia, Allegro and by now hundreds of smaller companies with similar levels of passion. Now the folks I've just named reflect an American bias, but all you have to do is look at the sales of Cup of Excellence lots and other auction coffees to realize that good as they are, U.S. roasters and retailers are actually behind the curve compared to what's happening in Europe and Japan.

The reality is that authentic specialty or whatever we're going to call it is a tiny market segment spread over many countries. Meanwhile what is shaping consumer perceptions of what's worth paying a premium for is of course 4 buck burnt coffee in milk from Starbucks and their imitators, mediocre but convenient (and, I have to point out, much of it "Fair Trade") K Cups in Keurigs and the like. That's why I think it's so crucial that we on the specialty side be laser-like in our focus on distinctiveness and excellence in the cup.

We still have a lot to learn from the wine industry in this regard, and I look at producers like Marcel Chapoutier in the northern Rhone, Beaucastel in the South or Leroy in Burgundy, all who farm not just organically but biodynamically and run exemplary farms. All of these producers hardly need anyone to promote or differentiate their wines given the press they receive, but when they do talk about what they do and how they do it, it's always about quality, about loyalty to the land, about the quest to make great tasting wine even better, about (in Mme. Leroy's wonderful phrase) "the nobility of the vines." They wouldn't think of putting a third-party certification label on the bottle because (to put it in coffee terms, stolen from Jerry Baldwin) "the proof is in the cup [glass], and nowhere else."

Pantry Essentials

2011-06-02T16:40:00.000-06:00

Here are some notes on high-value oils, vinegars and spices that have proven their worth over the years.

Oils

We eat salads year-round and excellent extra virgin olive oil at a good price is essential. By far the best value I've found is the vintage dated Kirkland Toscano oil from Costco. It runs around $11.50 for a full liter and is typically available only from its arrival around mid-March through late summer, so you have to hoard. This is authentic, peppery, fresh and green Tuscan oil with very low acidity and most important it is fresh. Good olive oil needs to be consumed within a year of harvest, and most of the high-end bottlings I've found at Whole Foods and other grocers is two or three years old. Laudemio and Capezzana, to name just two outstanding brands, are certainly better oils than the Kirkland product if they are fresh, but good luck finding them in that condition. Even if you do, at $30 or more for 500 ml. they are five times the price of the Kirkland oil and maybe 20% better in flavor.

When you do want to splurge, but from someone knowledgeable and conscientious, and no store in the U.S. meets that requirement better than Zingerman's (http://www.zingermans.com), the best food store in the country and maybe the world. Prices there are high, sometimes scandalously so, but quality is impeccable and if you know anything about the kind of effort these fine people have put into sourcing artisanal foodstuffs over the past 30 years you'd happily pay a premium to support their efforts. Co-founder Ari Weinzweig has combines an encyclopedic knowledge of handcrafted foods with an utterly unpretentious writing style and contagious joy of discovery.

The other must-have oil in our kitchen is J. LeBlanc Walnut Oil. The LeBlanc oils are in a whole different universe from other nut oils, with a viscosity and depth of flavor that'll blow your mind. Unfortunately they are hard to find in the U.S. (stock up at their cool little store on rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement if you're ever in Paris) but there is one store I've ordered from (through Amazon) who carries the full range:

http://www.touchofeurope.net/9475/3+LeBlanc+oils+Hazelnut+almond+walnut+oil+8+fl.oz..html

Vinegars

By far the most useful single vinegar in the kitchen is a good aged Sherry vinegar. Buy it from Zingerman's or the excellent Spanish foods specialist The Spanish Table (http://www.spanishtable.com); you might find a serviceable one at your local Whole Foods as well. Used judiciously (start with 1 part vinegar to 3 parts olive or walnut oil and adjust) sherry vinegar adds a nutty wineyness to food and it's wonderfully friendly to such choice additions as Dijon mustard, garlic, shallots, tarragon and so on - much more so than red wine vinegars. A few drops used atop a grilled chicken breast or to liven up a simple pan sauce are a revelation.

Good red wine vinegar is also well worth keeping on hand, and the aforementioned mail order sources have good ones from Rioja and elsewhere. As for Balsamic Vinegar, it's a much understood and bastardized product. Get your education on it from the Zingerman's web site or, better still, Lynne Rossetto Kaspar's magnificent cookbook The Splendid Table. Long story short, the real stuff comes in tiny 100 ml bottles and starts around $100 - and is totally worth it to try at least once in your lifetime. On a day-to-day basis the best strategy is to buy a top condimento balsamic, expecting to spend around $40-60 for 250 ml. Zingerman's is the best source I know of for these, but Whole Foods carries the Manicardi line and you may find good deals elsewhere. Taste before you buy if possible, but if not look for very thick viscosity and try to buy from one of the producers Zingerman's mentions.

Good balsamic isn't for salads, with a couple of exceptions. A few drops combined with red wine vinegar and then mixed with olive oil (and salt, of course - don't skimp!) make an authentic balsamic vinaigrette to dress bitter greens. A drizzle of the pure stuff along with some olive oil, salt and slivers of Reggiano Parmigiano carved using a vegetable peeler make a sublime dressing for leaves of radicchio, the bitter but tasty chicory plant (the result is called Blacksmith's salad, a winter-time treat).

Otherwise, I use my extra vecchio condimento as a finishing sauce, and sparingly. A few drops on top of peak season strawberries is a sublime and traditional use, as is (believe it or not) a tiny spoonful on really good vanilla gelato. Better still, buy a nice store-roasted free range rotisserie chicken, cut into serving pieces and drizzle with balsamico just before serving. You've just transformed a humble roast chicken into a dish worthy of the best Amarone or Barbaresco you have. A drizzle on a fine steak is equally wonderful. In late fall, make an appetizer of thinly sliced ripe pear, with a thin sliver of Reggiano atop each slice and a drizzle of balsamic over all.

Spices

Freshly ground pepper made from Tellicherry peppercorns bought at Costco. For salt, the best everyday choice and the healthiest is sel gris - gray salt - from France or Portugal, with all its minerals intact. Zingerman's again, maybe a local store. Fleur de Sel or Maldon's sea salt may be worth the splurge for finishing dishes, and of course keep a big container of kosher salt or supermarket grade sea salt (un-iodized) for salting pasta water and the like.

Saffron is another can't-live-without-it spice but you get thoroughly hosed if you buy it in small packets at the supermarket. Instead, go to http://www.costco.com and buy 5 grams of lab-tested, top quality Spanish saffron for about $20 postage included.

Few folks know that the most flavorful peppers in the world come from Turkey. Urfa pepper is a deep purple, smoky, winey pepper of moderate heat with many uses. Marinate boneless, skinless chicken breasts in a nice dusting of Urfas with lemon juice, olive oil and salt and grill over hardwood charcoal.

Marash pepper is the fire engine red cousin to the Urfa, a bit hotter but fruity and vinous. Use it in a red sauce or on pizza. Its multidimensional depth of flavor will be sure to make you throw out every other red pepper flake or powder in your kitchen. Buy both of these and many other spices from http://www.silvercloudestates.com

Rice and Beans

Our mainstays without a doubt. For beans we love the highly digestible, ancient Anasazi beans from Adobe Milling (http://www.anasazibeans.com). Here in Colorado they're carried by King Soopers and other supermarkets; elsewhere they're available by mail.

For rice, 20# bags of Aged Basmati Rice from India are at Costco for well under a dollar a pound - half the supermarket price.

Odds and Ends

Organic bronze-die extruded pasta from Costco. Maranatha brand Almond butter (far more digestible than peanut butter) for about $6 per quart at Costco - less than a fourth of typical supermarket prices is wonderful for breakfast atop Alvarado sprouted whole grain bread. S & W organic canned tomatoes in winter, organic butter and chicken, Reggiano at half the Whole Foods price and fresh mozzarella for pizza are also Costco staples.

Last but not least

Coffee: buy a hot air popcorn popper ($20) or splurge on a Behmor ($300) but buy all your coffee and brewing apparati from http://www.sweetmarias.com and enjoy the best coffee in the world for half the price you'd pay at a good local or mail order roaster.

Tea: ditch the tea bags (90% of what you're paying for is packaging and the tea is usually stale to boot) and buy all your tea and tea wares at http://www.uptontea.com. Order sample sizes at first and always pay close attention to new arrivals. When you look at teas within categories, choose the sort option of "sort by most recent" and stick to teas on the first page or teas in the new arrivals section within 90-120 days. Upton is the best in the country and maybe the world at what they do, with excellent value in every category, accurate, hype-free tasting notes and lightening-fast order processing and delivery.

The lowdown on great brandy

2011-06-01T15:02:00.000-06:00

I'm writing this post in an effort to distill (pun intended) decades of connoisseurship, unimaginable amounts of money spent and liver taxed, despite the fact that due to advancing age and greatly reduced means these wonderful drinks are now somewhere between a memory and a very occasional pleasure for me. My motivation in both to see folks stop wasting money and get to taste the truly great stuff, and perhaps even more to encourage you to support artisanal producers who unlike the mega-brands are often barely surviving.

Where to start? Well, there are some excellent brandies being made in North America these days, though they aren't the absolute best regardless of price. Germain-Robin in northern California makes some elegant, fruit-driven brandies that are good values, and up in Oregon Stephen McCarthy at Clear Creek makes world class fruit distillates (an ethereal Alsatian-style pear brandy, fine grappy, good value entry-level Apple Brandy). And there are others. But, as usual with me, let's just make a beeline to the best stuff.

Spanish Brandy

While cognac has the name and sky-high prices and Armagnac and Calvados the cult-followings of connoisseurs the great Spanish brandies, which are far richer than any of the above and sell for laughably low prices, are products whose connoisseurship is restricted to a handful of aging, in-the-know tasters in Spain and in the ruling classes of Latin America. That's too bad, because these are unbelievable products.

Forget about the cheap stuff. What you want are the grand solera bottlings made from the same grapes as good sherry and aged in the same solera system. For Brandy de Jerez, the most important type, you have two choices:

Gran Duque d'Alba: My pick (and that of many others) as the single greatest Jerez brandy. Waves of PX sherry, raisin, chocolate, walnut, rancio and sweet spice coat the palate. Sweet, but one click drier than its sister brandy Cardenal Mendoza (see below). Around $40-50 - you'd have to spend at least $300 to get a cognac of equal complexity and it'd still taste like water compared to this.

Cardenal Mendoza: the archetypal Spanish brandy, meant to go with a fine Cuban cigar and a demitasse of strong espresso after a 4 hour lunch on a Sunday. Slightly sweeter than the Duque, just as complex, perhaps a hair less elegant, same price range.

Torres 20 and Jaime 1: These aren't Jerez brandies but are outstanding and unique products from a large but excellent winery. Torres 20 at around $60 a bottle has won the world's best overall brandy title at World Wine and Spirits on at least two occasions. It's cognac-like in its distillation and Limousin oak aging but with an orange blossom sweetness and extra degree of richness that are amazing for the asking price.

I have not had the chance to taste the Jaime 1 (it's 3x the price and allocated) but it's made from the same rare folle blance grape that produces the best Armagnacs and the few tasting notes I've seen on it make it sound like a great thing to try on someone else's dime.

Armagnac

In France there's a saying: "we happily export our Cognac so we can keep the Armagnac and Calvados for ourselves."

Armagnac is the original brandy of France, and the best examples are single producer products that are single-distilled in pot stills, retaining far more congeners (which contribute body and aroma) than the double distillation used in Cognac and elsewhere. While cognac gets almost all its character from the wood it's aged in, Armagnac is all about inherent fruit and terroir.

If you're unfamiliar with Armagnac, the web site of the premier U.S. importer, who also wrote the definitive book on the brandy, is a good place to start:

http://charlesnealselections.com/armagnac/

While there are several permitted grape varieties used to make Armagnac, the one to make a beeline for is folle blanche, the original grape of choice for both Armagnac and Cognac. This is a fickle grape variety subject to grey rot and other woes, and it's almost extinct even in Armagnac. It's worth the search because of its perfumed, floral character.

You want to buy only vintage-dated Armagnacs bottled at barrel proof by the top producers. The place to start is Domaine Boingneres, the standard bearer in the Bas Armagnac region. From there, try to get your hands on a bottle of Domaine Laberdolive Jaurrey, anything from Domaine Ravignan or any of the other producers in Charles Neal's portfolio. You'll most likely have to buy online unless you live in California, from brandy specialist D & M (http://www.dandm.com) or K & L Wines (http://www.klwines.com). The ideal age for Armagnacs is much younger than cognacs since as mentioned before they're more fruit than wood driven. While the best cognacs have seen at least twenty and preferably 30 years in wood, 11-15 years seems to be ideal for most Armagnacs.

Stay away from reduced (watered down to 80 proof) Armagnacs and blends and at least initially avoid the vast number of bottlings from the superb negociant Francis Darroze. There are some wonderful brandies in his portfolio but many are marred by excessive oak.

Cognac

Skip Courvoisier, Hennessy, Martell and Remy Martin entirely and look for small-producer bottlings, where you pay for product rather than marketing and/or Baccarat crystal bottles. The high-value stuff is going to be limited in distribution and brought in by the same Bay area stores mentioned above or by small producer wine importers. Some names to look for: Domaine Serrenne, Daniel Bouju (incredible), Pierre Ferrand, Chateau de Fontpinot. Cognacs from the Fin Bois or Borderies regions often have more character younger than Grande Champagne.

Calvados

Ordinary $30-40 a bottle Calvados is fine for cooking but if you want to experience the potential of brandy made from apples (and, often, pears) you'll have to splurge. Even in the higher price ranges most of what I've tasted has been marred by way too much oak for the level of fruit, but there is one producer who stands head and shoulders above the rest: Adrien Camut. At every age level his brandies have an elegance and complexity and a tension between fruit and oak that simply has to be tasted to be believed. You're looking at $100+ to try it, and I should warn you that if you like it there is no substitute.

Other producers worth looking for are Domaine Dupont and LeMorton.

More resources

Spirits specialist F. Paul Pacult's book Kindred Spirits is well worth reading. His online magazine Spirit Journal is geared towards professionals, and he's also the spirits reviewer for Wine Enthusiast magazine. I find him generally reliable though Calvados and Armagnac are not his strong suits (he's fantastic for Bourbon, single malt Scotch, Rum and Tequila).

Brewing Great Coffee at Home Without Turning Into a Geek

2011-06-01T13:47:00.000-06:00

Okay, first the geek-avoidance bit: paying $300 for a Baratza home burr grinder, having to have a special narrow-necked Hario Buono kettle in order to get just the right pour rate for coffee in your Chemex equipped with a $50 stainless steel Coava filter, weighing (I kid you not) the water before you boil it - all of these things, and many more, are geeky. They're also unnecessary and certainly not something most sane coffee lovers are going to be willing to deal with in the morning before they've had their first cup of coffee.

So here's what you need to brew fabulous coffee at home. For all methods, you need filtered or bottled water at around 3-4 grains of hardness. Check with your local water treatment plant and use bottled spring water if necessary, or mix distilled with your tap water if it's just a matter of getting the mineral content down.

You need a way to boil water, and electric kettles are more than twice as fast as stovetop ones. You can buy one at Wal Mart, or a better one (Chef's Choice is a reliable brand) online.

You want (but strictly speaking do not need) a decent gram scale. If you drink tea as well as coffee or are into precise and repeatable results, it becomes a need. Upton Tea and, on the coffee side, the fabulous Sweet Maria's, sell good scales.

You need a grinder, and a simple blade grinder (Bodum makes a nice one) will do. Either spent the $25 and make to, or save up and spend $200 on the cheapest model of Baratza conical burr grinder. Grinding before you brew is the important thing, and you simply can't have great coffee without doing so.

Then, you need to choose one or more of the following brewing methods:

I. The Aeropress

This gets my vote for the best home coffee maker ever made. You put finely-ground coffee into a heat-proof, BPA-free cylinder. At the bottom of the cylinder is a small circular paper filter (which can be replaced with a permanent stainless steel one from Coava if you choose, though it makes little difference to the cup). You pour over hot but not boiling water (around 180 degrees F.), stir with the included stirring paddle and after about 30 seconds slowly push a piston with an airtight seal down onto the bed of grounds. Air is trapped in the chamber between the coffee and the piston and it mightily resists your pressing (thus "Aero press").

What you have in your cup is up to four "shots" of roughly espresso-strength coffee concentrate. It isn't espresso, though you'll see some crema, but for an excellent caffe latte or cappuccino it makes a more than worthy substitute, and all you need do is buy a $20 whirly milk frother (Aerolatte's Aeromoo, from Amazon, is a favorite) to take care of the milk.

Dilute the shots with hot water and you have drip-strength coffee of supreme quality. The brew is as rich as plunger pot coffee but with no sediment, as smooth as great drip or vacuum pot coffee but with more body and less bitterness.

The Aeropress is the perfect travel coffee maker. You can take just the "guts" of it (the main chamber and filter holder plus piston) and either some paper filters (it comes with a year's supply) or the Coava disc. You can boil water in the inside of the piston any place you have access to a microwave. For a grinder, consider the Portex mini. It costs $70, but it will fit inside the chamber of the Aeropress and last for years:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/sweetmarias/grinders/manual-grinders/porlex-mini-ceramic-hand-mill.html

Downsides? A certain amount of body English is required. If you want to brew more than about 18-20 finished ounces of drip-strength coffee you'll have to brew twice. Otherwise, it's perfect. Nothing makes better coffee by the cup, and unless you're willing to invest a couple of grand minimum in a home espresso machine plus $300 in a grinder and endure a steep learning curve the Aeropress + Aerolatte combo for under fifty bucks is your ideal home caffe latte and cappuccino maker as well.

Where to buy: http://www.sweetmarias.com deserves your patronage (and has very cool video demos of this and many other brewing methods), plus they sell the Coava filter. Otherwise, Amazon.

2. Nissan Thermos and #6 Filter Cone

This is the set-up if you need coffee for 2-3 people every morning. You can brew a liter of great drip coffee in 4-6 minutes once the water boils, and it's by far the easiest of these methods.

Brewing: weigh out 60-70 grams of freshly-roasted coffee beans, or skip the weighing and fill your blade grinder (most hold right around this amount of beans). Grind for 20 seconds. Meanwhile, bring a liter of water to a boil.

Put a white (never buy brown filters - they make your coffee taste like a wet grocery bag) Filtropa or Melitta #6 filter in your filter cone and rinse it to remove paper taste. Put the ground coffee it it, shake it gently to level, put it atop the thermos and when the water boils pause briefly, then pour a few ounces of water to let the grounds bloom (they're frothing and releasing CO2 - if they don't, your coffee is stale).

Keep pouring until all your water is gone. Toss the filter and spent grounds and enjoy truly great drip coffee. Be careful because coffee stays piping hot in this type of thermos for close to 12 hours.

This set-up makes far better drip coffee than any home electric drip brewer with the exception of the $300 Technivorm (see below). Why? To make excellent drip coffee requires a brew basket that can hold up to 70 grams of roaster-fresh coffee without overflowing, a contact time between grounds and water of 4-6 minutes (less than that the coffee will be weak, more than that it will be bitter), and a constant brewing water temperature of 195-205 degrees F. (your garden-variety Krups, Braun or Mr. Coffee is lucky to get to 180 degrees or so).

The Nissan thermos costs fifty bucks but it'll last you a lifetime. The whole setup can be bought from Amazon (I'm hoping Sweet Maria's picks it up).

3. The Clever Dripper

This brilliant little invention is a more than worthy rival to the Aeropress. It's less versatile - you can only brew drip strength coffee and only a 12 ounce mug at a time, and it takes 4 minutes rather than less than 1, but it's no muss, no fuss otherwise.

The Clever looks like a Melitta cone, but it's really a full immersion brewer (a plunger pot with a paper filter - without the plunger). To use it you put a #4 filter into it, rinse, boil your water, and add about 22 grams (or two heaping Approved Coffee Measures [an ACM = 2 Tablespoons]) of coffee ground as for the filtercone ahove. You put the Clever on your counter, fill it completely with the boiling water (the cone will absorb some heat and get you to ideal temp) and cover with the included cover to keep it hot.

The Clever part is this: there's a valve on the bottom of the unit that stays closed and keeps the coffee from dripping until you place the Clever on a mug or over a thermos. You set a timer for 4 minutes as soon as you add the water, and when it goes off you put the Clever on your mug. Within another minute or so you have a perfect cup of drip-strength coffee.

The Clever is far superior to regular Melitta or Hario one-cup cones because the latter don't give you enough contact time between grounds and water. Effectively the Clever delivers the same quality as a much larger batch drip brewer, one perfect mug at a time. Very cool.

Buy it - and your Filtropa filters (and your coffee and everything else if you like) from sweetmarias.com

4. The Technivorm Moccamaster

This is the Dyson vacuum cleaner of home drip brewers. It seems like it costs a lot, but when you take into account it's a lifetime buy and delivers coffee of a quality no other home drip brewer can deliver consistently and over many years it's actually money well spent (though I will point out that you can buy five Nissan thermos and cone combos or an Aeropress, a grinder, a milk frother and six months worth of coffee for what you'll spend for the privilege of being lazy).

You can read more about the Technivorm series on the Sweet Maria's web site. Suffice it to say you'll find these babies in the cupping rooms and homes of coffee professionals world wide. They just sit there and work, for decades.

Does this mean you should throw out your Krups, your Braun, your Mr. Coffee, your $150 Cuisinart Dial 'n Brew? Yep.

Wine in a Box that Rocks

2011-05-31T14:02:00.000-06:00

For everyday consumption in France you go to your chosen vintner these days and he will have several choices of entry to mid-range wines available in wine-in-a-box format. This package has largely replaced the old practice of selling wine en vrac, which is to say filling your gas-can-like plastic jug from a hose and taking it home to drink, which was cheap but meant drinking oxidized plonk starting at about day 2. Boxed wines are big in other European countries as well, and I've read that in Australia they represent 25% of total wine sales.

Vin de carton has a terrible reputation in the U.S., but it's very much the same situation as with canned beer: boxed wine, like the beer can, is one of the very best ways to package the product, but you've got to put something other than swill in it to redeem it. You have a plastic bladder inside the box that is completely inert and airtight. It collapses around the wine as it is consumed and keeps it fresh for around six weeks - far better than an open bottle of wine that's good for a day. Zero problems with cork taints, no glass to break, far more efficient to ship.

In the U.S. there's not a lot of choice of good boxed wine at the moment, but things do seem to be changing. For a few years the Black Box brand at around $20 for 3 liters (= 4 750 ml. bottles) had the premium box wine category to itself. The wines are okay, but fleshy and overly-sweet in the California style, and in typical California mode it's Cab, Chard, Merlot or Shiraz, none of which are especially friendly to a wide variety of foods.

Far more versatile and interesting are the Big House Red (stylistically a cross between a decent Cotes du Rhone and a cru Beaujolais, with plenty of acidity and spice), Big House White (perfumey and crisp in the manner of a good Rousanne-Marsanne-Viognier blend) and other interesting stuff put out by Octavin (http://www.octavinhomewinebar.com/). At $18-20 per box these are unbeatable values.

Keep an eye out as well for limited distribution boxed wines brought in by respected small producer specialists such as Kysela Pere et fils (Maipo Malbec and others) as well as the solid if un-thrilling Cotes du Ventoux by the Beaucastel guys (Perrin family), La Vielle Ferme. Hand Picked Selections brings in a very nice Rousillon red called Cuvee de Peña in boxed format as well (http://www.winemerchant.net/brand/30-Cuvee+de+Pena.htm). These wines are all much more expensive than Big House, running ~$24-35 per box - still great value.

Harder to find but fairly common here in Colorado is a very food-friendly Portuguese red blend called Terras d'Uva Vinho Tinto (about $22). Refreshingly it's entirely composed of local grape varieties you've likely never heard of. It's its own thing, but served at cellar temperature it reminds me of a cross between the nice cru Beaujolais from Kermit Lynch's roster of producers I can no longer afford blended with an earthy Spanish red.

Another new entrant to the quality boxed wine field is From the Tank, a Rhone blend that's especially welcome, since red Rhones are surpassed only by the aforementioned Beaujolais in their versatility at table. It's Grenache-driven with a nice note of garrigue, the rosemary-and-thyme scent of Provence.

Also in limited distribution but well worth a search is an organic Tuscan red ("rosso Toscano") that despite being just outside the Chianti area has more soulful Sangiovese fruit than many Chiantis. The wine is called Casina de Cornia Rosso Toscano. With its crisp, food-friendly acidity and lovely wild strawberry and earth flavors it gets my vote as the most versatile boxed wine I've tasted.

Try decanting any of these wines into a nice carafe next time you have company over for dinner, and let them guess how much you paid for the "bottle" before you bring out the box!

Coffee Myths of the "Third Wave:" Seasonality

2011-05-28T13:03:00.002-06:00

I’ve noted with interest, and increasing alarm, that quite a number of today’s newer boutique roaster-retailers have chosen to limit their coffee offerings to coffees within a few months of harvest.

The explanation for this decision is invariably that coffee is in reality a seasonal crop just like summer tomatoes or pears in the fall, and their job as roasters is to offer coffees only at their seasonal peak. I believe this is a seriously flawed and self-serving approach that represents a pretty thorough abdication of a roaster’s responsibilities.

What’s missing in this equation as in so many other of the choices made in today’s narcissistic coffee bar scene is any acknowledgement of what’s in the best interest of the customer - you know, the folks who pay the bills.

We’ve got micro-roasters buying precious few pounds incurring huge travel bills for their “rock star” roast masters, barista championships and labor-intensive pour-over bars in lieu of real drip coffee in meaningful quantity, but what we don’t have is any sense that offering a reasonable range of coffees at prices that are as fair to consumers as they are to farmers might be a sound business practice.

As a knowledgeable retail coffee customer myself I’ll say that for starters one thing I expect from any coffee retailer is delicious choices in the four broad categories of origin-derived (as opposed to roast-imparted) coffee flavors:

1. Latin American mildness: bright, balanced flavors from top Central and South American high-altitude coffees.

2. Africa mild: citrusy and floral coffees from places like Kenya and Ethiopia

3. Africa wild: funky, fruity coffees with “mocca” character from Ethiopia and/or Yemen

4. Indonesian earthy richness: Sumatra, Sulawesi and the like.

We’re not talking nuances here - we’re talking “coffee food groups.” Nuance and outliers are great - but not when the basic choices are unavailable.

Now there’s no good reason why as a consumer I can’t have a choice of excellent coffees in each of these broad flavor categories all year round. Categories 3 and 4 are coffee styles that while not easy to obtain store quite well, and where adjustment in roast over time can easily deal with any fading that does occur.

For the washed East African category, it’s a matter of having the cash to buy during the main season and in the case of Kenyas to have coffee stored in parchment and milled as needed. These are comparatively expensive coffees now, but they’re cheap compared to the tiny lots of Cup of Excellence and other competition coffees many of today’s roasters squander substantial sums on acquiring.

As for the Latin American category, all that’s required is a basic knowledge of the crop cycle and either rotating offerings or, perhaps better still, savvy blending. In a given year that might mean early-season Centrals (e.g. Costa Ricans and Salvadors) and some Mexicans in early spring, the grand crus from Guatemala and perhaps some Pacamaras for late summer arrival, and when the Centrals fade and turn woody in late fall one substitutes fresh new crop Colombians, perhaps an exceptional Peru or better still a Sigri New Guinea, which despite its Pacific provenance works very well to fill the “mild and mellow” slot during a North American winter.

Contrast this proposed minimum range of choices with the current (late May, 2011) offerings on one leading roaster’s web site: 9 origin coffees, seven from Central America and two third-rate East Africans, at average prices of well over $20 per pound (and as high as $60.

Now this isn’t to say offering a meaningful variety of regional coffees doesn’t present some difficulties. For one thing, one has to have the access to capital to tie up substantial sums in a coffee inventory. “Just in time” or spot buying won’t cut it and doesn’t provide the consistency of quality and taste the customer has a right to expect.

You’ve also got to know how to roast, and how to blend. Absent a costly frozen green coffee storage system gradual fading of one’s raw coffee inventory is an inevitability, and is dealt with by gradually darkening the roast for awhile, then blending out the coffee (initially into espresso blends and ultimately into French Roast).

As James Hoffman memorably pointed out at the recent SCAA symposium, the job of the roaster is not to “educate” the customer but to listen to him. This is clearly not happening, and you can see it in the smug, holier-than-thou tone of the coffee selection and trade practices propaganda on the web sites of most of today’s leading boutique roasters.

I would also argue that the job of the roaster is as much to buffer the customer from “seasonality” as it is to expose her to it. Without a foundational consumer understanding of what the four great coffee flavor choices are - and without having those choices consistently available - we’re left with a retail coffee scene without a meaningful range of choice and customers who are forced to accept a tiny handful of (comparatively) taste-alike manicured washed coffees as representing the whole range of what’s good, simply because these are the coffees the “roastmasters” like to drink.

This is a giant step backwards for coffee retailing, and a ludicrous one in a time of sustained economic recession and record high green coffee prices where providing value and variety ought to be foremost considerations.

A rare dose of reality on fair trade coffees

2011-05-17T09:08:00.001-06:00

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Fair+trade+coffee/4782606/story.html

Amazed this article saw the light of day given the relentless PR machine of Transfair and well-meaning but uninformed and misguided consumer groups who endlessly promote buying certified coffees.

The article brings back memories of visits to some of the top fair trade cooperatives in Chiapas. The disconnect between the idealistic Europeans who started these groups, the well-off Ladinos running their offices and operations and the illegal immigrant Mayan Guatemalans doing the actual picking (for a pittance, and ridiculed as "stupid Indians" by the guys running the place), was pretty mind-blowing.

Stepping back from the immediacy and ironies of that situation, there's an even bigger picture that almost never gets discussed. Anywhere outside of Ethiopia and Yemen coffee is an imported, colonial export crop with a very short history - a couple hundred years or so. Prior to that historical blink of an eye the massive amounts of acreage being used for coffee in, say, Latin America was forest and farm land that actually fed people.

When coffee and poverty are discussed today there are all kinds of assumptions and statements made that demonstrate obliviousness to these facts. It's at though coffee had always been a part of these cultures, and that for thousands of years they'd drunk it loved it and relied on it to make a living. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ironically this article came out on the same day that the fabulous Esmeralda estate in Panama is conducting its annual on-line auction for the world's single most prized coffee. It's a coffee that earns its stratospheric (over $40 per pound) price the same way every other world-class foodstuff does: by its unique deliciousness and consistent quality. That's what I call fair trade - the rest is misguided charity that subsidizes mediocrity and gives folks who'd be better off diversifying their crops - or giving up on coffee altogether in favor of something with better margins like coca or pot - the cruelest of false hopes.

Fair trade: it's something you do, not something to certify.

Single cup coffee scene

2011-05-09T19:22:00.004-06:00

"The "ideal" coffee maker would be one which meets the following specifications: Maintains exactly correct brewing conditions completely automatically; requires little cleaning, with that which is necessary being both easy and convenient; provides essentially fresh brew in each cup that is served; meets the general requirements of the establishment in which is is used, with respect to cost, size, rates of dispensing and appearance."

- The C.B.C. (Coffee Brewing Center, Pan American Coffee Bureau), circa 1968

While I devoted most of my last post to lambasting Green Mountain's self-congratulatory marketing and ecologically disastrous K Cups I certainly respect the desire for more simplicity and convenience in coffee. I remember saying after the first espresso machines went into Starbucks stores that we now urgently needed a way to brew drip-strength coffee fresh, by the cup and to order. We knew even back then (we're talking over 20 years ago) that single origin drip coffee was the one and only chance we had to offer something to connect with the customer who really wanted to taste the place where the coffee came from, and that only those customers ultimately would pay up to support quality at origin. Hell, we were going to put a multiple Bunsen burner vacuum pot Premium Coffee bar in Columbia Center, the busiest of the old Il Giornale stores, and I made trips to visit various commercial single cup brewer manufacturers in hopes of having a proprietary machine designed.

Not a whole lot of innovation at Starbucks in this area since then, but you can see the consistent level of interest: espresso pods for home use for years now; buying the much-loved Clover machine but apparently only to kill it for others (thereby doing for technology what they did to The Coffee Connection); Via Instant which in spite of its mediocrity and absurd price is wildly successful, and now the Keurig deal.

In the boutique roaster-retailer world meanwhile instant coffee has become the domain of what an industry friend calls the Pouristas. These are the enthusiastic folks laboring over single-hole Bonmac or Hario drip cones sitting on cups that are themselves often sitting on scales, timing their pour, monitoring bloom time and water weights and so on. The admirable part of this is seeing such enthusiasm for theater and flavor paid to single origin coffee rather than espresso-based milk drinks, but cup quality-wise all of this pour-over silliness is a big step backwards from real drip coffee made in quantity on a commercial brewer, and it sure as hell ain't instant when it takes 4 minutes to get a single friggin cup of coffee.

While the Keurig system leaves a lot to be desired in terms of coffee freshness and brew temperature, Nestlé's proprietary Nespresso system is much higher quality, with pressurized capsules that have the same sort of extended shelf life at Illy's famous cans. The coffees are well-selected of course, but as with Keurig and the other systems the customer is investing in a machine that can only use those capsules, at a per pound cost of $25 or more, with none of the 50% or so premium going anywhere but to the roaster. (The fair trade folks ought to be publishing pie charts that show what percentage of the selling price per pound the farmer gets for "fair trade" K Cups - and asking consumers just how fair they think they are).

As for instant (powdered) coffee, the only problem historically has been it tastes like instant coffee, but for many years now there's been a huge difference in quality between brands due to proprietary technologies. The instant coffee process Starbucks uses was developed when I was working there and is pretty impressive. Would that they'd used it to supply the Sumatras and Kenyas I tasted during early R & D, rather than Italian Roast, Colombian and flavored swill. However, in getting into instant coffee the Green Menace is infringing on territory that Nestlé rightly considers theirs, and it will be very interesting indeed to see how this plays out in the long run, because Nestlé's coffee sourcing and proprietary instant coffee technologies are truly awesome - way beyond anything Starbucks has even dreamed of.

Nescafé products are very different depending on which of the 46 countries you buy their coffee in (each with its own customized blends and web site):

http://www.nescafe.com/Worldwide/Pages/UsefullLinks.aspx

Here in the U.S. they don't think all that highly of our taste buds: we get Taster's Choice Colombian, French Roast and some flavored crap for our "premium" choices. But check out the lineup available in most of Europe, including even the U.K.:

http://www.nescafe.co.uk/CoffeeCupboard/super-premium

Of these six coffees you can get only the Alta Rica high-grown Central American blend and Colombian in the U.S., for $12 per 100 gram jar from a mail order company (http://www.enjoybettercoffee.com/). I'd heard great things about the Alta Rica from friends in Europe and on foodie web sites and finally got to try it. Fresh-roasted seasonal single farm city+ roast in an Aeropress it is not, but it's a damn good cup of coffee that no one would think was instant unless they saw it being made. It's infinitely better than the Via (or fresh-brewed Pike Place Blend, for that matter) and I have no doubt the other 5 coffees are as well. Only question is when will Nestlé see fit to bring these to the U.S.? When and if they do, massive consumer sampling in upscale grocers like Whole Foods and in front of specialty stores in San Francisco and Seattle are certainly in order, and in any sort of large-scale taste test I predict they'll trounce not only instant but fresh-brewed from any of the major chains.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. Meanwhile, for those of us who care about truly great coffee, the need to develop ways of brewing them that are convenient, elegant and excellent is certainly urgent. Here's hoping that some of the the energy currently being squandered on Hario cones and Coava-equipped Chemexes makes its way into creating "open source" brewing technologies that actually work.

More dangers, more questions about long-term viability of being here

2011-01-20T16:35:00.005-07:00

Everyday dangers

On the Road

Erin and I continue to be amazed at the everyday hazards of being on the road down here, whether driving or as a pedestrian. Just today I was attempting to cross the street in downtown Ajijic. The light had turned red on the main highway but I knew better than to assume the big pickup heading my way would stop. Sure enough, he barreled through the light a good 10 seconds after it had turned red. We're used to aggressive drivers back home, but life on the road here is something else entirely, with (often unlicensed and uninsured) Mexicans, some just kids, passing on the right; speeding or, alternatively, coming to a dead stop in the middle of the street to chat with friends passing by, driving at night with no lights on "to save energy," all mixed in with local gringo seniors who should long since have had their keys taken away. Scary.

Should you get into a serious accident or have another medical emergency here at Lake Chapala, you call the Red Cross ambulance (hoping that one of their two is available) or a friend, get yourself stabilized at the Red Cross clinic in Chapala and then head in to one of the major hospitals in Guadalajara, around an hour away, depending on time of day and traffic. We're used to living in small cities that have their own hospitals, and in an urgent situation that kind of transport distance could be a life-or-death difference.

You're No Longer Welcome

Nearly a year ago we joined IMSS, the Mexican government health insurance plan. Recently we've had some encounters with the local office in Chapala that have made it very clear they are looking for any excuse to discourage gringos from using the system, and to deny claims for folks who've paid in for years without using the clinics.

In just the past few months we've learned a great deal from people who've had both good and bad experiences with IMSS clinics and hospitals as well as local clinics and doctors. Much of what we've learned has been deeply disturbing tales of misdiagnoses and boneheaded treatments, and the IMSS clinics and hospitals in Jalisco turn out to be some of the worst in the country. Yes there's still plenty of world-class medical care available here but there are also essentially no protections when things go wrong.

Crime

This past weekend we were out walking through one of the nearby neighborhoods with some nice steep hills and on our way back came across a half-dozen state police cars parked near a convenience store, with officers in black masks with rifles drawn in hot pursuit of some bad guys. Apparently this sight was related to a bunch of serious crime that occurred in Chapala and on the highway into Guadalajara over the weekend, including a fragmentation grenade being thrown into the home of a local official, discovery of a huge cache of weapons (including automatic rifles, grenades, thousands of rounds of ammo, a rocket launcher and large quantities of crack cocaine and crystal meth) and a nighttime blockade of the main highway going in to Guadalajara. These incidents occurred only a few days after a wonderful local expat who went to Erin's church was murdered in the course of a botched robbery in broad daylight, in a house that was a block away from one where we were visiting friends.

It's clear that this area, once believed to be immune from narco crime, while not a major thoroughfare, still has cartel activity as well as increasing levels of property crime. As expats with limited Spanish, removed from the tight-knit Mexican families who make up 90%+ of the local population, we simply have no way of knowing the full extent of what's going on, but it's clear that the locals are a lot more worried than we are.

Local police like police everywhere are poorly paid, often corrupt and quite possibly, in some cases, in the employ of drug traffickers. When you see a police car here there isn't that mixture of fear and a feeling of safety you get in the U.S. Instead, you just hope they aren't going to pull you over for a bogus traffic crime in search of a bribe, and you know that if your home were broken into you wouldn't even bother calling them.

That reality is part of an overall level of powerlessness - to do anything about crime, about noise, trash, sanitation, food safety, whatever - that goes hand in hand with being an expat. It takes awhile - at least a year I would think - for this to really sink in, and it's a reality that visitors, including even six-months-a-year snow birds - really don't have to contend with. Certainly it's a good reminder of how little control we have over anything in life, but by the same token the inability to so much as influence conditions that figure mightily into one's health and sanity does get old. Neighbor wants to play his stereo at top volume all night? Live with it or move. Local clinic botches your vitally important lab tests or breaks your shoulder due to re-setting it before reading x-rays (both things that have happened here recently to folks we know personally) - zero recourse, not even a "we're sorry."

Quality of Life issues

Another quality-of-life difference between Lakeside and our typical haunts in the U.S. is that bicycling for exercise is pretty much out of the question (there is one paved road around the lake and it is heavily trafficked) and hiking, our other go-to aerobic activity, is possible but dangerous, due to the invariably steep trails being covered in pea-sized gravel, especially during the long (November-June) dry season, that makes for treacherous descents even when equipped with trekking poles and stout shoes. Given the near-perfect year round weather these probably sound like silly complaints, and perhaps they are, but being in - and exercising in - nature in these ways are hard-wired habits for us that are difficult to give up. Living here is a purely urban experience, albeit with lovely flowers and amazing bird life.

I've rediscovered tennis since we moved down here and really enjoyed playing, but my body has rebelled of late, with chronic tennis elbow I've exacerbated by playing through the pain. Looks like it's down to yoga, urban walks and maybe a gym (boring and expensive), which clearly won't be sustainable for the long term.

Realistically for us the only likely alternative to life down here would be a return to the U.S., most likely to Silver City, New Mexico, which has the best combination of progressive community, weather, cost of living and overall livability of any affordable place we've lived. The only obstacle to such a move is health insurance costs, but that's a considerable concern, at least until 2014 when we'd be eligible for Medicaid based on our very low taxable income. Still at least New Mexico, which unlike Colorado is a "blue" state, has plenty of low-cost clinics who offer discounts for cash payment. Plus Silver is less than a 90 minute drive to the walk-across Mexican border crossing at Las Palomas, and on the other side are numerous dental clinics, pharmacies and doctor's offices catering to gringos. We like New Mexico, and the way things are going it might be as close to the real Mexico as we want to be for the long run.

View of Western New Mexico University, Silver City NM

Most important of all, the nearly 50% increase in airfares between here and the U.S since the demise of Mexicana airlines this fall has rendered our plan to return to the U.S. two or more times a year financially untenable. Meanwhile the time we've spent over the past two years starting meditation groups here and in Colorado has made it glaringly obvious that we both need much more time on retreat and mentoring from seasoned teachers in order to be in a position to be of real service to others, and such training is simply not available here, whereas in New Mexico we'd be driving distance from numerous retreats and seasoned teachers, including some profoundly accomplished practitioners and a wonderful place for inexpensive solo retreat right in the Silver City area. Maybe it's just getting older, but maturing in dharma practice is the only thing we feel really deep desire for these days. Other than another pilgrimage in Asia at some point and perhaps a return to France one day we've done all the travel, all the outward adventuring, we really want to do.

A masterful post by one of the great minds of contemporary dharma

2011-01-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Bhikku Sujato is a Thai forest tradition monk who weds serious meditation practice with a Ken Wilbur-like intellect. His two books, A History of Mindfulness: How Insight Worsted Tranquility in the History of the Sattipatthana Sutta, and A Swift Pair of Messengers are both masterful (and available as free downloads).

This quote from his blog today distills the former book down to its pith essence. With so much confusion out there (much of it promulgated by famous teachers) about what mindfulness actually is and what the role of concentration meditation (taught and practiced by the Buddha) and "insight" meditation (not taught by him!) in the path are, Sujato clarifies the confusion like no one else. I'm so grateful to have found his work.

http://sujato.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/a-brief-history-of-mindfulness/

A quick visit to Manzanillo and Barra de Navidad

2011-01-13T14:15:00.001-07:00

Here's a photo of a quintessentially Mexican road sign, in that even the "desviacion" has a desviacion. And woe unto those who cannot read, upside-down or otherwise, because on the other end of this major construction project there is no sign at all - or rather, the "sign" that you've gone from paved road to major project would be to drive into an open ditch with about a 4 foot drop-off. Warning signs? We don't need no stinkin' warning signs.....

We made a quick trip down to the coast to explore some of the lower-cost non-resort beach options nearby. Furthest north in our trip was the tiny village of La Manzanilla, where we'd stayed before. It has the best beach of any of these places, a handful of excellent international restaurants, a serious dearth of Mexican ones (one taco stand, for example) and has been thoroughly discovered by the art-buying, jewelry-rattling gringo set. It's more than a little precious, but I can see why. Very tranquil and probably the best option provided you reserve a place for at least a week or more, which we didn't (the hotel options in La Manzanilla are not attractive).

Next stop south is Melaque, a long-time favorite of Canadian snow birds. Nice beach, lots of crumbling buildings in town, a tiny handful of passable places to eat that you can pretty much exhaust in a day or two. The town itself and all the close-in hotels have a run-down, shabby feel and the place seems almost entirely devoid of culture, Mexican or gringo.

A couple of miles further south is Barra de Navidad, which has a nicer town area with charming streets, more numerous and aggressive touts and better gringo restaurants, including a French bakery, some good continental places and coffee bars. Barra's beach isn't appealing for swimming, and the town abuts an unattractive lagoon. Overall a bit classier than Melaque, but that's not saying much.

Manzanillo, the big city a half-hour further south, is an interesting combination of industrial port with beach resort. It's bustling and refreshingly real but certainly not charming. Some good restaurants though and one gringo-oriented place to stay (the Pink Posada) that while not good value-for-money still makes a worthwhile stop. Erin took this photo at sunset:

Considering that every U.S. state except Florida had snow on the ground the days we were here, nothing whatsoever to complain about. We did realize once again that we are just not beach people though - not ocean swimmers, not into heat and humidity or the party scene. Next time we want a bit of warmth during one of Lakeside's cold snaps we'll just head a couple of hours south to the lovely town of Colima (which is on the way to these beaches), which has coastal weather, a university, fine museums and restaurants, good shopping and colonial architecture. Colima and nearby Comala are real gems, and we look forward to spending extended time there.

The degeneration continues

2011-01-05T17:09:00.001-07:00

Starbucks just announced they're transitioning to the new logo on the right, and since April Fool's Day is a long way off we have to assume the marketing folks are at it again, earning their keep by ruining what's left of a once great brand.

The old brown logo was of course the best, with its rich earth tone (kinda reminds you of coffee - what a novel concept!) and beautifully feminine image of the mermaid. The first green-look logo was the bastard progeny of Howard's green winged Mercury from Il Giornale logo

and the original Starbucks one. This unhappy union of graphics and companies (a wonderful, product-driven roaster-retailer wedded to a slick espresso bar) was promoted as "the best of both," but of course turned out to be their ruination, at least with respect to product quality, good taste and human scale.

First they removed the "Tea" and traded coffee brown for lucre green. Then, they de-sexed the mermaid in a bid for mass-market blandness, and now the words "Starbucks" and "Coffee" are both gone. The only further "evolution" I can imagine from here is to simply replace the mermaid with a dollar sign in the same green and white colors, which would at least be truth in advertising for the one thing the company still stands for and cares about.

New Year's Eve 2010

2010-12-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a view of the lake from the malecon a few hundred feet from our casita. It'll reach the low 70's here today, down into the high 40's at night - about as chilly as it gets in these parts. The gentleness of the climate is a huge blessing, much more noticeable as we get older. I'm a California kid at heart, having grown up there. Moving to Michigan at age 13 was jarring to say the least, and subsequent moves to Colorado for dharma studies and Seattle for work never diminished my sense of home being tied to a Mediterranean climate, being near water, the smell of eucalyptus.

Walking through the neighborhoods we came upon a fellow doing street repair the way it has long been done around here. These cobblestoned streets are rough and need constant repair, but they suit the climate perfectly and make sense in a land where capital is scarce, labor cheap and skilled hand crafting a way of life.

My new year's wish for all, from the metta or lovingkindness practice we do every day:

May you have peace of mind and ease of heart.

May you love yourself just as you are.

May you be free from all forms of suffering.

May you know the deepest happiness.

Safety issues real and imagined

2010-12-31T08:40:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent moments from our lives as bookends:

1. Yesterday afternoon Erin went to visit a friend who lives in one of the subdivisions east of Chapala. There was road construction most of the way, and she came back a bit ashen despite having a Reiki treatment from her friend, saying the driving was the worst she has experienced in Mexico, with several near-misses, people passing in a 40 kph construction zone at 100 kph, making sudden signal-less turns in front of her, etc.

Now it's not India (which hopefully will remain the "high" water mark for lunatic driving in our memory banks) but you can't drive 10 minutes around here without seeing someone, and usually multiple someones, doing crazy and totally illegal stuff behind the wheel. While our friends up north think of drug kingpins and maybe Montezuma's revenge when they fret about safety in Mexico, we worry more about driving and walking.

2. This morning's breakfast: local watermelon from the bag of things I bought at our favorite local fruiteria. For 106 pesos (about $8.80) I got a very heavy bag containing the watermelon, a honey-sweet pineapple, two mandarin oranges and two navels, a kilo each of dried beans and sugar, cilantro, chile and nopales. That's maybe a third the cost of only very roughly equivalent food in the U.S., the "roughly" part being that no fruit is in season up there and the stuff we get down here, because it's picked ripe for immediate consumption, tastes nothing like the Mexican stuff we see in the U.S.

So there you have it: we might not live long, un-maimed, down here, but we'll eat well and be able to afford to do so while it lasts.

Another recent series of experiences that carries significant weight in our perceptions of the viability of living down here has to do with IMSS, the national health insurance and care system we signed up for about 9 months ago. In theory you pay your premium (escalates with age but currently around $200 per year per person) and after three years are fully covered. The hospitals are bare bones, you have to have a caretaker/translator with you at all times, but in the event of a serious accident or illness IMSS is known to be a lifesaver. At an annual cost way below what we've paid for a month of high-deductible U.S. coverage, signing up seemed a no-brainer.

It turns out that as with everything else in Mexico, IMSS varies from state to state (just like in the U.S. - Mexico, too, is a big country), and Jalisco, our state of residence, has one of the worst IMSS systems, with overtaxed and underfunded clinics, long waits for surgery and horror stories about sanitation and general conditions in hospitals. Moreover, the local IMSS clinic in Chapala is overseen by an ogress of a woman who is well-known in the local community for looking to make life difficult for any newcomers, especially us gringos, whose use of IMSS she deeply resents. She'll tell you to show up a 6 a.m. for an 8 a.m. appointment you turn out not to have (repeatedly, until you give up), or, in our case, require you to have tests not required by law (and not available in this area) in order to maintain coverage.

One visit to the Chapala IMSS clinic is enough to make you seriously consider either moving back to the U.S. or signing up for private insurance anyway, as even early in the morning you walk into a huge and not especially clean waiting room (standing room only) full of coughing, obviously sick people and dozens of wailing babies. Erin and I figured if you're not sick when you show up, you'll probably have caught a dose of something by the time you get in to see the doctor. We had low expectations of the Mexican system, but this office reminded us more of the train station in central New Delhi - third world going on fourth. Scary.

So we may well end up "going naked" (self-insuring) and hoping for the best, of paying up for private insurance for a few years. The good news is that out of pocket care is generally excellent and affordable. The bad news: there are some incompetent and/or woefully under-equipped local labs and doctors who should have their licenses revoked, and unlike in the U.S. you have no legal recourse when mistakes are made.

Good friends here went into full-tilt panic mode when one of the most used local clinics and labs told the husband in the couple, who'd had prostate removal surgery, that his PSA numbers were ten times what they actually turned out to be (such results, if true, could only have meant a full-on return of cancer). Another local fellow moved back to Florida to get health care after two other local doctors and clinics so thoroughly manhandled him that he could no longer function. Buyer beware, avoid doctors who are over-worked and overly popular simply because they're accessible and speak good English, get a second opinion always for anything major. And remind yourself the same sort of misdiagnoses and lab errors happen in the U.S., at 5 or 10 times the cost.

The nomads were at it again - our year in review

2010-12-19T17:00:00.004-07:00

Erin and Kevin, Montesano WA

2010 has been another wild ride of a year for us, with most of the drama of our own making, as usual. We were in Mexico through April, then uprooted and moved back to Cañon City Colorado in May, with every intention of sticking it out in the U.S. for good. By the end of August we'd moved back to Mexico, and have settled in in the little village of San Antonio Tlaycapan on the shores of Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest freshwater lake and the most popular and developed expat retirement destination in the world.

Why all the moving? A lot of it was just homesickness: we'd had only one return trip to the U.S., in August of '09, and it had been a semi-disaster, with 108 degree weather in Portland, cold and rain in Washington State, me getting sick and missing a meditation retreat that the whole trip was built around. Colorado, which has been our home most of our married lives, beckoned.

The 1700 mile drive home was fairly uneventful, but I landed back in Colorado with a bad eye infection that brought me up close and personal with the U.S. medical system I'd hoped to avoid dealing with. We stayed in cramped quarters at my mom's house while we looked for a mobile home or inexpensive house to buy, and the lack of space and family dynamics made our re-entry more challenging than either of us had imagined.

We'd envisioned having our pick of inexpensive places to buy, but the two back-to-back first time homebuyer's tax credits had resulted in many desirable places being snapped up. In the process of looking at houses, the realities of the local and national economy began to seep in. Contrary to what we'd thought not only had there been no real recovery since the crash of '08, but with sustained high unemployment it became very clear that the local real estate market had nowhere to go but further down for the foreseeable future. Buying made no sense, and despite diligent bush-beating for work prospects for both of us it became clear in short order that opportunities for either of us to bring in the steady trickle of income we'd calculated would be essential were going to be very hard to come by. I looked long and hard at doing a small-scale coffee roasting business, but networking revealed a lot of fear and not much hope about the economy, making fund-raising for startup capital pretty hopeless.

August 4th, 2010 was our 20th wedding anniversary. It was a milestone we thought about celebrating in the beautiful mountain town of Crested Butte, Colorado, where we'd spent many happy days mountain biking and hiking in past years. Adding up the costs of a couple of nights at the cheapest B & B in town (still over $100 a night in low season) made us settle for grass-fed beef burgers and a good microbrew at the local pub. It wasn't much of a celebration, but twenty years later I am far more certain than I was on a bright summer's day in Seattle that marrying Erin was the best decision of my life. I wouldn't trade our adventures together, mis-steps and all, for anything, and if she would she's been far too diplomatic to say so very often.

We loved reconnecting with the small but vibrant Buddhist and Christian contemplative communities in Cañon and the equally vibrant local/organic agriculture and lefty political groups. The sheer ease of being back in the U.S., where streets are paved, utilities work, Netflix streaming videos and books from Amazon are yours at the flick of a switch (and English comes out of the TV when you turn it on) - we wallowed in it!

Then there's the dark side, especially in a conservative small town like Cañon City. Culturally and intellectually we found most of the locals to be if anything more alien in their perspectives and priorities than the Mexicans down here, who much to their credit actually do put family (rather than overwork and consumerism) first. The weather - and Cañon has Colorado's best climate, hands-down - was hot and windy every day, making us realize how thoroughly Lakeside's Mediterranean climate had spoiled us.

Medical care - I had occasion to make several visits to local clinics - is perhaps the biggest shocker of all after spending the better part of two years in Mexico. Not only were we spending a small fortune for ultra high deductible ($25,000 each) catastrophic insurance, but I had the privilege of waiting two weeks or more, and paying $120+, to see an actual (harried) doctor and dentist for perhaps 10 minutes after wading through paperwork and dealing with a host of useless underlings. The contrast between that and making an appointment directly with a doctor here, walking in the same or next day (or having him come to the house - no extra charge) and paying $12 for the visit made me realize that even if we could afford U.S. health care we'd use it for dire emergencies only and get routine care done down here, Thailand or any number of other countries.

During our Colorado time we were fortunate to spend some time up in our beloved old hometown of Boulder, hanging out with friends and hiking the trails. Boulder has long felt like home to both of us and still does. The fact of the matter is we're both drawn exclusively to such "precious" (as our friend Darvesha calls them) places: Boulder; Santa Fe; Ashland, Oregon and so on, as places to live. Give us a college town with great weather, easy access to lots of hiking and biking and lively spiritual and progressive political communities and we're happy - except for being utterly unable to afford to live in such places! And all of our moving around has been in an effort to find the non-existent Holy Grail of an affordable small town with most of the same amenities at a far lower cost. The closest we have come - and it's very close in many ways - is Silver City, New Mexico, which is still at the top of my list for places I'd like to live but far too isolated, geographically, for Erin.

We both find it to be very important to work at cultivating gratitude for the many opportunities we do have and our limitations in order to not succumb to a sense of failure e after all of our messy attempts at living various places, compounded in my case by numerous false starts and mis-steps in trying to find work in the coffee and tea industries that I still retain much passion for. Neither one of us ever envisioned living in exile as expats in Mexico. Extended time in Asia at some point studying meditation and yoga - sure. A spring or fall in rural Italy or France - no arm-twisting required. Still, here we are, and compared to so many people we know back home, in the land of long-term double-digit unemployment, utterly broken health care systems and political parties (and crappy weather)...we are blessed.

I'd spent a good deal of time in Mexico during my coffee buying days, but such trips take you to Chiapas Oaxaca and Veracruz and not the gringo retirement havens of Lake Chapala or San Miguel de Allende. I always liked Mexico - the people and food certainly far more than the coffee, which was and is mediocre at best - but never fantasized about living here. Guatemala was always my favorite country to visit in Latin America, Costa Rica appealed for its lively participatory democracy, Panama for unspoiled hiking in forests...and Mexico hardly registered, apart from Oaxaca and Puebla, whose world-class cuisines have long appealed.

Two years in to the process of living here, we continue to be both appreciative of and deeply ambivalent about life in Mexico. The friendliness, decency and good humor of the Mexican people fill us with gratitude, the weather is fantastic and easy access to fresh, real food all year round at prices we can afford fills us with gratitude. We know from seeing how the locals live that we can continue to learn from them how to live better on less here, whereas in the U.S. we were barely making it living in just about the cheapest acceptable place we could find.

The expat community is lively and diverse. Without a doubt it's an older crowd, but the same is true of our friends back home, for the simple reason that other people anywhere near our respective ages are doing what we ought to be (and would prefer to be!) doing: working! At least here the gringo community gets together for lectures, discussions and meals during the daytime and not just evenings and weekends, and many more people are out there volunteering and doing rather than just glued to the TV and computer in their palatial empty nests as is so typical in wealthy but lonely U.S.A.

Anyone with the gumption to cross a border and live outside their homeland, even for only half the year, is much more curious about the world around them than most folks back home, all too many of whom get their fear-based "reality" fed to them by the likes of Fox News or CNN. This time of year there seem to be nearly as many Canadians here as Americans, along with a smattering of Europeans, so the place has a quite cosmopolitan feel compared to the small retirement burgs we've frequented back home in recent years. There's a thriving organic market on Tuesdays that complement the traditional village one on Wednesdays, an amazing array of restaurants and around 100 clubs spanning every conceivable hobby and interest.

We're well aware that we live our daily lives in a gringo "bubble," yet even though we're relative newcomers we actually get out into local Mexican culture far more than most other people we know here. We eat local food 90% of the time, know our tortillas and beans and nopales (cactus), shop in tiny tiendas where no one speaks English as much as possible, and use our basic Spanish daily. This doesn't sound like much, and it isn't, except that we continually meet people who've lived down here for five or ten years who speak maybe 5 words of Spanish, buy all their food at Super Lake (the local gringo grocery) or Costco and have never eaten a street taco in their lives.

We'll continue to work on our Spanish, but are under no illusions about "going native" or otherwise integrating with local Mexican culture. I should say cultures, because here at Lake Chapala there are really two distinct groups. One are the local village Mexicans who historically have fished and farmed and continue to do such work as well as construction and service industries. These are working-class folks, often with large families and elementary school educations. In sharp contrast to these locals are the wealthy Guadalajarans for whom Lake Chapala is their weekend and holiday playground. Many of these folks have wealth that far surpasses 90% of the gringo community - to the point that they can tie up $500,000 or more in a palatial home that's used only on weekends or holidays for entertaining. It often seems like it's a toss up as to whether these wealthy Tapatios look down their noses more haughtily at the local "hick" Mexicans who are their servants or the hopelessly tasteless geriatric gringos flaunting their white limbs in shorts and flip-flops as they wander the Lakeside villages. These members of Guadalajara's ruling class consider themselves Spanish at least as much as Mexican, and it's Spain and certainly not the U.S. whose definitions of what's in good taste in terms of food, clothing or the arts set the standard for them.

Meanwhile, Erin and I, a childless middle-aged couple, are, like other gringos, a total mystery to local Mexicans, for whom family (by which they mean an extended family including all generations from grandparents to grandchildren plus godmother and godfathers and many others) is everything. That we don't have kids yet are married already defies comprehension - that we've moved to their country without at least bringing what family we do have (i.e. our parents and siblings) is the final proof that we are sad and lonely creatures from another planet. Thankfully Mexicans are in general a very tolerant and kind people, putting up with our weird ways and broken Spanish with courtly politeness and real warmth that we do our best to reciprocate.

We've been fortunate during our brief time living down here to connect with some like-minded folks with interests in meditation and spiritual teachings. There's a group of up to 15 people that gathers on Tuesday evenings for meditation and study (we're currently reading Jack Kornfield's fine book The Wise Heart), and Erin leads a Christian centering prayer group at the local Episcopal church that is if anything more lively than the Tuesday Buddhist group. A seasoned Buddhist meditation teacher from Portland, Oregon just retired down here this month, which is big news for our community and will hopefully lead to us finding a public home for these groups that might also host yoga classes and other compatible pursuits.

Erin does massage for friends out of our cozy casita's spare bedroom/office a couple of days a week and has enjoyed being able to use her skills almost as much as the lucky recipients have enjoyed being on the receiving end.

My involvement with coffee and tea has been limited to teaching occasional "Coffee 101" classes as benefits for the local sustainable agriculture group, which of course I greatly enjoy. Eight years after leaving Allegro Coffee/Whole Foods I do the best I can to keep up with the industry from afar, but am well aware that participating in that industry is one of those "you must be present to play, let alone win" situations and I am very much out of the game, even though I continue to have passion for the business and feel like I could still innovate and contribute at a high level.

Life seems to have other plans for me, and so for now I do my best to re-channel such energies into dharma practice and study, my real heart passions, for which the coffee business was always a substitute and a diversion anyway, albeit a great one that at is best did and does serve to benefit people and at least temporarily alleviate some suffering.

As most of our friends know the primary impetus for moving down here was and is financial. Despite being invested in about as conservative and well-diversified a manner as is possible we like so many others took a considerable "hit" during the '08 market meltdown, and while our investments have recovered to some degree we're still well off from our 2007 peak. We could clearly afford to live in the U.S. and would prefer to do so were it not for two things: 1) my inability to find work in the coffee business and lack of sufficient "risk-able" capital to start my own thing; 2) out-of-control health insurance premiums that even for two relatively healthy (knock on wood) middle-aged folks seem certain to exceed what we spend on food and utilities combined down here.

Sexy Santa, village of Chapala

We continue to follow economic and political news in the U.S. closely, as well as monitoring these fronts and security issues relative to the drug war here in Mexico. The two country's economies remain locked in a "death spiral," with 70%+ of Mexico's exports going to the U.S. That's one reason the dollar:peso exchange rate seems likely to remain fairly stable, provided the U.S. doesn't continue to print money like there's no tomorrow ("quantitative easing") as it has been. As for the U.S. things look worse than ever to us, with unprecedented wealth inequality, a now almost spineless President whose idea of political compromise is to meet the far right a millimeter to their left, and mid-term elections that just returned to office the same crooks and numbskulls who caused the aforementioned economic crises and Banana Republic level wealth inequality. I wish I could say that I saw hopeful signs on the horizon, but it would appear that things politically, economically and environmentally are going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

More than half of the expat population here are snowbirds who head back to the U.S. and Canada in the spring, and of those who are nominally full-timers many have the wherewithal and adventurous spirit to travel extensively, both back up N.O.B. (North of the Border in expatspeak) and globally. Much as we'd like to join them, vital to keeping our expenses low is to keep our travel back home to once or twice a year, limiting our time on such trips due to the need to buy short-term health insurance and the much higher costs for everything (food and drink, especially). We do plan to visit the Northwest next spring, where we have a meditation retreat scheduled at Cloud Mountain in Oregon.

Our lease here expires next September, and our tentative plan is to stay here on a month-to-month basis until November or December, put our few worldly goods in storage and head off to Asia for 3-5 months for pilgrimage and meditation retreats, returning to Lakeside as the snowbirds leave in April. Still very much up in the air, finances and health willing, but Asia calls to us in ways that Mexico and Latin America never will. We would dearly love to do more meditation retreats and other training back in the U.S., but running the numbers shows us we can spend a couple of months or more practicing under more basic conditions in Asia for the cost of one 7 day retreat each in the U.S., so to the motherlands we will go.

We have a dear friend and mentor in Silver City, New Mexico who is one of the most highly evolved spiritual practitioners either of us have ever met. She and her partner lost everything they had other than an isolated piece of land where they live off the grid on about $500 a month to Bernie Madoff a couple of years ago. I remember her sending out a note telling friends of this unbelievable loss in which she quoted from one of the Hindu scriptures: "to those devoted to the Lord he grants their sincere wishes, but to those who love him best he grants the ultimate boon: he strips them of everything." Our situation isn't remotely comparable to theirs, but on a more modest level it feels like our lives have been stripped to the essentials. We own no home, our worldly goods would fit with ease in a tiny tow-behind trailer, we have all the time in the world to practice and serve but just enough money for the essentials. Life seems to be calling us to do fewer things better, with more grounding and as close to zero attachment to the outcome as we can muster.

To local friends reading this: thank you more than I could ever hope to express for your friendship and company. To our friends and family up north: come visit!

Happy holidays!

Some noteworthy books of the year

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Dancing With Life, by Phillip Moffitt
Twelve by Twelve, by William Powers
Buddha's Brain, by Rick Hanson
Stepping Out of Self-Deception, by Rodney Smith
Turning the Wheel of Truth, by Ajahn Sucitto
Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, by Paul Knitter
The Hidden Power of the Gospels, by Alexander Shaia
The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, by Andrew Harvey
Broken: A Love Story, by Lisa Jones
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, by Cynthia Bourgeault
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Stiltsville, by Susanna Daniel
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Favorite Music

Just a Little Lovin', by Shelby Lynne
Schizophrenic, by Oz Noy
To the One, John McLaughlin
Sally Beth Roe, Gerald Gradwohl
Historicity, Vijay Iyer Trio
Initiate, The Nels Cline Singers
Saiyuki, Nguyen Le

An inspiring and fun read

2010-11-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Erin and I both just finished reading Twelve by Twelve: A One Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream, by William Powers. It's a very well-written book that brings together through vivid personal experience many disparate and resonant threads: voluntary simplicity, social and personal change in both the first and third worlds, community, sustainable agriculture and spiritual transformation. In the end, it's an especially fresh look at what it might really mean to "be the change you want to see" in the world.

http://www.williampowersbooks.com/wpowers-twelve-overview.htm

Thanksgiving message from a wonderful teacher

2010-11-25T10:26:00.002-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zl9puhwiyw

A wonderful photographer

2010-11-21T10:31:00.001-07:00

This talented photographer just opened a small gallery at 18 Calle Colon just south of the plaza (and right next door to the wonderful Las Quekas de Abuelo restaurant) in Ajijic. Check out his photos, and if you live here you owe it to yourself to visit and look at his book The Through Line.

The first link below is to an excellent gallery of his photos (takes a couple of minutes to load but is well worth it!). The second is to the site for his book.

http://www.jaykoppelman.com/

http://thethroughline.wordpress.com/

Feria Maestros del Arte

2010-11-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

This weekend is the most exciting of the year in our part of Mexico for visual arts. The Feria Maestros del Arte is a three day festival during which the very best traditional folk artists from all over Mexico come to Chapala to show and sell their wares.

This year is the 9th anniversary of the Feria. Many things about the show are extraordinary, starting with the extreme care with which the artists invited are selected. Many represent art forms whose very existence is threatened due to the pressures of modernization and urbanization, and the difficulty in making a living doing something so labor intensive.

Visionary organizer Marianne Carlson has made the survival of these arts and artisans her first priority. Those lucky few artists who are invited pay no booth rent or other fees and keep 100% of the prices they receive. In recent years diligent fundraising has allowed the fair to cover the artist's often considerable transportation costs (many come from remote areas many hundreds of miles away), and local people, mostly from the gringo community, also provide free lodging as well as some meals for the artists. In many instances the revenue from these three days is the biggest source of income all year long for those exhibiting.

Attending the Feria, where so much of the art is of museum quality, will spoil you for arts shopping almost anywhere else in Mexico. There's simply no comparison between the work sold here and the mass-produced trinkets on offer in typical tourist traps.

We had to restrain ourselves from spending serious dollars this year, but couldn't resist a couple of choice, smaller pieces:

This clay skull intricately decorated with butterflies is made by the Castillo Orta family from the state of Puebla. The level of detail of this family's work dazzled us last year, and this year we finally succumbed, even though the prices, while more than fair for the countless hours of work involved, are quite high. Here Mexico's unflinching willingness to look death in the eye, and in doing so to embrace resurrection as well, are on full display.

Here's the Catrina to end all Catrinas. Look at the minutely detailed painting on the lower part of her skirt, done with a steady hand, the tiniest of brushes and infinite patience. For those unfamiliar, the Catarina got its start as a wry send-up of the rich and famous, showing that they like the rest of us are just skeletons and mortal flesh under all their airs and finery. This masterpiece was going for 4500 pesos (about $375) - far beyond our means - but at least we got a photo! Given the artistry involved that "steep" asking price is really a bargain.

I'd been looking for a beautiful image of Mother Mary for Erin. One of the great delights of Mexican Catholicism is that the locals dote on images of the Virgin (and in many instances merely politely tolerate those of Jesus, truth be told!). In a magical booth full of beautiful images I found this small ofrenda (altar) to the Virgin:

Created by Michoacán artist Rocio Luna Moreno, this little altar, complete with votive candle and flowers, now occupies a choice spot on our dining room wall. For us the echoes of other images of the divine feminine (Tara, Kali, Parvati and others) are so palpable here. Mother of Christ (and all the Buddhas!), savior and solace of beings, and, not incidentally, a much-needed counterpoint to and corrective of the patriarchal cultures that seem to most need and appreciate these images.

We're blessed indeed to live in a culture with so much soul.

An interesting juxtaposition

2010-11-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here's yesterday's daily dharma quote from Tricycle magazine:

Our mind is like a house

We can look at it like this: our mind is like a house, and our mindfulness is like the tenant of that house. Because we don't want any intruders or unwelcome guests, we lock all the doors and windows of our house. Now no one can get in unless we let them in. No one can enter unannounced. That's the function of mindfulness—to be watchful of what's trying to enter our mind. If an angry thought tries to enter our mind, it can't come in until we open the door. Our purpose is not to shut everything out; it's to remain conscious of our environment and what's happening in it. Then we can deal with it appropriately. We can open the door to our angry thought, listen to it, and then ask it to leave. We recognize it as a thought and don't mistake it for who we are. That's the point. It shifts the experience. Instead of thinking, "I'm really angry right now," we think, "Oh, look, an angry thought has entered my mind." It's easy to let go of a thought that's a guest in your mind; it's harder when you take on the identity of the guest. Who are you going to ask to leave?

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "Rebel Buddha"

And here's today's:

The Power of Judgment

Sometimes you hear mindfulness defined as a nonjudging state of mind, but that’s not how the Buddha understood it. He often compared mindfulness to a gatekeeper in the way it helps you judge what should and shouldn’t be done:

Just as the royal frontier fortress has a gatekeeper—wise, experienced, intelligent—to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without; in the same way a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering and able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago. With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, the disciple of the noble ones abandons what is unskillful, develops what is skillful, abandons what is blameworthy, develops what is blameless, and looks after himself with purity.
—Anguttara Nikaya 7.63

So mindfulness actually plays an essential role in developing your powers of judgment.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "The Power of Judgment"

Ponlop Rinpoche, wittingly or unwittingly, echoes the Buddha's own metaphor, but as usual there's no improving on the original teaching - and both quotes are worlds-removed from the skewed definition of "mindfulness" created by Jon Kabat-Zinn and others bent on secularizing the dharma and watering it down into a branch of modern psychology: "non-judgmental awareness of the present moment." Instead sati ("mindfulness" but perhaps more accurately "retention," "recollection," "knowing") clearly has the sense of remembering ("able to call to mind even things that were done and said long ago") the object of meditation and, far more important, to cultivate positive mental states and actions and eliminate negative ones. Nothing non-judgmental or "values neutral" about it.

A must-read book

2010-10-19T12:19:00.000-06:00

I've just finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. My interest had beed piqued by an earlier (and by now famous) article of his in The Atlantic, entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Carr is no Luddite; rather he's a superb writer who's been an early adopter of every electronic technology one can think of, but who's also paid attention to the effects of these things on his work. The Shallows takes a look at two other key technologies, the clock and printed books, both of which profoundly altered the way we live, before delving into the very recent world of the internet, smart phones and text messaging.

The book surveys the latest research, much of it only possible in just the past few years, into the neuroplasticity of the brain and how our brains are altered through long-term use of the internet, ebook readers and the like.

Who should read this book?

* Anyone who spends more than an hour a day online.

* Anyone who's noticed themselves reading fewer books and spending more time surfing the web and clicking on hyperlinks in recent years.

* Anyone who values literacy, contemplation and original thinking.

* Anyone who's a meditator and/or values calmness, equanimity and precision of mind.

This is the most important book I've read in at least a decade. Ironically, but appropriately, it's available both in hard copy and in a Kindle edition from Amazon. More info and reviews are here:

http://www.theshallowsbook.com/nicholascarr/The_Shallows.html

Reflections inspired by new organic market

2010-10-12T16:18:00.000-06:00

This photo was taken at the Monday tianguis in Chapala, my favorite of the local markets. That's a pretty astonishing price on tomatoes, albeit these are doubtless romas from the huge abastos in Guadalajara and so while they're Mexican they might not be what some of us would consider local.

There's a lively new market for organic products only on Tuesday mornings from 10 to noon, held at the covered parking area space of Hold in One golf school and restaurant in Chula Vista. Erin and I have been to it several times, and I must say it evokes mixed feelings.

When you subtract the vendors offering prepared foods and/or things they're just re-selling (packaged beans, soaps, coffee and the like) there isn't a whole lot of food there, though there are some really good things: heirloom tomatoes from Jocotepec, the fabulous greens and organic meats from ACA out in Jaltepec, some nice herbs. Prices are high: full-on Whole Foods+ for meats, most produce at least double what you'd pay for conventional at a good local fruiteria, or even the Ajijic Wednesday market, which is much more expensive than most of the independent stores. The reason things are so expensive is clear to see: the customers are all gringos, and one of the reasons the place seems so damn busy is they're all driving to this market, unlike the locals who mostly take the bus or walk everywhere. Not to say that organic products shouldn't cost more, but just like tony farmer's markets in places like Boulder or Berkeley the prices at this particular tianguis clearly are based on what a charitably-oriented, price insensitive consumer is willing to fork over.

At the Wednesday market or the Chapala mercado, there are actually two parallel local economies taking place. Inside the Chapala mercado and at most of the big produce stands in the Wednesday market there are vendors who are mostly re-sellers of produce bought from the huge wholesale markets in Guadalajara and trucked in from all over Mexico, but outside the mercado (on the north side) and here and there in the Ajijic market, as well as on street corners and plazas throughout Lakeside, there's a truly local economy of foodstuffs grown or, more often, wild harvested, right here at Lakeside. Right now there's ciruela (a type of plum), guayaba (guava, for delicious agua fresca) and, always, nopales cactus, chiles, chayote squash and its root, the delicious and super-healthy camote sweet potato, plus epazote and other healing herbs and much more. Local peanuts are coming in, and soon the night air will be scented with freshly-roasted chickpeas, a fall and winter staple.

It interests and (from time to time) amazes me that there seems to be such a total disconnect between the many idealistic and well-intentioned gringos who support things like the organic market and any sort of participation on their part in the local food economy. I'm far from being a Mexican food expert, but I read my Diana Kennedy and other Mexican cookbooks and ask locals about any fruit or vegetable I don't know in my kindergarten Spanish - and I taste! Meanwhile most gringos I know here, including folks who've lived here for years and moved down from progressive communities in the U.S., cook only gringo food at home and rarely eat Mexican food even in a sit-down restaurant, let alone the street stalls where the good stuff is most often found. More than a few stick to gringo geriatric meal times as well (lunch before noon, dinner before 6), which means they're completely out of synch with local dining times and are unable to even discern which places are busy and thus likely safe to eat at, since the locals start thinking about lunch around 1:30 or 2 and don't expect to have their light evening snack of a taco or tamale until 8 or later.

It seems to me the starting point for being "green" is to learn the local foods, following the Michael Pollan dictum: "Eat food [what your grandmother - or in this case a Mexican abuela - would recognize as food, so no packaged or processed anything], not too much, mostly plants." Here that means learning the various types of dried beans and how to cook them, buying and eating corn tortillas everyday, learning how to cook the local vegetables and the seasons of the local fruits, drinking beer and Tequila rather than wine, knowing one's chiles, and so on, as well as adapting to at least some degree to eating one's main meal at mid-day (a far healthier practice than going to bed still digesting a heavy dinner).

Then, following the example of the locals, you want to make sure you live walking distance from what you do everyday, not out in some antiseptic gated community where you're in your SUV everyday, and of course taking the local bus for longer hops and minimizing or eliminating car use. Then you don't need to bother with an expensive gym membership or joyless workouts, since you're walking several miles a day in the course of shopping, eating and socializing. Of course on foot you're also up close and personal with the local culture, and my sense is that half the reason for all the folks driving around the villages in their outsized SUVs is a desire to be insulated from the culture - to keep Mexico at arm's length.

A gringo friend who's a fervent believer in "going green" told me the other day that the reason Mexicans don't shop at the organic market is "it's too expensive, and besides they don't eat the foods we eat" - by which she meant, we don't eat the foods they eat: dozens of tortillas a day as staple grain, frijoles, local wild and cultivated greens and squashes, fruits galore, a bit of meat here and there so a chicken can last all week, and so on. The question is, with such values, why don't most of us eat the way these folks eat, since it has been sustaining people here (and their environment) very well indeed for upwards of 5000 years.

Having spent many years buying coffee for a company that specialized in organic and small farm coffees I've seen how organic agriculture works all over the world. The reality is that most organic growing occurs by default: farmers are often unable to afford nitrogen-based fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. They're also typically far too poor to afford organic certification, which is very costly.

Third-world farmers and their customers, for the most part, are concerned with survival, pure and simple, and don't have the luxury of worrying about things like pesticide residues or the fate of the planet. This isn't to say there isn't awareness or a need for education in organic agriculture, but it's vitally important for we gringos, whether we're visitors to developing countries or residents, to be aware of the colonial and in some cases imperialistic nature of our concerns and issues. We're concerned about food safety or some vague notion of saving the planet; locals are concerned about hunger - theirs and their family's - and how to slake it. For many, food is fuel, and finding enough of it with the few pesos at their disposal is a daily struggle. $1 a pop heirloom tomatoes or $15 apiece organic chickens are not part of the picture, and indeed are probably seen, along with $300,000 houses occupied by two people and $30,000 cars, as more proof that we gringos are long on money and exceedingly short on common sense.

Las Gorditas de Ajijic

2010-10-12T15:16:00.000-06:00

This roadside stand located almost directly across the street from Dona's Donuts and just east of Farmacia Guadalajara is no more. Apparently the vacant lots in back of their former space on the frontage road are for sale, though why that meant booting these folks out I don't know.

This was one of the best street food choices in Ajijic, open only three days a week but doing a booming business, and one of the few places with tasty Mexican vegetarian options (classic rajas de chile, strips of roasted poblano in sauce with tomatoes; excellent stewed mushrooms). The family that ran the place was kind and hard-working. One can only hope they will find or have found a new home.

We enjoy our occasional splurge meal at one of the popular gringo food restaurants (La Taverna or Tango, most often) but I must say I feel a bit guilty anytime I divert my limited eating out dollars from local places like this one. In talking to people even at popular and long-established places such as Mario's in San Antonio or the best of the taco stands (El Compadre in Ajijic, Comal Express in San Antonio) they all report that the shaky economy has them struggling.

The Instant Coffee Wars

2010-10-03T13:39:00.009-06:00

While my Starbucks days are long gone (I quit in 1993 shortly after they went public and shafted all of us who'd built the company), I continue to follow the company and the coffee scene generally. Having worked there when their proprietary instant coffee was developed, I wondered when they'd get around to using the technology for something better than flavoring ice cream.

The Starbucks instant coffee called "Via" has been out for something like two years now. They were pretty boneheaded about which varieties they chose: Colombia (always a problematic second tier coffee for a company that rightly doted on fine Guatemalans and Costa Ricans in its heydey, and used Colombian only for incineration into French Roast or inflicting on cheapskate wholesale accounts), and Italian Roast (as if the regular Starbucks roast of anything weren't already close kin to a Kingsford briquet). Personally I was hoping for Sumatra, which was the first test coffee decaffeinated there and tasted way better than anything they're putting out now.

The only sensible place to buy Via is at Costco where the big packages get the unit cost down to around 60 cents instead of a dollar; still outrageous but perhaps justifiable for travel or camping. The Colombian is more than decent, though Mr. Schultz's claim that it tastes identical to their fresh brewed is, sadly, true only because the company's buying, roasting and delivery-to-store practices have done such a superb job of lopping off any aroma or varietal character present in the green coffees they buy.

Starbucks' entrance into the instant coffee category has not gone unnoticed by Nestlé, the pioneers of instant coffee and one of the world's most sophisticated buyers and roasters. Their flagship brand, Taster's Choice, takes on the Green Menace quite directly:

http://smartchoice.tasterschoice.com/

Here at Lake Chapala we have access to good quality certified fair trade organic coffees from Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca, freshly-roasted at prices of just over $5 per pound. I brew my morning cup in an Aeropress, as good a way to brew coffee as anyone has ever invented, and needless to say I buy small quantities and grind just before brewing.

Recently I decided to do a blind taste test between said local coffees, Starbucks Via Colombia, and standard-issue Mexican Nescafé. Now for those who don't know, Nestlé is an exceedingly sophisticated company that dials in its products for each market in which they do business, so the Nescafé sold in Mexico (available in the U.S. at Latin groceries) is different than - and far superior to - the product sold under that name in the U.S. The roast is darker, to support the milk almost always added here, and that alone makes a big difference.

The Starbucks Via is not a pure instant coffee, since it contains (as listed on the box) "microground" and instant coffee - i.e. ultra-fine (Turkish+) ground coffee is included because it doesn't dissolve fully and gives the coffee more body. That also limits the shelf life of the stuff, and I was surprised to see a best by date on the Via that was less than 6 months from date of purchase.

Even with such pull-out-the-stops trickery the end result is a very serviceable, chocolatey and discernibly darkly-roasted cup of coffee that is exactly on par with my freshly-roasted and ground local coffee. That's quite an achievement for an instant coffee, except that this is Colombian going up against Mexican and Colombia does have the capability of producing world-class coffees while Mexico almost never does.

The real surprise was how good the Mexican Nescafé is, especially when brewed strong. It has a slightly more pronounced instant coffee aroma than the Via but arguably makes up for it with a sweeter flavor free from the trademark Charbucks char. The Nescafé is much less dense than the Via, but by weighing the coffee on my gram scale I can easily get an equivalent dose. Apples-to-apples, I make the Nescafé as being about 90% as good as the Via (and thus about 90% as good as local fresh-roasted), at a tiny fraction of the Via cost. Now that's black; if I drank all my coffee with milk and sugar, it'd be a no brainer to retire the grinder and Aeropress (saving them for visits to the U.S. where I can get my hands on stellar coffees from other countries) and just buy big jars of Nescafé.

Clearly Nestlé is a whole lot better at what they do than my former employer is at what it does, and the latter is increasingly ill-defined. Checking the news recently to see if Starbucks had had the good sense to introduce a Sumatra or Indonesian blend or perhaps an African melange in the Via line, I saw that instead they are introducing flavored, instant coffees. Flavored coffees were one of the iconic, line-in-the sand items that Starbucks in my day said it would never, ever offer. I can still remember a dangerously heated conversation at an SCAA conference between then-SCAA head Ted Lingle, myself and former SBUX coffee buyer Dave Olsen, the Gloria Jeans folks and several others, where we Starbucks folk were called on the carpet for our "arrogance" in refusing to offer flavored coffees. Of course being passionate about quality and having a laser-sharp focus on it were what built the company into the legendary brand it once was. In just a few short years they've gone from product-driven, to marketing-driven, to opportunistic, lost and adrift; from "Peets for the masses" to "barely better than McDonalds."

Aforementioned coffee buyer Dave Olsen once told the Colombian Coffee Federation, when they dared to try to offer small lots of really good coffee while maintaining their ad campaign for Juan Valdez that positioned all Colombian coffee as somehow "special:" "You can't be the best of the best and the best of the worst [mass market producers] at the same time." That quote should be enshrined in some business case study alongside an equally memorable one from Howard Schultz, spoken just before I quit: "The death of Starbucks won't be that we get bought by a larger company; the death of Starbucks would be mediocrity." I think I prefer my mediocrity served up without grandiosity, so when desperation strikes it's Nescafé for now.

Addendum: I tasted three more locally-available instant coffees and the clear winner was Nescafé Diplomat, a 100% Mexican Altura premium product with no off notes and crisp acidity in the finish. Far superior to regular Mexican Nescafé and still reasonably priced. Taster's Choice (imported from the U.S. and expensive) is clean and light but not worth the price, and a Mexican decaf made in the state of Veracruz that had been recommended to me called Los Portales is as awful an instant coffee as I've had.

For dark-roast fans, Nescafé Ristreto (for the Mexican market) is a more-than-credible imitation of a traditional northern Italian espresso blend. I'd expected an overwhelming robusta presence but it's quite subdued.

The superiority of Nestlé's proprietary process and their sourcing capabilities put them in a league of their own when it comes to instant coffee.

Addendum:car vs. public transport in Mexico

2010-10-02T15:07:00.000-06:00

We've spent months at a time down here without a vehicle and about 18 months with one. Whether it's worth the expense and hassle is a question each person has to answer for themselves, and it also depends very much on where in Mexico you choose to live.

In a big city, like Guadalajara (~6 million) or even Oaxaca (~650,000) public transport and walking are clearly the way to go. Buses and combis run from early morning to very late at night and driving and parking are a nightmare. Ditto with expat haven San Miguel de Allende, which is very dense and compact but with horrible traffic congestion that makes walking faster than driving for most errands.

Here at the lake the local buses get going pretty late in the morning and stop running before 10 p.m. They're also crowded and, in the case of the locale ones that go through rather than by each village, in bad shape, slow and quite uncomfortable as well as often standing-room-only full. Day-to-day you only use a car for very short hops of 2-6 miles, but for things like major shopping runs, picking up beer from the depositos (all returnable bottles) and getting to a tennis game early on a Saturday morning they're invaluable. We only fill up about once a month, but by buying a cheap, high-mileage car the costs are minimal and the benefit substantial.

For longer trips - to the beach (4 hours), or San Miguel (5 hours), we most often take the deluxe bus. These buses are truly the airlines of Mexico, since few Mexicans own cars, and offer a level of comfort that can only be compared to first class on the ultra-fast trains in France or first class on an international airline such as Singapore. You get a seat the size of a Lazy Boy recliner complete with foot rest, individual video, free wireless internet, bottled water and a meal as you board, and no stops. It's very relaxing - and affordable (for example, here to Puerto Vallarta about $38).

Driving, on the other hand, is definitely the way to go when traveling off the beaten track to small villages away from major cities. It's not that you can't get to these places by bus, but rather that it will take many times as long to do so given logistics and wait times. We have friends who've lived down here since the early 90's who are adamant about not having a car anywhere outside the U.S., but despite having lived down here for so long Erin and I know the villages around the lake and many other parts of Mexico we've all visited much better than they do simply because we've been able to see and get to so much more due to having a car.

Some typical costs, all ballpark:

Local bus: 5-8 pesos (about 40-75 cents at 12.5 pesos to the dollar). No transfers. 2-3 round trips per day for a couple = $3.00-4.50 per day or over $100 per month - more than the cost of insurance plus gas and some maintenance.

Local taxi run, Chapala to Ajijic (5 miles) 60-80 pesos depending on time of day.

Basic local car: around $3500-5000.

Insurance: about $40 per month.

Gas: $35 per month.

Auto maintenance: oil changes same as U.S., other work about 20% or less of U.S. prices due to much cheaper labor. Mechanics here can fix almost anything and are amazing fabricators of parts and body panels.

Rental cars are expensive in Mexico due to required liability insurance (your U.S. credit card will cover collision but not liability). Figure $50-60 per day, rented in advance online. Some local beater car rentals are available at around $40, less for longer term.

How not to buy a car in Mexico

2010-10-02T14:43:00.000-06:00

This is a stock photo that's a very close match to the 2004 Ford Ka I bought yesterday. We've rented a Ka in France and had great fun with it, and both Erin and I like it's ladybug-like looks. They're not available in the U.S., but are, along with the Dodge/Hyundai Atos and Chevy Pop (a relabeled Opel Corsa) one of the three most popular made-in-Mexico entry level cars here.

I found the car in a local ad. It was owned by a very nice Mexican lady, a lawyer, and her equally pleasant Canadian husband. The only issue was, she'd recently moved to this area from Mexico City, and so the car has plates from there rather than Jalisco. I'd read enough to know that getting a U.S.-plated car nationalized is never worth the hassle, but little did I know that transferring title from one Mexican State to another is at least as bad.

The Kafka-esque experience started with taking all the paperwork to the local vehicle registration office in Chapala. They told us we had to take the car into Guadalajara to have the title switched - and that we needed to be at the office there at 4 in the morning to wait for a chance to register the car at 8 when they open, since they only do 25 cars a day! This of course sounded unbelievable so Eri, the owner, asked for the number of the office there and called them to find out the real story. No answer - and the ladies at the Chapala office said, "oh, they never answer their phone when they are open because they are busy with customers then" (and needless to say, they don't answer it before or after opening hours or have an answering machine).

The owner, fortunately, has family, friends and employees in the city, so she had one of her workers show up at the registration office at 4 a.m. to snag us a spot. We only had to get up at around 5:30 a.m. so as to make it to the office by 7, which we did - and we were the last car to be accepted into the dirt parking lot, located in an alley in the suburb of Tonala that the average person wouldn't find in a million years. Then began a very slow process of having three different inspectors over the course of two hours come by to look at the car and shuffle through the huge wad of paperwork required: 5 years of tax receipts for plates, two copies of passport, proof-of-residency, title, etc. We ought to have known something was up when one of the inspectors said to Eri, "mucho dollares," pointing to her gringo husband and yours truly, since he like most Mexicans assumed we were loaded. Eri pointed out that she and her husband both work full time down here and that many gringos live here because they can't afford to live in the U.S., but I think that fell on deaf ears.

Next we waited on hard plastic chairs in the grungy cement-floored office, often standing to give others a turn since there were far more people than chairs. The staff in the place consisted of two people doing re-registration paperwork and one cashier - all of them using manual typewriters! We submitted our paperwork, and then nothing happened for about three hours. We did have a number though: 48, which meant we were going to be the very last people to receive our license plates and title.

I tried to read and listen to a couple of podcasts, but as I was going on only about 4 hours of sleep thanks to insomnia plus the early call I wasn't retaining much. Four hours later, at 2 p.m., number 47 was called....we're next...hallelujah. Then...49...the girl behind the counter "I don't have your file"...50....Eri goes into a nearby office and doesn't emerge for half an hour.

The story is that the number on a mirror on the passenger side doesn't match the main vehicle identification number. Not exactly surprising since said mirrors are frequently ripped off the side of cars in Mexico due to being hit by large vehicles passing too closely on cobblestoned streets that were built for horses, not cars. The jefe Eri is in talking to scolds her: "in Jalisco, you must have and save the receipt for any car part changed on your car as long as you own it," and tells her she must take the car to a Ford dealership in the city who can prove the part isn't stolen. This in the land of vehicles made up almost entirely of spare parts held together with duck tape and wire. Of course, he could make her problem go away...for the right bribe (seriously - he flat-out tells her so).

I've already paid Eri and her husband for the car but am truly losing it now, after sitting in the office for 8 hours with no end in sight. She meanwhile walks back into the chief's office and closes the door, emerging 20 minutes or so later with word that we now do have a file and will in fact get our plates and registration. She only got this result by getting very angry with the guy (public anger, especially from a woman to a man in authority, being almost unheard of in Mexico), pointing out that she is a lawyer and threatening to sue him. 2000 pesos and 8 hours and fifteen minutes after arrival, we were on our way back to the lake.

In Mexico City this same process can be done online and takes a few minutes, but in Jalisco you either buy a Jalisco-plated car or prepare for an ordeal that reminds me of India, not Mexico. There is truly only one word to describe the experience:

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/definition+of/clusterfuck

Wine buying at Lakeside: Russian Roulette

2010-09-22T11:56:00.000-06:00

It should go without saying that finding any wine at all in Mexico is fairly remarkable, and only possible because this is an area with a sizable gringo population and both visitors and (often part-time) residents from Guadalajara's upper class.

Wine doesn't stand up to seriously picante Mexican food, but of course it's very compatible with the steaks and chops that are typical of the meat-and-potatoes cuisine favored by many gringos (and is equally popular with visiting Guadalajarans).

Imported wine (imported anything) is heavily taxed in Mexico, but Chile, Argentina and Spain apparently have special deals that limit the damage and make their wine better values than others. Sadly Mexican wines - and there are some good ones - aren't accorded any sort of favorable treatment and so are not the outstanding values they should be, with rare exceptions.

At Lake Chapala the main place to buy wine is Licores Paz, next to Superlake. La Playa, a good place to buy spirits (in the plaza just west of Wal Mart) also has wines, often at slightly better prices than Paz, and Wal Mart itself has a fairly broad selection, mercifully stored in cooler conditions than at Paz and usually at more-than-competiive prices.

Poor storage and lack of turnover are two major problems with buying wine locally - so much so that I'd hazard a guess that at least 20% of the inventory at Paz is probably either maderized or has turned to vinegar. I doubt any attempt to return said wines would be successful, not only because "buyer beware" is the universal rule in Mexico, but also because there's clearly no one involved in buying or staffing these stores who knows much about wine (the third problem: selection!).

So, first rule of thumb: buy only the most recent vintages (2008 or newer). The only exception to this rule would be an older wine (say a Rioja reserva) that was still imported within the past year or two. You can find out this important information by looking for the sticker on every bottle of wine imported after 2000 that says "Importacion" with the year the wine was imported underneath.

Rule number two is: be aware of the context in which you're buying. The local gringo population has a well-earned reputation for being, to put it bluntly, cheapskates when it comes to buying wine, expecting -even though this is not a wine drinking culture - to somehow miraculously be able to find drinkable wine for much less than they were used to paying back home in Canada or the U.S.

There's a lot of jug wine and 60-100 peso ($5-8 U.S.) stuff going out the door at Paz, which even back home means you're buying industrially-produced plonk (think Yellow Tail, 2 Buck Chuck) grown from high-yielding irrigated vineyards, that's been heavily manipulated (acidification, caramel, excess sulphur, filtration that strips out flavor but ensures stability on the shelf, and the like) . It doesn't help matters that almost all that's available is Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay and the occasional Malbec - grape varieties that are heavy, ponderous and in need plenty of new oak to compensate for lack of inherent flavor interest, and that are unfriendly to foods other than bland, rich ones (roast beef or steak for the reds, fish in a cream sauce or the like for the Chardonnays).

You can forget about finding an artisanal vin de terroir from any country at Lakeside, and if, like me, you've learned the truth of "food with the region goes with win from the region" and like to cook French or Italian you'll find your options are very limited. Versatile food wines (Beaujolais, Cotes du Rhone, Chianti, dry Rieslings and the like) are nearly impossible to find.

One can occasionally find decent value Montepulciano d' Abruzzo (most often the Citra brand in 1.5 liter bottles) at Paz, and even more rarely a recent vintage of a decent Cotes du Rhone at La Playa or Soriana (in Chapala), but otherwise the Italian and French shelves are full of old inventory, sickly sweet Lambrusco (of the sort Italians export so they don't have to drink it) and fourth-rate negociant bottlings that would have been bad value at their original prices of a third or forth of what's asked for them here.

A recent scouring of reviews by credible critics of leading Chilean and Argentinian producers found almost no points of intersection between recommended producers and those carried at Paz. Exceptions: the Cono Sur line of good-value wines (their Pinot Noir is a refreshing rarity that may be the only drinkable example of that varietal to be found at Lakeside), and a few of the Montes Chilean wines (though not their flagship Syrah).

The one bright spot, relatively speaking, for those who prefer more elegant wines, is that there are some excellent Spanish wines to be found, albeit at a price and with a far better selection in Guadalajara at places such as La Europea than at Lakeside. Torres Gran Sangre de Torro and their other mid-range wines are readily available (though the best prices are at Oxxo and La Playa), and with care one can find serviceable Riojas from the top producers, though here particularly one must pay close attention to the date of importation. I spent some time recently comparing prices on medium-priced Riojas, the Torres line, everyday priced Chilean wines as well as rum and brandy and came to the conclusion that a trip to La Europea will generally pay for itself - and certainly yield more choice of high-quality wines and spirits - for anything other than casual drinkers. They have four locations in Guadalajara.

I should also mention that Costco in Guadalajara sells wines. Storage conditions are very good and there are some decent selections, but prices are no bargain. Costcos in Mexico are bound to be a major disappointment to those used to the U.S. version, not through any fault of the company but simply because the high duties on the imported goods they primarily deal in make prices very high - often higher than those from Mexican supermarkets such as Soriana or Mega.

With respect to Mexican wines, you'll find the cutting-edge ones only at La Europea, at prices that relegate them to special-occasion status, but Paz does carry some decent everyday choices. The Cabernet and Petite Syrah of L.A. Cetto are serviceable, and they do make one extraordinary wine: their Nebbiolo Reserva, which at about 165 pesos is almost unquestionably the finest Nebbiolo produced anywhere outside of Italy and represents outstanding value for money.

For newcomers especially, something else to be aware of is the strongly seasonal nature of business at Lakeside, with the freer-spending expats apparently much more in evidence during the winter months. From November through February there are frequent wine tastings in the parking lot outside of Paz, and they're well worth attending, especially when (as is often the case) they're featuring the wines imported by an outfit called Simply Canadian, which does a very professional job of finding good value Chilean (and, to a lesser degree, Argentinian) wines in the price ranges area expats are prepared to pay (and made from the 3 or 4 grape varieties they're willing to drink). Their Santa Alicia line in particular is reliably good, with the reserva wines (one step up from the basic level) comprising the "sweet spot" of best rapport qualité:prix.

For those like myself with champagne tastes and a cerveza budget the best option seems to involve a change in habits, a lowering of expectations and becoming a savvy opportunist when traveling. The change in habits is eating Mexican food as often as possible, which is not only cheap and delicious but is so well accompanied by fine Mexican beers (namely Bohemia clara, the country's one decent pilsner, Negra Modelo, its best dark amber, and Noche Buena, the country's finest beer, available only from November through February). Tequila (about which see my extensive post elsewhere on this blog) is also a remarkably food friendly spirit (as is Mezcal with Oaxacan cuisine), and one can drink good bear and great Tequila on a daily basis at a price that will still be less than you'd pay for drinking barely tolerable table wines.

With respect to shopping, it seems best to embrace the limited nature of what's available locally and save the splurges for visits to La Europea in Guadalajara and similar stores in other major cities. San Miguel de Allende, which attracts a wealthier and more sophisticated expat crowd than Lakeside, has its own branch of La Europea and several other stores where one can easily find many of the wines and spirits absent at Lakeside, so it's worth bringing an extra bag for purchases if you're planning to visit.

quality you can taste vs. certified mediocrity

2010-09-17T17:45:00.001-06:00

The good folks at Sweet Maria's coffee (see earlier post) had a link to this article that offers a good overview of competing certification schemes for coffee:

http://www.conducivemag.com/2010/08/a-peek-behind-the-coffee-label/

My comments are to be found towards the bottom of the piece's "comments" section. As always, the fundamental question seems to be is there a minimum price determined by something other than market forces that coffee or any other agricultural product ought to command? Singling coffee out seems to me to be very short-sighted. Oftentimes in these discussions I come off sounding like a libertarian free-marketeer, when nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that I don't see it as being truly compassionate to tell small farmers who through no fault of their own happen to grow coffee in places that are incapable of producing anything more than decent commodity-quality beans that charitable aid schemes like certified Fair Trade are something they should count on, when the track record says otherwise.

Meanwhile, I'm going through withdrawal after a few great months of buying green coffee for home roasting from Sweet Maria's. From great Yemens, Ethiopians, Kenyans and sundry Indonesians to a steady diet of nothing but Mexican coffee is pretty sad. At least there are good local roasters here, and I certainly can't complain about the price (60 pesos or about $5 for 500 grams - over a pound - of fair trade organic beans roasted daily, from good farms in Veracruz, Oaxaca or Chiapas).

An addendum: I promise this'll be the last plug so people don't think I get kick-backs from these guys, but I just read the latest post from Tom over at Sweet Maria's about a truly astonishing coffee he's offering:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.central.salvador.php?
coffee=ElSalvadorPeaberryAidasGrandReserve2010#ElSalvadorPeaberryAidasGrandReserve2010

The care these folks take, in sourcing, in doing the hard travel, the love they have for farmers and for the product embody all that is good about the coffee business. So inspiring!

The heart essence

2010-09-16T08:35:00.000-06:00

This post by the invariably clear and iconoclastic Ken McLeod really struck a chord:

http://musingsbyken.blogspot.com/2010/09/short-reading-list.html

The books are very carefully chosen and reminder to really take the key stuff to heart until it transforms you, rather than engaging in a hungry ghost search for the novel and new, is, for me anyway, something I can't hear often enough.

We are blessed

2010-09-11T11:38:00.001-06:00

We flew back down to Lake Chapala two weeks ago, having sold our car and pared our possessions down to some boxes stored on shelves in my mom's garage and our checked baggage (two big duffels each and a carry-on). To say we are weary of moving would be a colossal understatement: we are here for the duration (but our friends will rightly believe it only when they see it).

The search for a rental has been unexpectedly difficult, but at the last possible moment when we were about to sign a year's lease on a place that was far from ideal, a lovely little 2 bedroom casita a stone's throw from Lake Chapala came into our lives, thanks to a recommendation from a local friend.

The place we're renting is owned by an astonishingly energetic woman who's lived down here for 34 years. She's in her late 60's but has the vitality and curiosity of a 20 year old! In the past few years she's done backpacker travel in India and Sri Lanka and all over Asia, and is currently planning a trip to Ecuador and only worried she won't be able to find a travel companion willing to go as far off the beaten track as she prefers. Talk about a role model for graceful aging - and someone whose experience here we plan to soak up.

I always try to share the economics of being here, not only because they're such an important factor in our decision to live here full-time, but also as a counterweight to all of the lifestyles of the rich and famous promotion of this area by the real estate companies. We're paying $550 (U.S.) per month in rent, with a year's lease (it would've been more for a shorter term), and this rental like most here comes fully furnished, right down to the cutlery.

Gas, electricity, phone and internet combined will average $80-100 year round. Electricity is about 60% more on a per unit basis than in the U.S., but you use a lot less. No heating, no air conditioning in this near-perfect climate - that's a huge cost savings. Low fixed costs like these mean we can spend more on good food (today we'll have green salad and half a local chicken bought from the guy who grills them up the street for 30 pesos, or about $2.50) and travel (local bus tickets are 6-8 pesos, roughly 50-75 cents). And while we'll eventually buy a "beater" car, we really don't need one here, because we can and do walk everywhere (getting in a minimum of 3-4 miles of walking a day on cobblestoned lanes, which in turns means no health club membership needed!).

Our casita has ideal north-south exposure (the lake is due south) and shares a walled compound with the owner's beautiful hacienda-style home and another casita rented by a local tennis instructor and writer. There's an open field between us in the lake, occupied by two happy cows. Their mooing, distant roosters, a riot of birds, from black-crowned night herons to hummingbirds buzzing the veranda in search of nectar and of course the occasional barking dog (it is still Mexico after all) are the sounds we swim in here - so different from the village close by. Walking through the gate towards our place you have to duck your head very low to avoid the gate, and that just adds to the feeling of going down the rabbit hole, entering into a verdant little hidden Eden. Here are some pictures:

the veranda where we'll spend most of our time, with oranges ripening on the tree

the "muy mexicano" interior

exterior

Retired too soon in a country that grows increasingly unrecognizable

2010-07-31T15:32:00.001-06:00

As a follow-up to my last post, it seems clear that many people are going to be faced with similar choices to the ones we are dealing with. In my case I left the corporate world voluntarily, weary of politics and ethical compromises demanded by my employer, but many people in their 50's and 60's have been laid off or downsized with little prospect of work in an economy with 10% nominal/16%+ actual unemployment.

Moreover, it's clearly prudent and realistic to plan for the current economic situation not to improve anytime soon. Double-digit unemployment for a decade or more and Japanese-style stagflation seem very likely. Some of the most respected financial writers (in this case, Scott Burns and legendary writer William Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing) are forecasting much lower than average stock and bond market returns for the foreseeable future and the need to lower portfolio withdrawal rates to 3% or less per year in order to avoid running out of money in retirement:

http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=57393&highlight=scott+burns

Combine that recommendation with retirement accounts and other investments that are still reeling from the market meltdown of two years ago and (for those of us without corporate coverage) health insurance and health care costs that can easily consume 25% or more of one's budget and are increasing at 15-40% a year (with no hope of containment under the terribly weak Obamacare plan) and you're looking at a very tough scenario for many aging baby boomers. Come to think of it, those who even have such assets are a minority; many people are sitting on houses that represent their only nest egg, whose value has often plummeted far below what they owe on it, with little chance of recovery in their lifetimes.

The causes of the disastrous situation in which the country finds itself are quite clear: massive growth in the "ethics free" financial services sector (which creates nothing of value but instead sucks money out of the rest of the economy); a gigantic transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to a tiny ruling class, and a government and economy that are completely owned and controlled by multinational corporations.

Of course these companies also own the news media, and in true Orwellian fashion they've done such an excellent job of managing public perception that they've persuaded those most screwed over by the policies of the Bush era to vote for Tea Party candidates and other arch conservatives who promise a return to, and even an increase in, the very policies that caused the current mess. Meanwhile the pointless, utterly indefensible wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (whose daily cost could easily pay for health care for every American) wear on, and Obama, elected with so much hope and optimism, is looking more and more like a one-term President who'll go down in history as nothing more than a black Jimmy Carter, timid when courage was most required, unwilling to fall on his sword for any principle, a hemming-and-hawing policy wonk at those moments that most called for directness and emotional authenticity.

While we don't relish becoming full-time expats for the foreseeable future, at least we've been blessed with enough foreign travel experience during better times to not be scared shitless at the prospect. One of the most striking things about being back and talking to people about Mexico, mostly, but also our travels in France and Italy, Thailand and India, is just how little people know about other countries here, and how much of what they do "know" is dead wrong. Part of the media conspiracy here in the U.S. is to make damn sure no one knows what other countries do better. This is "the greatest country on earth," after all, so any reports about places outside our borders must be exclusively about violence, natural disasters and the like. Rick Steves in Europe on PBS is okay, but that's about it: no coverage anywhere on, for example, universal health coverage and how everyone but us has it and what we might learn from it, or Europeans with their 5-7 weeks of vacation per year not only eating and living better and living longer but also producing more per work hour than us and what we could learn from that. And of course those are rival first-world countries; any coverage at all of the developing world is, again, limited entirely to the latest disaster: the Haitian earthquake or Mexican drug cartels. More than any other country we have visited, the U.S. has become a nation of sheep. How much worse will it have to get before there is any sense that our fate is totally interdependent with that of other nations, and that people and planet have inherent value beyond their ability to generate the next quarter's profits?

Exile?

2010-07-30T13:28:00.000-06:00

painting of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche by Joni Mitchell

Three months in to our attempted return to the U.S. and small town life in Colorado, it's become clear that for both economic and quality of life reasons the U.S. will have to be a place to visit rather than live for us for the foreseeable future. Erin calls the experience "exile," and at times that's just how it feels. There's no end to the second-guessing of our decisions that's possible, from getting out of the full-time working world to soon, to not saving enough, to putting way too much emphasis on changing external circumstances at the expense of inner work.

What's called for is cultivating joy and putting our energy into practice, study and volunteering every day. In every respect, being kind to ourselves by controlling what we can control (how we spend our time each day, making sure our spending - of time, money, life energy - honors our highest priorities), and working hard on cutting the strong habit of worrying about things we can't control (U.S. politics, the broken health care system, financial market insanity).

What's come to mind strongly these past few days are vivid teachings from my old teacher in Boulder in the early 70's about what it really means to take refuge, in the Buddhist sense. Now seems a particularly good time to revisit them:

By taking refuge, in some sense we become homeless refugees. Taking refuge does not mean saying that we are helpless and then handing all our problems over to somebody or something else. There will be no refugee rations, nor all kinds of security and dedicated help. The point of becoming a refugee is to give up our attachment to basic security. We have to give up our sense of home ground, which is illusory anyway. We might have a sense of home ground as where we were born and the way we look, but we don't actually have any home, fundamentally speaking. There is actually no solid basis of security in one's life. And because we don't have any home ground, we are lost souls, so to speak. Basically we are completely lost and confused and, in some sense, pathetic.

These are the particular problems that provide the reference point from which we build the sense of becoming a Buddhist. Relating to being lost and confused, we are more open. We begin to see that in seeking security we can't grasp onto anything; everything continually washes out and becomes shaky, constantly, all the time. And that is what is called life.

So becoming a refugee is acknowledging that we are homeless and groundless, and it is acknowledging that there is really no need for home, or ground. Taking refuge is an expression of freedom, because as refugees we are no longer bounded by the need for security. We are suspended in a no-man's land in which the only thing to do is to relate with the teachings and with ourselves.

The refuge ceremony represents a final decision. Acknowledging that the only real working basis is oneself and that there is no way around that, one takes refuge in the Buddha as an example, in the dharma as the path, and in the sangha as companionship. Nevertheless, it is a total commitment to oneself. The ceremony cuts the line that connects the ship to the anchor; it marks the beginning of an odyssey of loneliness. Still, it also includes the inspiration of the preceptor and the lineage. The participation of the preceptor is a kind of guarantee that you will not be getting back into the question of security as such, that you will continue to acknowledge your aloneness and work on yourself without leaning on anyone. Finally you become a real person, standing on your own feet.

Never too late, I hope.

Three weeks back

2010-06-08T13:59:00.003-06:00

We've been back in the U.S. for three weeks. It's been a bit of a mad scramble to find a place to live and acquire all of the small items needed to set up house from scratch. We've spent many hours scouring Craigslist and local used furniture places, looking at homes to buy and rent, and made many a $200 trip to Wal Mart (a place I normally avoid like the plague) buying the basics.

We found a cozy rental house in a great neighborhood. We'd hoped we might find an inexpensive place to buy right away, but our timing wasn't good: the two successive first-time home buyer's $8000 tax credits caused most of the lower-end places to get snapped up, and foreclosures have forced a lot of former homeowners into the rental market, making it tight as well.

Now that we have a roof over our head and a couch to sit on, we're turning our energies outwards, into reconnecting with friends and making new ones, as well as inward, into ramping up our meditation practices in preparation for retreats we've both got scheduled next month.

A few reflections on differences, as the reverse culture shock wears off:

Being in wild lands: 10-15 minutes of driving or a half-hour on a bike and we are on trails or nearly deserted roads where the only sounds are the wind and birds. That's something we deeply missed living in Mexico, and it feeds our souls to have it again. A couple of days ago we hiked up by Royal Gorge and saw jackrabbits the size of medium-size dogs leaping in the morning dew. Wildflowers are everywhere.

The joys of cycling: We both bought bicycles and are slowly but surely riding ourselves back into shape. Not being able to bike and limited opportunities for aerobic exercise generally are one of the big downsides to life at Lake Chapala. We aren't runners anymore (and running on cobblestones is insane anyway), the hikes there are dangerously loose, dusty, steep and urban in feel (one never leaves the constant clamor of the villages), biking dangerous and unpleasant (on the one traffic-clogged paved road that exists there), so that leaves tennis (great fun but hard on the joints) and indoor gym stuff (spendy and boring). All of which is a long-winded way of saying we are definitely Coloradans at heart.

Food: here it's clearly a question of major trade-offs. The quality of the fruits and vegetables in Mexico, not to mention a 12 month growing season, are incredible. On the other hand, organic and any other traceable foodstuffs are nearly impossible to come by there. On our first trip to Costco we loaded up on a 20# bag of Basmati rice, organic Almond Butter for $6 a quart, then off to the Indian grocery for our staple spices. We find ourselves eating much less meat here, and can easily buy only the local, pasture-raised varieties. Eating Asian cuisine again, both homemade and in restaurants, is for us a joy that exceeds even the best Mexico has to offer (and that best is found in Oaxaca and Puebla anyway, not in meat-and-potatoes Jalisco where we were living).

Drink: While I've greatly enjoyed my connoisseurship of Tequila, it's one of many such explorations where if I listen to my body at all I can tell that I like it a whole lot better than it likes me! The simple fact of the matter is neither of us do well with distilled spirits, with the possible exception of a glass of Calvados or the like in the dead of winter. In Mexico I found myself drinking Tequila all-too-often, mostly just to have a taste of something with real flavor, since even the best Mexican beers (Negra Modelo, Noche Buena) are pretty bland compared with what we are used to. Erin's new favorite beer comes from what's become our favorite brewery in the entire country, Oskar Blues in nearby Lyons, Colorado. They combine phenomenal products with clever, funny marketing:

http://www.oskarblues.com/the-brews/mamas-little-yella-pils

The microbrewery scene here in Colorado is second-to-none, so Erin and I have had a field day rediscovering old favorites and trying some new ones. There's such an awesome range of flavors available that between these beers and an occasional glass of killer boxed wine (a category that has exploded during our absence) we find ourselves with no appetite for anything stronger - a healthy change for sure.

Our wine budget is basically non-existent, but on those rare occasions when we do treat ourselves it's amazing to have soulful, food-friendly wines with real terroir and typicité from France, Italy and Spain after a year-and-a-half of being able to access only ponderous, oaky and usually poorly-made plonk from Chile, Argentina and Mexico. $10 here, savvily spent, buys better wine than $30 will in Mexico - no surprise when you consider it simply isn't part of the culture, is taxed to death, and none of the artisan importers do business there.

Medical Care: my one encounter with the U.S. system since our return more than lived up to my worst fears about being back. A visit to a local eye doctor to treat a persistent infection I'd picked up in Mexico cost a small fortune, and I am still getting bills for follow-up visits I'd been lead to believe were free. Figuring out the cost of anything is essentially impossible, and not having insurance but being willing to pay cash just confuses them. Equally frustrating after Mexico, where you walk right in and see the doctor of your choice, here you spend 3/4 of your time dealing with nurses, assistants and the like while you wait for the harried doctor to carve out a few minutes. The one and only good thing about the system here vs. Mexico is the doctors speak English as their first language.

Ease and functionality: A year-and-a-half in the world of constant power failures and surges and the worst telephone service in the Americas has certainly made us appreciate just plugging in and having things work. We've chosen to live in a small city with limited services but are still enjoying 9MB internet speeds for the same price as highly unreliable sub-2MB service in Mexico, with crystal-clear phone calls. With a Roku box and basic $10 per month Netflix subscription we no longer have any need for cable TV (we watched our first streaming video last night). The sheer ease of having things work and having recourse and choice when they don't is very easy to get used to.

Community: by far the best part of being back is connecting at a deep level with people. The Buddhist group here is up to 19 members, and without exception everyone I've met in it appreciates the preciousness of practicing and studying in community. We had a half-day of sitting and walking meditation followed by a potluck lunch at a sangha member's house in the mountains south of town and I realized I hadn't felt that kind of group energy since I was last on retreat.

The local food co-op is thriving, there's a monthly meeting of progressives at the local brew pub called Drinking Liberally plus another one for folks interested in the Transition Town movement and local self-sufficiency and sustainability generally, plus the hiking club, a couple of thriving small yoga studios, Chi Gung and Tai Chi. The new whitewater park for kayakers is a smash hit, bringing a much-needed shot of youthful energy into town as peak snowmelt makes for the best rafting and kayaking of the year.

We miss our friends in Mexico and will no doubt question our sanity in making this move when winter comes along, but very early on I'm sticking with my conclusion that the snowbirds have it right. Time will tell.

Live from Phuket!

2010-04-22T09:11:00.000-06:00

While I'm ambivalent about many aspects of modern technology (and even more so about my own sometimes unskillful engagement with it), I'm sure glad there are people out there using it for good purposes.

I just got an email from the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies saying that a bunch of students currently engaged in the first of two 80 day meditation retreats that are the inaugural use of this just-built facility have taken it upon themselves to offer live podcasts of at least some of the teachings. The teacher is Alan Wallace, a one-of-a-kind practitioner/scholar who is quite simply the finest "hands-on" meditation teacher I've ever encountered.

Here's the link in case of interest:

http://web.me.com/ksnowsb108/Phuket_Spring_Podcasts/Main_Page/Main_Page.html

I should probably mention that a copy of either (or both!) of The Attention Revolution or Genuine Happiness in one's hands is pretty much essential for anyone who hopes to put these talks into practice, unless one's already done retreat with Alan and is familiar with the three types of shamatha he teaches.

Mexico and the Failed State - a great article

2010-04-08T12:32:00.002-06:00

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100405_mexico_and_failed_state_revisited?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100406&utm_content=readmore&elq=f3b31af1b61e40ada0e1f4a9890be21a

Faith and Belief - provocative clarity from Ken McLeod

2010-04-06T14:47:00.000-06:00

Clear, direct and uncompromising words from this excellent teacher (and boy should this be required reading for any follower of any "ism"):

http://musingsbyken.blogspot.com/2010/04/faith-and-belief.html

Forced retirement to Mexico?

2010-04-05T09:46:00.000-06:00

Thanks to the great folks at MexConnect.com (by far the best overall source of current info on living and traveling in Mexico) I learned about this most interesting blog by a woman from Northern California who's retired to Oaxaca. She's an artist and spiritual practitioner who's felt compelled to move to Mexico in order to survive without being a burden on her kids - and she's living on $900 a month:

http://yaxchibonam-retiringinmexico.blogspot.com/2009/10/scary-budget-day-pot-of-soup.html

For many people this blog will be well worth some time exploring, and don't miss the link to her other blog, which is a fascinating record of her years as a nun practicing within the Vietnamese Buddhist communities of the famous teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

One of the most poignant stories involves teaching English to Mexicans living in the U.S., and as her own Spanish improves having to communicate to them that she is having to move away from her country and family to theirs in order to survive, in a perfect and exceedingly ironic counterpart to their own perilous journeys north to find work and suffer through years of distance from family, food and culture:

http://yaxchibonam-retiringinmexico.blogspot.com/2009/11/ironies-in-new-economy.html

If nothing else, these two posts serve as a much-needed bookend to the endless real estate company sponsored ads down here about buying your dream home for "only" 200-400K and living a middle-class American lifestyle (happily isolated from Mexican culture) for "only" $2000 per person per month.

Paying it forward

2010-04-04T21:51:00.001-06:00

We spent the afternoon today having a leisurely lunch and conversation with new friends who'd found us through our interview on retireearlylifestyle.com. Terry and LuAnn, a lively and heartfelt couple currently living in Montana, had already done all the hard work before meeting us: downsizing, re-examinging priorities, embracing their heart's desire for a life focused on learning and service rather than managing "stuff."

What a delight it was to realize that despite being wet behind the ears ourselves we have something to share with others hoping to simplify and live a life devoted to opening and being rather than owning and managing (experiences, stuff, fears - whatever).

The photo above is a typical dinner lately: black bean tacos dorado (literally "golden" but experientially "crisp but yielding"). They're lightly fried tacos made of mashed black beans laced with Oaxacan morita chiles (a subtler but still smoky relative of Veracruz's chipotle) served on a bed of lettuce ribbons dressed simply with apple vinegar and a pinch of salt, drizzled with crema and queso fresco. This is vegetarian cuisine that makes you forget all about meat, as flavorful and satisfying as South Indian cuisine (high praise, since we both think that Tamil Nadu and Kerala have the best food on the planet). Everything on the plate and in the glass (Negra Modelo beer) was grown or made within 100 miles of where we are, with the main ingredients made within our daily walking radius of 5 miles. The vitality and affordability are visceral.

Health care and insurance

2010-03-24T16:36:00.000-06:00

Erin and I are delighted at the passage of the health care bill - and sickened at the fear and hatred being promulgated by its opponents, but at the end of the day it's a very conservative plan that's better than nothing but not by much. We certainly don't see it having any impact on us in the short term.

I've spent a great deal of time looking into individual policies that might allow us to return to being U.S. based at some point, but no matter how creative I get or how limited the coverage or high the deductible premiums are sky-high and look to be increasing at 20-40% per year. Being relatively young and healthy we are exactly the kind of people the insurers would love to have paying into the pool, but clearly we would opt to "go naked" if we did return anytime soon.

I've also looked into private insurance here in Mexico and while it's a much better deal than equivalent U.S. coverage it's still very expensive, mostly because the pool of people who can afford it is so tiny in this very poor country. For a couple of hundred dollars a month (increasing 15-20% annually) we could get no-ceiling comprehensive coverage with a $2000 deductible, which sounds great until you realize you can get catastrophic coverage through the Mexican government for about $500 a year total for the both of us.

Meanwhile I came down with an ear infection and severe sinusitis the other day and walked into one of the local clinics here. I saw a U.S.-trained doctor with 30 years of experience in less than 10 minutes, was thoroughly examined and got three prescriptions. Cost for the office visit was 150 pesos (about $12). This is typical of the experiences we've had with doctors and dentists here. You see the doctor (or dentist), not a nurse or assistant, and if you want to see a specialist you just call them. House calls? Sure, and same price as an office visit. Going to the hospital for a test or surgery? Your doctor will probably insist on driving you and will monitor the process with an eagle eye until you're full recovered. The sad fact of the matter is that even if we were magically granted free full insurance coverage in the U.S. the level of care we'd receive would be a huge letdown after living here. Amazing.

Springtime

2010-03-24T16:21:00.000-06:00

Well here we are on March 23rd and it's springtime, Mexican-style. This is a photo I just took of one of the innumerable Jacaranda trees in our tree-filled neighborhood of La Floresta.

It's getting warmer by the day here, with highs in the high 70's to low 80's and deliciously cool breezy nights in the 50's. The air is scented with orange blossoms and jasmine, and the dozen or so species of birds outside our casita are in full mating-season song. Mangos are ripening on the trees and the local kids just finished dressing up as bumblebees and ladybugs to celebrate the first day of primavera - springtime.

Today we walked the streets of our little village with Erin's mom, strolling through the weekly food market called the tianguis, where we bought all manner of seasonal fruits and vegetables, some duck confit de canard from a bonafide Frenchman who sells meats and quiche, farm-fresh eggs and a snack of watermelon and pineapple doused with salt, chile and lime.

Heard from friends they'd gotten over a foot of heavy wet snow in Boulder last night, on top of that much a few days ago. We miss a lot of things about Colorado - but weather isn't one of them.

Colima

2010-03-05T17:24:00.002-07:00

How's this for resourcefulness: this very cool depiction of the Last Supper is made entirely of sea shells and sand. It's one of many things we found captivating about the Museo Universitario de Artes Populares in the equally captivating city of Colima, capital of the eponymous state, about a two-and-a-half hour drive down towards the coast from Lake Chapala.

Colima is a vibrant small city of about 130,000 people, located at an altitude of 1700 feet, which gives it the warmest climate of any city in the western central highlands. There are four gorgeous public plazas overflowing with palm and mango trees and flowers. It's an exceptionally cosmopolitan and clean city, and the people we met were very kind and eager to show us around - so much so that we were kind of taken aback - like first time visitors to places like Portland, Oregon, who often wonder why the locals are saying hello to them on the street or smiling for no reason when they're standing in the supermarket check out line. The parks where we spent a lot of time just hanging out were completely trash-free, and all of them had numerous special covered seats equipped with electrical plug-ins and free wireless internet service!

The city is defined by the two giant volcanoes that are very visible from town: smoking, very active Volcan de Fuego (3820 meters), and the dormant, snow-capped Volcan de Nevado de Colima (4240 meters). There are great hikes and bike rides around the volcano and to nearby crafts villages, and nearby the gigantic Manantlán Biosphere preserve has hiking and mountain biking galore. Those outdoor activities coupled with a vibrant university and the manageable size of Colima made us think of the place as a worthy tropical equivalent of our beloved hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

We focused on regional food during our brief visit (stewed pork in coconut vinegar and mild chiles; a drink called tuba made from the fermented sap of the coconut palm) but managed to also find an authentic Oaxacan restaurant and a dynamite taco stand right across from our hotel serving phenomenal tacos al pastor for 5 pesos each. There are plenty of decent hotels to choose from in centro in the 300-400 peso per night range, and while the entire town is easy to walk there are also a steady stream of taxis willing to take you anywhere you need to go for 20 pesos or less.

While shopping here at Lake Chapala is pretty much limited to foodstuffs and the most basic clothes, Colima has a large shopping mall, many department and specialty stores downtown and everything else one could want in the way of consumer goods. Folks here at Lakeside have to brave Guadlajara, a rather intimidating (not to mention huge, dirty and, in some areas, dangerous) city of 6 million to do major shopping, but we think from now on we'll just keep a list and head to Colima from time to time, combining it with some quality beach time (it's only one more hour past Colima to lovely Manzanillo, and a few minutes more to other great beach towns such as Melaque, Barra de Navidad and La Manzanilla).

Summers in Colima are clearly pretty torrid - though not as hellishly hot and humid as the coast, thanks to those 1700 feet of altitude gain. The trade off is that the winters, which can be quite chilly where we are (especially this year!), are perfect. The city would clearly be a perfect choice for expats seeking more culture and action than Lakeside, while one has to go only 6 kilometers to have tranquil village life in the pueblo magico of Comalá. The "downside" (which would probably be considered a positive factor by those contemplating such a move) is there are few gringo tourists and even fewer residents, meaning at least basic Spanish is a necessity. We loved the place, and can't wait to return.

Passion

2010-02-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

It had been a couple of years since we'd been to Puerto Vallarta, and it was nice to have the excuse provided by good friends from Colorado coming to visit us at Lake Chapala, who wanted a few days of beach time before heading home.

PV's old town or "zona romantica" is the place to stay and eat if you do go, and one of the great things about it is if you walk 5 or 6 blocks away from the beach and uphill you're quickly in real Mexico, with 50 peso multi course comida corridas, 20 dollar a night hotels and awesome taco stands everywhere.

The highlights of this trip were meeting two people with tremendous passion for good work. One was the owner of a lovely coffee roastery and espresso bar called Café Oro Verde. Up a flight of stairs well away from the main tourist areas is a funky café adjoining a serious craft roastery, where choice organic beans from a couple of top farms in Chiapas I used to buy from in my coffee buyer days are perfectly roasted. For 144 pesos (U.S. $11) I bought a kilo (2.2 lbs.) of perfectly roasted coffee, with a stunningly excellent shot of espresso thrown in for good measure. The owner, Wenceslaus (real name!) is a total character - former restaurateur in Everett, Washington, who learned how to roast from Umberto, the founder of Seattle's Torrefazione Italia (long since sold out and counting his money back in Perugia). We talked coffee for a good long while and he strongly encouraged me to open some sort of good coffee store at Lakeside.

Equally passionate are the owners of the wonderful folk art gallery Peyote People, who for more than a dozen years have been partnering with carefully-chosen artists in many parts of Mexico to keep the "best of the best" of these arts alive. The Huichol people are a particular passion here, and we got to see samples of Huichol art from the 60's and 70's, long before the gaudy colors most of us associate with this tribe hit the scene. Visiting this gallery is an incredible education for one's eye - and makes you realize just how shoddy the mass-produced stuff you see everywhere else really is. The level of detail and individual artistry on display here is breathtaking, and the devotion of the owners to the survival of these artists goes way beyond any sort of business proposition:

http://www.peyotepeople.com/

Tacos al pastor in Puerto Vallarta

2010-02-20T09:52:00.001-07:00

Here's the maestro (as we called him, much to his amusement) at Pancho's Takos (yes, with a "k") in Puerto Vallarta, monitoring marinated pork on a spit (that's pineapple on the top), for tacos al pastor, a cult dish in Mexico that at its best (here!) is one of those rare foods that goes right to the pleasure center of the brain, making gluttony almost inevitable.

Tacos al pastor is a blending of Middle Eastern techniques of roasting marinated meat on a spit (as with gyros and shawarma) with Mexican spicing and sensibility. The complex, subtly spiced marinade recipes are closely guarded - one of those "I could tell you what's in it, but then I'd have to kill you" situations. The piña or pineapple on top lends its juice to the meat, tenderizing it further while adding its unique aroma. The cook carefully turns the meat so it's exposed to the intense heat of the hardwood charcoal firing the grill, then shaves off ultra-thin slices kissed with a slight bit of char that are crispy on the outside, tender on the inside. A taco consists of a few thin shavings of meat atop a just-made corn tortilla, with small bits of pineapple and a little raw white onion and cilantro, to which one adds a squeeze of lime and a thin ribbon of fiery salsa. The flavor is sweet, sour, slightly picante, rich but light, with a tropical aromatic tang that makes just one more taco (and then another) an inevitability.

How good is it, really? Well, with fiver nights in Puerto Vallarta at our disposal and an almost infinite choice of restaurants we ate here three nights - and it would have been four, but they are closed on Sundays. One hears of dedicated vegetarians who "fall off the wagon" due to the allure of bacon or barbecue, but however seductive those things are tacos al pastor are like crack cocaine by comparison. Good thing we live five hours away from Pancho's!

The U.S. at arms-length

2010-01-29T21:31:00.000-07:00

We watched most of Obama's State of the Union address on Wednesday. A year after his election we still love the guy, and are so happy to have him as President after eight years of suffering though the shame of George W., the ultimate Ugly American.

However inspiring Obama might be, the context of his address was anything but - a nightmare mixture of spineless Democrats, neo-fascist Republican rubes and their goon squad (a.k.a. the Supreme Court), who showed their deep resentment at being called to task for giving multinational corporations personhood status in political campaigns.

Paul Krugman sums it up better than I ever could:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29krugman.html

After Obama's address we flipped channels to Stephen Colbert's show where the senior CNN analyst he had on as guest said current projections are 10%+ unemployment in the U.S. through at least 2016, or as Colbert quipped, "more than halfway through the Palin administration's first term." Sometimes I think the only problem with living as an expat in Mexico is it's nowhere near far enough away from the train wreck of a country our homeland has become.

Sitting on the fence

2010-01-15T18:12:00.001-07:00

It's been a bit over a year since we moved to Mexico, and that fact, the beginning of a new year and decade, investment review, the need to deal with health insurance and visa renewals all have us thinking and talking to each other about how we feel about being here longer term.

This community (by which I mean the expat community) is strongly seasonal, and transient, in nature. At least half the gringos here are only here for 4-6 months each year; many of the others live here full-time but travel back to the U.S. or Canada often, and there's a steady stream of people moving back and newcomers moving down lock, stock and barrel just as we did.

We've met, and continue to meet, some lovely people but also, a year later, have much greater appreciation for the depth of the friendships we have in Colorado. The little sangha we were part of there has blossomed and grown and is exponentially more serious about practice and community than anything we've been able to help create here. I know if we'd moved down here from Alberta or the Dakotas there'd be no second guessing or looking back, but Colorado is a pretty special place and does call to us from time to time.

Clearly the lessons we've learned here about keeping a careful eye on fixed, recurrent expenses and sharing resources will serve us well if we do move back at some point. We've been poring over the numbers and our conclusion is that overall costs for food, shelter and the like needn't be much higher than here in small town Colorado. Transportation, given the need to drive longer distances, will be double but do-able, but as always the elephant in the room is health insurance and health care costs. Knowing we'd have to come down here for treatment if anything major did happen - and more than likely move down here full-time should either or both of us be fortunate enough to live to a ripe old age and need assisted living or the like - is a big incentive to just put down roots right where we are.

Meanwhile, we remind ourselves that we've expended far too much energy over the past 7 years changing external circumstances when staying put and changing perceptions and priorities would've served us far better. The following quotes, from James Thurber and the great Tibetan lama Dilgo Khyentse respectively, probably ought to be affixed to my bathroom mirror for daily reflection:

"All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

"We call the country in which we were born our homeland. In truth, however, there is nowhere among the six realms of samsara that is not our homeland, because we have been born so many times, in so many places. Like nomads moving camp every season, we change our native land with every rebirth. What is the point of getting attached to one country rather than another?"

El Tortugario

2010-01-13T15:11:00.001-07:00

The tiny village of Cuyutlán doesn't have a whole lot going for it: a couple of basic hotels and even more basic restaurants, an underwhelming (to put it mildly) salt museum (the area is a major sea salt producer) and, best of all, a sanctuary south of town dedicated to raising sea turtle hatchlings and releasing them in to the wild (more than 500,000 so far).

Erin thinks Steven Spielberg based "ET" on the face of these gentle creatures, and it makes sense to me. We saw many floating tranquilly in deep ocean on our dolphin spotting expedition in Puerto Escondido last year, including one with a large sea bird riding atop it like a surfer.

These guys are threatened because we humans like to eat their eggs. It's hard to imagine they have many other predators besides us. It may well be that the problem is just too many humans eating the eggs (in Mexico, the Catholic church gets the "credit" for much of the human overpopulation), since for many centuries the indigenous cultures who lived here lived very well on a corn-and-beans based diet that included sea turtle and iguana as their only animal protein. Nowadays there's way too much factory farming and animal cruelty in Mexico, just like at home, but at least there are concerted efforts to save these lovely, gentle creatures from extinction.

Give me the real Mexico...in carefully controlled doses

2010-01-13T13:44:00.001-07:00

We just returned from a week of visiting the central Pacific coast. From Lakeside we drove down through Colima to the small village of Cuyutlan, south of the industrial port city of Manzanillo. From there we drove 4 hours in the rain on slick, treacherous roads consisting of nothing but hairpin turns (I kid you not) to Caleta de Campos in Michoacán, then back up the coast to Manzanillo, Melaque and La Manzanilla.

The Michoacán coast consists mostly of uninhabited beautiful beaches. The level of poverty in the tiny villages you pass through reminded me more of Nicaragua or rural Chiapas (places I visited in my coffee buying days). People are living in tin-roofed structures made of falling-apart found timber, without running water let alone electricity, with starving dogs and pecking chickens milling about in the dirt and mud.

We'd heard good things about Caleta from friends, and the beach is pristine, but the town itself is a dump and a scary one at that, with huge trucks of army guys armed with automatic weapons parked prominently on the main drag, a few dirty tiendas and a restaurant scene so dismal that we couldn't even find good street food. The "deluxe" hotel we stayed at would've been tolerable except that all the other rooms were occupied by vacationing Mexican families, which meant 6 or more people in rooms intended for two, with completely uncontrolled children running the hallways and whooping it up in the pool at all hours. "Sandals" resort for couples it was not, and beaches just as pristine or more so can be found in places like Puerto Escondido, where there is also rich culture, excellent food and a vast choice of affordable lodging.

Manzanillo is a bustling business city of about 130,000 that seems larger. We'd visited 4 years ago and been turned off by the oil tankers in the bay and other heavy industry, but this time we found it charmingly real (but not, a la Caleto, too real), with some nice beaches, great typico cuisine and a couple of nice lower-end hotels.

We also enjoyed Melaque, which had a nice mixture of Mexican, Canadian and American tourists on the day we were there (seemingly about one third of each group), with lots of touristy trinket shops but also plenty of affordable basic beach hotels and taco stands. La Manzanilla, another ten miles up the coast, is much more precious, made so of course by the hordes of wealthy gringos who've discovered the place in the past 4-5 years. There are several truly excellent international restaurants (we had the best pizza margherita we've had since Italy, decent Thai green curry and stellar fish and chips) and many Condé Nast-worthy lodging choices as long as you don't mind paying through the nose for them (the going rate appears to be close to $90 a night for short stays, $1600 and up for a month). There are a couple of much more basic hotels, but the vibe is definitely San Miguel-on-the-beach, with trendily-dressed ladies of a certain age rattling their jewelry on their way to the art gallery. We enjoyed every minute of it.

Christmas Eve, Mexico style

2009-12-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

Cold last night (for here) - in the low 40's, which meant room temperature in our unheated, tile-floored casita was in the low 60's overnight. Awoke to bright sun, turned on the oven for a few minutes to take the edge off the chill, local coffee, papaya, blazing sun and cloudless skies. Played tennis for a couple of hours with friends as the sun warmed things up to 70.

Erin and I sat out under the veranda by the mandarin orange and avocado trees, watching the hummingbirds in the bougainvillea and eating a couple of tacos de barbacoa each for lunch, with cactus salad and homemade agua de Jamaica (hibiscus "water"). Total cost for lunch "out" about 35 pesos - under $3.

I guess I'm not dreaming of a white Christmas - and I think I could get used to this.....