Report from the coffee whore

You know that rich, full, heavy, somewhat burnt but really only heavy smoke sensation your tongue takes upon itself after a nice full cup of coffee? I’m sitting with that right now. And it was worth every torturous minute we spent acquiring it. We have both a Cubano roast and an Italiano roast. And they are heavenly. When we spent time in Coatepec and Xico and Xalapa earlier this year, we visited many roastaries but could not find one with a roast we liked. I loved the medium tostado roast I found in San Rafael, with a coffee from Coatepec that was so chock full of caffiene I didn’t know what to do with myself. The roast was very toasty, the beans simply brown but the coffee was anything but acidic. It was intriguing; light roast but still good. I don’t think I’ve had a light roast that wasn’t bitter or simply weak before that one.

(as an aside, I’m typing whilst sitting in the sala, breeze from the sea, low to no humidity (though Jamie might diagree – I’ll have to check the numbers in a second), Ellen for company as she just awoke, watching the palapero errect the postes for a palapa across the way from us. These palaperos are David’s group and do it very differently from Dino; no winches, no trucks (except one to drag the post to a general area of deposit) and pure brute strength to place the post))

(it is now the end of the day, the girls have swum, we’ve hung laundry and watched the palaperos to our fill) Once our Coatepec supply of coffee ran out, we purchased from Costco (Chiapas organic) and re-roasted it here at home. It was a good coffee and nothing to complain about, but nothing to rave over either. I’d read on a local site that there is a place in the Ejido (the side of Playa in which most of the locals and Mexican transplants live) that has been roasting and selling good coffee for a while now. Since our Coatepec stash has run dry we finally decided to see if we could find the place (the directions were rather vague; look for this sign in the middle of the road (which no longer exists), take a left, look for the roasters) and see if their coffee would work for us. We headed to the spot, drove around, were certain we had not found it, drove to a spot I thought it should be, started asking folks, finally found a taxista who knew about the roaster, ended up right back at the spot we originally thought it would be and asked another local fire extinguisher business if they knew about the roaster. One person knew but said they’d recently moved and gave VERY vague (go down to the Office of the Ejido, at either the street before or after, he wasn’t sure which, go down a couple streets and start looking) directions. After our first try, we found ourselves very close to Jamie’s favorite fish and shrimp taco stand, getting very close to closing time and decided that since we’d probably NEVER find the place, we should at the very least get some tacos. We’d JUST exited the car when the guys from the fire extinguisher business came screeching up and said that they’d talked to the friend of the owner and she gave them better directions and that they’d take us there. So we hopped back in, screamed around the ejido until he cut his velocity by 75% and without rhyme or reason, we crawled around a few blocks, circling here and there until the guy figured out where he was. And parked. In front of a non-descript green house on a dirt street. No smell of coffee. No roasters. I started to wonder if I’d dragged the girls and Jamie into an bad situation but the fire extinguisher guy commenced to bang and yell and wait and bang on the gate and yell some more and after quite a few minutes we heard a yell from within. And not too much later a man appeared pulling a t-shirt over his head. And they all seemed to know OF each other and the t-shirt guy invited us in and we found the MOTHERLAND of coffee. Big garbage-can sized tubs of roasted coffee, inky black, shiny with oils, the smell was our perfume. And we inhaled and stared and tenatively touched and asked the kind stranger, please oh please, could we simply leave our ATM codes, turn over all our property, children, whatever, to immerse ourselves in the bean. He declined, but did take $180MN for two kilos. We got Cubano and Italiano and while he seemed doubtful that we’d be able to handle the Cubano (and I was CERTAIN I wouldn’t), I LOVE the Cubano and adore the Italiano and want to marry it and have its children (as long as they are coffee beans). And we lived happily ever after in a haze of coffee goodness.

Well, the mornings sure are nice. As the fire extinguisher guys stuck around through our awestruckness and ooohing and ahhhing I began to suspect that they might appreciate a thank you. I wasn’t going to buy them a kilo and I was certain that an outright offer of money would be dismissed, but when we left I figured out what to do. I slipped a 20 (peso note) into my palm and when I shook the main guy’s hand in thanks, his eyes widened in disbelief and his smile grew and I think I just MIGHT have figured out another social nicety in this land of eternal sun.