specialty coffee Archives

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It’s summer in Southern California, and my frugal self can’t help but turn on the AC once the loft nears 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In a moment of weakness (I blame the heat), we went to our favorite local coffee shop in Santa Ana last Sunday, to reap the benefits of their AC in lieu of turning ours on. Which also is a confession for: we ordered coffee at a coffee shop, something we haven’t done in a while. Despite the regrets of spending $11 in exchange for two hours of AC time (we stayed until closing hour), we were introduced to a splendid drink, which they call the Frozen Sweet Latte.

The drink comes from a slushie machine, and while $5.50 a glass seems like a steep price, the joys of sipping one of these babies as icy crystals twinkle on your tongue is indescribable. It’s enough to evaporate any heat wave (well, the AC in the shop helped). Regardless, once we had a taste of their medicine, we just knew we had to replicate it, or at least try. Hence, the sharing of a similar, but slightly different, frozen sweet latte recipe. Without a slushie machine, we made up for their textured ice crystals with a more distinct taste of espresso. Here’s how you could avoid paying for coffee, and sit through another hot afternoon in a blazing room.

Makes 6 servings

Things you need:

- Blender – You’ll need a blender to mix all this goodness right before serving. Having worked at Jamba Juice for almost two years, a blender was one of the first things to go on our registry. No Annie Banks Mackenzie crying over a blender as a wedding gift here (Father of the Bride fans, anyone?). This is the one we own.
- Scale – I own this one, because it weighs heavy-enough things for bread-making as well. I also like this because I can toggle between grams and ounces. Mike has this one that he uses for coffee exclusively, which is what we mostly use when measuring coffee bean and water weight. It is especially useful since it has that timer, essential to latte pulls and drip-coffee!
- Grinder – The grinder plays a huge role in the quality of your brew (or espresso, or latte, or what-have-you). We used to just live with the results of a sub-par grinder, until last Christmas, when our gift to each other was a high quality grinder that has been spewing out delicious cups of Joe ever since.
- Espresso Machine – The La Marzocco Linea Mini is the machine we use for our espressos. It’s a high quality machine, and the price point reflects it. However, for my frugal readers who happen to buy an espresso drink every day, it will take approximately three years to come out even in terms of money spent on coffee. Just in case you care about the math.
- Freezer safe bowl – Honestly, we just use a glass Tupperware to store the coffee in the freezer. We have a Tupperware set similar to this one.

Ingredients:

1 cup of espresso
1 cup of milk
1/4 cup sugar
6 cups of crushed ice

The Process:

Pull 1 cup of espresso from the espresso machine. We had to pull approximately 4 espresso shots, at 20 grams of freshly ground coffee beans extracted at 25 seconds each shot.
Pour the espresso in a freezer safe bowl. Add the sugar and mix until the sugar has completely dissolved.
Add 1/2 a cup of milk.
Freeze in the freezer for at least 8 hours.
Thaw slightly in the fridge right before use. We placed it in the fridge for approximately one hour.
Transfer to a blender with 1/2 cup of milk. Add 6 cups of crushed ice (depending on the consistency you want).
Blend on high until thoroughly mixed. We still wanted some crushed ice pieces in there.
Pour into 6 glasses. Sprinkle with freshly ground coffee.
Enjoy with a metal straw.

The Verdict:

Our version is definitely not as light as theirs, but if you really like the taste of coffee, the flavor stands out more in this version. If you could budget out $5.50 a glass, it’s still worth trying out their slushie machine version at Hopper and Burr. Really, the texture is better than ours! The owner, Severson, is doing other pretty neat stuff worth checking out too.

Mexico City has an up-and-coming coffee scene, so subtle that the locals themselves may not even realize it is happening. While a majority of cuidadanos still ask for coffee as our grandparents once knew it, (that is, black, watered down, bland, and prepared in seconds), a lot of foreigners were seeking out newer coffee shops that are not far off from the third wave cafes that one would find in California. Because these coffee shops take more than a minute to brew coffee, many locals prefer to stick with shops such as Cafe El Jarocho, serving Coyoacan since 1953. With a city as fast-paced as the cars intermingling amongst themselves within the same lane, no one who really lives in the city has time to wait for someone to time an aeropress to the correct second, let alone wait for a barista to grind coffee beans so that they are fresh for the steeping.

The great thing about the coffee being served in Mexico City is the knowledge that the coffee beans are being made not too far away. Unlike the coffee being served in California cafes, these beans did not have to travel halfway around the globe, and were not picked from cherry trees months ago. These were from local farmers in neighboring cities, and supporting the farmers that are working hard to preserve the quality coffee bean in Mexico is especially important.

With the recent escalating spread of roya, also known as coffee rust, among coffee plantations, there has been a significantly decreased output of coffee cherries in areas that used to be heavy coffee producers, such as Oaxaca. An air-borne fungus that spreads rapidly and causes an infectious orange “rust” color of the leaves of cherry plants has the ability to prevent photosynthesis of plants which leads to failure of cherries to ripen. Affected trees will have much fewer leaves, or at times are even fully defoliated, by the second season. What results is a loss of jobs for many farmers, and miles and miles of barren and abandoned trees. Due to the roya outbreak, Mexican coffee production has decreased by more than half in the last five years. Additionally, coffees being produced are not scoring as high as they used to. Coffee is considered competitive when they score above 85/100, and with the spread of roya, fewer and fewer coffee make the cut.

The fantastic thing about Mexican coffee is that, unlike most other coffee producing countries which export their best produce to other countries, Mexico keeps its coffee within its own country, due to the increasing demand in cities such as Mexico City. Many coffee shops only serve Mexican coffee exclusively, something that is not found in California cafes. Because of this interest in trying to preserve good Mexican coffee beans, specialty coffee shops in Mexico City have been helping coffee farmers maintain their livelihood. I like to think we did our part too, by supporting specialty coffee shops that are buying nothing but high quality coffee from farmers in nearby regions. Here are my top caffeine stops, starting with the favorite and working down to lesser loved stops.