I Want to Be Under the Sea With a Little Cup of Coffee With You
That's a Beatles song! Probably!
Hi!
This week’s coffee shop spotlight!
It’s gosh-goobly Plowshares UWS!
Its trio of beautiful, gorgeous, subscribed-to-this-newsletter individuals are the nicest front-of-house people I’ve met in a long time. In fact, I ended up at the northern branch a week later, meeting the lovely solo barista and chatting with him for a little about this very newsletter!
I even took a short dinosaur video for y’all, as I now have to pretend I have a modicum of professionalism.
What’s new, Jude?
What’s new is that this e-mail is far too long and I’m skipping this section.
Learning Corner!
Hello folks and loved ones and parents and strange elephants that can flap their ears to fly!
This is the learning corner! After lots and lots and lots of requests (2), I am including a learning corner so you can learn a little more about your cup. This one is long, so buckle up.
Today’s topic is:
why are large-scale blends a thing?
Blends, like s’bux, are all over the place in coffee. There’s a few reasons:
creating a taste profile
an obvious one; if I like fruity coffees & chocolatey ones, I might mix one of each instead of trying to cultivate a coffee that has both traits. It’s a lot easier/cheaper to find straightforward single-note coffees.
stabilizing that taste profile
let’s say you have a blend of 6 farms. One of those farms has a drought. If you replace its coffee with coffee from another farm for a year, you’re only changing 1/6 of the overall taste.
stabilizing pt. 2
you can also adjust the ratio to make up for differences over time. This is why tasting and cupping is so important!
scale
At a certain point, coffee companies [I’m talking about ⭐💸1] can entirely decimate ecosystems, and thanks to their scale can’t let customers notice any change. Consistency is far too valuable to them. So, if the blend is many farms, losing one is nominal; its taste profile stays consistent. Burning the beans also helps…
scaling
As a coffee chain requires more coffee, it can add more farms to its blend with minimal taste difference.
flubbing quality
You can mix a small amount of amazing coffee with a lot of bad coffee and have something pretty good, for a lot cheaper. (I make this sound unethical; it's not—it still makes for a great, enjoyable cup)
If it seems like blends are mostly a thing mean, evil companies do, and it can be! But we’re not evil, right?
To that end, I’m going to chat a little bit about sustainability, and later, how some blends can help the coffee industry.
Storytime
The year is the 1900’s and Jacky, our friend and farmer, was told one day that growing coffee is going to be really lucrative for him.
Our friend (and farmer!) Jacky decides to plant a few coffee trees, and they do extraordinarily well! Much better than his other crops. The government sees their farmers doing well and subsidizes the crop to encourage planting (coffee trees take 3–5 years to produce after planting), and hopes to make money off of taxes and exports.
In 10–15 years, Jacky and his neighbors have mostly coffee in their farms, with few native crops accompanying. The government increases their incentives, leading to a region or even entire county of monoculture farming. Everybody’s farming coffee, so the supply is too high, and now Jacky is selling it for less and less every year.
Our friend doesn’t want to switch—if the coffee prices go up again, Jacky would need to wait another 3–5 years for new seeds to reach maturity—so he keeps farming and selling coffee.
His neighbors do, too.
There are no longer big trees forming a canopy overhead, and there are no longer shrubs and grass tightening the soil at foot. A wind storm passes through, tossing up soil and throwing it into the sea, and taking precious coffee branches with it. No problem—Jacky is smart! He saved up for emergencies.
A storm again comes, this time heavy rain, knocking out a few more branches and channeling in runnels through the soil, bringing it to another farm.
You get the idea.
As countries were invaded to farm spices and coffee (and sugar and jute and wheat and tea and cotton and rice, one per region), foreign powers demanded more and more until every farmer was our Jacky. Now, companies that require major amounts of coffee are the ones forcing monoculture farming in their stead.
As a single origin (one farm) coffee chain grows, it puts more pressure on that farm to grow more coffee instead of coffee+helpful plants (beans+beans!), meaning you might want to consider a blend to put less pressure on your suppliers.
Here’s some ways a blend can help:
Put less pressure on single-origin farms.
Allows for guaranteed buy-price for all your farms, if one doesn’t do well one year they still get paid the same amount for their labor, subsidized by farms doing very well.
You can switch farms to more sustainable ones or farms that are just starting out—put your money to use!
You can put your money in helping train farmers and improve equipment in your farms that need it.
Break time!
Paul Ringo once said, in a conversation with John Harrison,
Remember, George—it’s not “love and coffee is all you need”, it’s just love. If you make coffee for someone [and share this newsletter], isn’t that love?
And now…
The Recipe Section
This one’s an easy one.
black cardamom
Black cardamom is a delicious spice; always dried over an open fire. It can add a really nice smoky+campfire effect to your drinks. If you want to see its creation, check out this very cool video and learn more about the spice here.
I’d say it’s better in coffee drinks than matcha, but you do you.
Also, as a side note, it’s a similar effect to lapsang souchong, a tea that’s smoked. I wonder if you’d live through putting smoky syrup in a smoky tea.
For the syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
3–5 black cardamom pods, smacked to open
Add your sugar to the water and bring to a simmer while frequently stirring. Add your cardamom pods, and stir infrequently for about 25 minutes. Taste it every time you stir [about every 5 minutes] to make sure it doesn’t get too minty. It’ll be up to your spice quality, freshness, and vendor how this comes out, as black cardamom is a rare spice. It’s crazy smoky, and carries a slight menthol flavor in the seeds.
In that vein, I’d recommend testing your cardamom before making this recipe. Eat a few of the seeds; and then chew a half-pod shell. Adjust your seed-to-pod ratio to get maximum smoky with minimum menthol flavor.
I get my black cardamom from Duals Naturals in midtown2, but you can get a lot of spices online nowadays. It’s a lot cheaper in person though.
I can say that regardless of your smoky-to-mint ratio, if you leave the cardamom in longer than 35 minutes you’re going to taste a lot of menthol.
For the drink
make latte
put syrup
freepour a pegasus
nice!
In the lab, we made a matcha drink with cardamom+cherry+rosemary+fig and a grate of nutmeg on top. If you’re experimenting, smoky/fruity flavors with herbs are great with this syrup.
Thanks for tuning in!
Enjoy your coffee!
Starbucks has been making a push recently to be more sustainable. I am looking into it!
Editor’s note: If you head to the east village location and see someone with a Van Gogh-esque NYC Skyline tote bag, tackle them to the floor immediately. They are a thief! They stole my spices and my irreplaceable $10 sunglasses and I’d like them back.