The Giants are on the Juice

As we approach baseball’s All Star break, I feel it is my responsibility to inform the public about what is likely to be this year’s big doping scandal, and it involves the New York Giants – apparently not only the whole team, but the sportscasters who cover the game, and, shockingly, most of the radio listening audience. No, it’s not human growth hormones, it’s not synthetic testosterone, it’s not illegal amphetamines. The problem is something that is – for now – a perfectly legal substance, and it appears that it is being abused on a grand scale: Caffeine. Just take a look at Bob Elliott and Larry Jensen, stars of the team; just before game time, that critical period when they should be preparing physically and mentally for the contest ahead, they decide it’s wiser to take a coffee-break! Forget the lineup, the pitching strategy, the concentration on the other team’s strengths and weaknesses… give yourself a break, relax, let that pesky tension and fatigue from – I don’t know, putting on your uniforms, tying your shoes – drain away with the pleasant lilt of a good cup of coffee. It’s a tough life there in the locker room before a game, so really, give yourself a break!

Now let’s go up to the press box for some Pan-American Coffee Bureau-sponsored irony. Sportscasters, we are told, have to think fast and stay alert, so when they should be checking the lineup, preparing their mountains of statistics, and rehearsing their cheerful radio banter, it’s important for them to – you guessed it – take a break! It’s the delicious and clear-thinking way to take your mind off of what your are supposed to be doing.

To complete the PACB takeover of the world, we are treated to the sight of what can only be the quintessential fan-family, the older and younger males humbly served a cheerful cup by the disinterested but dutiful woman of the house. Look how cheerful those guys are! She can’t help but feel a deep satisfaction that her boys are juiced up while listening to the game.

Or perhaps all they are getting is radio silence, as the team and the sportscasters seem to be taking a break. Nevertheless, once this doping scandal hits the newswires, I predict those Giants are going to be run right out of New York.

Edward R Murrow was a slacker

“Minutes before air-time, newscaster Edward R. Murrow checks his script for CBS Television’s See it Now – and takes a Coffee-break!”

So reads a 1953 advertisement from Life magazine. Is reading a script for your own show so difficult that after a few minutes you need time out? Minutes before air-time? Was he really that lazy?

No, not according to the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, the sponsor of the ad. In 1953 “Coffee-break” apparently had a different meaning than it does today. “Delicious, bracing coffee aids clear thinking. A cheerful cup can clear your mind for action too.”

I can’t remember what I was looking at on ebay when I came across this ad page for sale. Judging by the illustrations, you would think that coffee consumption was at an all time high back then. “Coffee’s gentle stimulation makes hard work seem easier. Make a “Coffee-break” part of your working day!”

Ebay is sinister, though…you can’t look at an item without being tempted by Related Items. You guessed it – this isn’t the only old ad I bought.

A day late and a nickel short

One day after the last post I happened to catch a rerun of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. There’s a scene in which George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn go in to Tiffany’s to buy something on a $10 budget, and the only thing they can come up with is having a ring engraved – a ring that came from a Cracker Jack box. The clerk, played by the excellent John McGiver, says, with mild surprise, “Do they still put prizes in Cracker Jack boxes?”
“Oh, yes,” George replies.
“That’s nice to know,” McGiver says, almost wistfully. “It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past.”

Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.

Five cent coffee

In the last post I mentioned the drug store that still sells coffee for 5 cents a cup. I recited the old coffee menu from memory, but I got to wondering if it was possible to post a photo of the sign here. My 80-year-old uncle still lives in the neighborhood, so I asked him whether he wouldn’t mind stopping by St. Paul Corner Drug and snapping a shot of the coffee sign. He happily obliged, hopping on his Yamaha 750 and riding up Snelling to the intersection of St. Clair.

One of the best things about this store, besides the orange phosphates, is that through the years it has been owned by a succession of very nice and extremely friendly pharmacists. I have many memories, all the way back to childhood, of pleasant afternoons at the soda fountain when the owner took time out of his day to greet and chat with me and my brothers. From my uncle’s report this week, the current owner is carrying on his predecessors’ tradition.

Click for larger view

I have no idea how old this sign is, but I’m pretty sure it dates back to the 60’s. And it looks like it. I know it seems unlikely that anyone could make money selling coffee for a nickel these days. I have learned, though, that long-time customers are so happy about the price stability that they often donate packages of coffee to the store to help offset the costs. And regardless of the current cost of coffee, I plan on doing the same.

Through the window, across the street, you can see the sign for the St. Clair Broiler, another institution of the intersection that has been there since at least the 50’s. The fountain is the same as it has always been, though the electronic devices on the counter are newer. I heard recently that this is the only pharmacy left in Minnesota with a working soda fountain.

When I moved to Bozeman in the 70’s we had an excellent drug store with a soda fountain, a store that had also been here for decades. But when the housing boom started in the 90’s, the building owner decided to triple the rent for the drug store, and it put them out of business. Not because the building owner was losing money, mind you, but because rents were going up everywhere so he decided he was going to cash in. Better, I suppose, to have a high paying expensive gallery of some kind than a lower paying historic and well-loved business on main street.

I admire St. Paul Corner Drug not only for their sense of community but for their sense of neighborhood. I hope it stays that way for the next five decades regardless of fluctuations in real estate or coffee futures. And when I visit next year, I’m going to bring a bag of coffee and a pocketful of nickels.

Seers, Sayers and Players

Last week coffee futures prices hit a 13 year high. So far this year they are up approximately 40%. It’s tough on my end of the business, because it means most coffees are considerably more expensive, and if I ordered now, I would have to raise my own prices; I can absorb a little bit, but passing on even half of that would be downright painful for my customers.

I’ve never been in a business that was directly involved in a globally traded commodity before. For the past couple years I didn’t really think about it; coffee prices fluctuated up and down a little, but nothing significant, and once I averaged my costs and settled on my selling prices, I pretty much didn’t change them.

But suddenly this year “investors were worried,” “markets were uncertain,” “weather threatened” certain growing areas, “market fears” drove up prices, etc. I have always been baffled by the willingness of the public to simply accept explanations that are, in essence, pure fiction, especially when people who are obligated to report on price changes ascribe consciousness, personality, and even free will to a number. One of the most absurd headlines I’ve seen recently was “Oil struggles to overcome recent losses.” Horse pucky. Oil doesn’t struggle to do anything. Markets are abstractions that do not have the ability to worry, react, be afraid, or feel uncertainty.

Another classic fiction is when people are referred to as ‘investors’ in commodities; they are not investors at all – they are simply gamblers. I have a friend who worked at the Chicago Board of Trade for many years, and his only job was to buy and sell futures of all kinds and try to make a profit. Neither he nor his company had any interest in coffee, oil, the bellies of pigs, wheat, or any other commodity. They simply played with huge contracts and hoped they were in the black at the end of the day. They guessed, they gambled, they put huge sums of money in commodities for sometimes minutes with little more knowledge than a tourist at a roulette wheel. What investor comes to you, invests in your company, and then takes the money out two hours later?

Recently one of the excuses for a jump in coffee prices was that “fund managers, uncertain about oil, flee to coffee.” Call me practical, but it simply doesn’t seem right that gamblers, players, manipulators, and anyone else who has no actual interest in coffee should have the ability to create a financial hardship for me, my retailers, or you, the actual consumer, by creating an artificial price increase, especially when it’s  based on fear, worry, uncertainty, suspicion, jitters, trepidation, angst, acid reflux, or any other hooey that has nothing to do with buying and selling coffee. I can guarantee you that the farmers themselves rarely – if ever – benefit from this kind of price fixing.

Two blocks from where I grew up in St. Paul, MN, (more than 4 decades ago) there was a corner drug store and soda fountain that had a sign behind the counter that said. “Coffee 5¢. Refills 5¢. ‘Just a drop’ 5¢. ‘A wee bit’ 5¢.”  Two years ago I went back to visit. The drug store is still there. You can still get a cherry coke or an orange phosphate or a milk shake made by hand. And coffee is still 5 cents a cup.

Now that’s what I call market stability.

Kopi Luwak

If any of you are familiar with the movie “The Bucket List” you will remember that one of the things on that bucket list was having a cup of Kopi Luwak – or civet cat-processed – coffee. The civet cat, which is not really a feline, is native to many areas in Asia, including coffee growing areas of India and Indonesia. It has a fondness for perfectly ripe coffee cherries and will dine on them at night. But the animal is unable to digest anything more than the fruit of the cherry, so the rest of it passes through, perfectly intact. Some time back, people got the idea that collecting the ‘leftovers’, washing them, and then processing the coffee normally, would make a desirable product for discriminating coffee drinkers.

They were right. When humans pick coffee, they often pick ripe cherries along with underripe and overripe cherries, and process them all together. The best tasting coffee comes only from the perfectly ripe cherries, and that is the beauty of letting the cat do the work. But it’s not just the batch of perfect coffee fruit that makes this unique; the digestive enzymes the coffee is exposed to during its 36-hour trip through the cat change the chemistry of the coffee, removing bitterness, increasing aromatics, and often bringing out desirable flavors not found in traditionally processed coffee.

When this coffee was first marketed, it was collected in the wild after the civets were done leaving deposits around the farm. But a lot of the Kopi Luwak that’s on the market today, especially from Indonesia, is from caged civets that are fed coffee cherries of all ripeness levels. The expert selection of perfect coffee by wild civets has been removed from the equation. There are, however, a few coffee farms where the workers collect the naturally harvested (and deposited) coffee, and we have managed to obtain a small amount. It’s 100% Arabica from an organic farm in India, fully washed and sun dried. It’s expensive, of course, but if you want this rare and one of a kind experience, send us a note.

Coffee Tracks

Yesterday a friend and I were sharing coffee stories, specifically how we both started drinking it purely for the utility of the caffeine jolt. For me, it was just as I finished high school when I got a job with the railroad as a telegrapher/switch yard operator. Since I had no seniority, I was always on the graveyard shift of midnight to 8 a.m. After the first night, during which the hardest work was simply staying awake, I decided to try coffee. I brought some kind of awful instant stuff and loaded it up with milk and sugar to mask the horrible flavor and bitterness. I could hardly stomach it, but it did give me enough of a buzz that I stayed awake and out of trouble. Unfortunately, I had no idea that coffee could get any better, but once it was sweet enough that the bitterness was gone, I suspected it was capable of more than I was experiencing. Eventually I kept drinking it even when I wasn’t on duty, especially at Mickey’s Diner in downtown St. Paul; coffee with milk and sugar went surprisingly well with blueberry pie.

So this friend and I were discussing the odd phenomenon of repeatedly going back to something we considered poor, paying money for it, and modifying it with cream and sugar, all with this sneaking suspicion that one day, perhaps, we would have a cup that could possibly taste good on its own, even though at our young ages we had never experienced it. Fast forward 30 years, and here we are in my kitchen enjoying outstanding espresso from the Speedster, lamenting all those years of lost potential. (Perhaps if we had been born Italian we would have got to this place of enlightenment a long time ago.) However, our lamentations were brief – more cappuccinos were up and there were tasty scones on the table. We look forward with satisfaction, knowing our suspicions were correct.

By the way, I recommend downloading Martin Sexton’s song Diner – wonderfully creative from an extremely talented musician.

Summer?

It’s June 11th. In a week and a half the days will start getting shorter. After several days of rain, this morning I woke up to this:

Fresh Snow on the Mountains

Actually, that’s what appeared after the snowstorm I woke up to moved on. The mercury was down to 33°. Ok, it was a digital thermometer and used some high tech measuring system, but I like saying mercury. ANYway, it’s COLD! The house was cold, and the humidity was high, which made it worse. So I decided to fire up the sample roaster and roast up the several pounds of different coffee samples I received this week. While the roaster was warming up I brewed a double cappuccino on the Speedster and looked out to the garden. Cassin’s finches, pine siskins and juncos were swarming the bird feeders, anxious for the high calories of the black oil sunflower seeds. Buntings, robins, warblers, and the finches who weren’t eating were all singing from the poplars and chokecherries. And then a male western tanager appeared out of the drab colors of an overcast morning, a contrast so suddenly striking it was like he carried his own light source.

I like June: western tanagers appear everywhere, from the foothills of the mountains to the boulevards along the city streets, wowing everyone with their striking black, red and yellow. They will be here for a few more weeks, then head up into the mountains to nest. The appearance of this guy was effective in mitigating the mood brought on by the foul weather, and the roasting session went well. The room warmed from the heat of the roaster, the clouds moved on, and the tanager stayed, occasionally singing from the poplar. If the coffee samples turn out to be really good, perhaps a Tanager Blend will show up on the store soon.

It’s a Miracle

This week I took a couple days off to help out the science class at Chief Joseph Middle School. Every spring the school hauls busloads of kids up the Gallatin Canyon to the Storm Castle ranger station for a day of outdoor activities. Every 40 minutes groups of 7 or 8 kids rotate between stations where they learn about things like timber management, fire management, wildflowers, natural aquifer systems, flyfishing, archery, and, in my section, birds.

I’ve been birding since I was five years old, thanks to my grandfather who had a backyard full of homemade birdfeeders and bird houses. He also had mist nets set up for capturing and banding birds, and I was helping with that before I was strong enough to hold up binoculars. I had a good childhood in that respect. And I’ve been birding all my life since then. Through my participation in the local Audubon I am often asked to volunteer for local schools when they have their outdoor days, and I always enjoy it. Younger kids are easier, as they tend to be fascinated more easily by the bird life around them, and less distracted by classmates. This week I had 7th and 8th graders, the age at which you clearly win some and lose some. Every 40 minutes I would give my introductory talk and usually by the end of that 3 minutes I knew whether I had interested kids or distracted ones, like the girls who used their binoculars to watch the boys over at the archery area, or the boys who turned the binoculars backwards and were fascinated by how small their feet were.

But in every group there were a few kids who were truly interested, and for those I had set up some spotting scopes on a tall shrub where a hummingbird had staked out a territory, always perching on the exact same twig tip between food forays or aerial displays. Even though we had finches and warblers and kinglets and sparrows all around us, it seemed the hummingbird held a special kind of magic for the kids and almost all of them found it fascinating.

In one group there was a boy, Jared, who was clearly a ‘special needs’ kid; his speech was loud and monotone and slightly slurred, he walked awkwardly and with a slow limp, his hands seemed uncoordinated, and his eyes each looked off in different directions. He didn’t seem intellectually handicapped, though, and tried to do everything the other kids did, though he mostly didn’t succeed, like looking through the binoculars. And he frequently asked if he could sit down on the ground as soon as we stopped walking. He didn’t shy away from anything we were doing, and even asked a lot of questions, but it was like he was disconnected, participating without experiencing what the rest of us were. He did tell me, though, that his grandmother has bird feeders and often told him about the birds she sees. When he looked at the bird book he would hold it about half an inch from his face, so I knew he couldn’t see well, if at all. When I asked his adult aide, who accompanied him, about that, she said, “He’s legally blind. He can read, but only because we use a giant magnifier at school so he can make out the letters.

And that gave me an idea. When the hummingbird returned to his perch after enthusiastically showing off for the female, I adjusted the scope and then zoomed it all the way up to full power, so the bird filled the field of view. Then we brought Jared over to the scope and explained to him how to use it, and what direction he should point his eye in relation to the eyepiece. He moved his head around this way and that, and then I saw a subtle change when his line of sight matched that of the optics. He froze for a second, and then exploded:” I SAW IT! I SAW IT! I SAW THE HUMMINGBIRD, I SAW THE HUMMINGBIRD!!” his voice loud and cracking in that teenage-puberty-onset kind of way. He threw his arms around his aide so hard that he almost knocked her over, and then he fell down on the ground, unable to stop the flood of exclamations. At one point he was on his knees, his forehead on the ground, with his arms outstretched like he was bowing toward Mecca, but he was pounding the ground with his open palms saying, “It’s a MIRACLE! It’s a MIRACLE! It’s a MIRACLE!” Finally, when he spent all his energy, he rolled onto his back, a huge silly smile on his face, and said to no one in particular, “I have to tell my grandmother about this.”

Gardening tips

I’ve been putting my old coffee grounds in the garden for years, not only for the added organic matter, but for the acidity as well. Tomatoes do well with slightly acidic soil, as do roses. In fact, when I spread coffee grounds around the rosebushes (native roses, not tea roses) they bloom like mad. Worms like coffee too, and redworms – the composting worms – really gravitate toward a coffee pile in the garden.

A few days ago, though, I learned something new: ants hate coffee. A friend has been trying to control the ants in his flower beds with all kinds of natural methods, and somehow he found out about coffee grounds. He spread them around the area where he had the ant problem, and all the ants left! Of course I had to google this and see if it was true, and this ant control method is lauded on many a gardening web site. Cool. I’ll have to try this with flea beetles when my beets come up.