It Came From Indonesia - Page 2
As is the case with most things, coffee is a matter of preference. Either you like it or you don't. And if you like it, you like it a particular way.
You can have it sugared, creamed, spiced, flavored or flat-out converted into ice cream, candy and baked goods masquerading as coffee so you can put it in a gargantuan cup and walk around at work all day with what is effectively a feedlot trough of chocolate-covered coconut cream pie topped with mint ice cream and cherries.
The technical term for the way I like mine is black. My particular, preferred version of black is more along the lines of molten black with searing red-hot chunks of thick, earthen terrain colliding with white lightning bolts exploding with a hefty, damn near solid, I Dare You aroma that digs into the scalloped edges of the whole affair with razor-claws. It requires some chewing.
It took a bit of global grazing to settle on a winner but with some mentoring from Martha and Dave, the neighborhood bean slingers, I ultimately landed in Sulawesi with fallback positions in Papua, New Guinea and Kenya.
Those fallbacks are crucial. Once you zero-in on a small patch of land as a supplier, you have to come to terms with a few things. First, this is a commodity. It's like corn on the cob. It's not available year-round. Cob merchants can always go someplace else for their corn but the only place you can get Sulawesi coffee is from either Sulawesi itself or from a certified local bean slinger who knows how to lasso this stuff, bean by bean, in the treacherous wilds of Indonesia. Then there's the volcano and the terrorists and the weather. All of these things can run afoul of beans in the global pipeline.
As I write this, I'm down to my last gasp of Sulawesi, Papua has come up short in the supply chain and Kenya is $18 a pound so I'm digging in for a one-pound round from Tanzania. Tanzania shares a common border with Kenya so while they have similar climates, expecting the same to coffee to come out Tanzania that comes out of Kenya is like expecting the people who live in apartment #201 to be the same people who live next door to them in 203. That's entirely too eerie and likely akin to living in Rod Serling's House of Quarter.
On the up side, working your way through your preferred coffee's off season is a great tool for digging yourself out of your caffeinic rut and reaffirming why you were in that thing to begin with. I tend to find that when all is said and done and my bean is back in stock, I wander back into the rut of my initial entrenchment because, frankly, ruts get a bum rap. There's a reason we get into them in. We like what's in there. It's why mice ignore that shiny metal thing when they get a good cheese Jones going on.
© Geoff Crunick 2013