Coffee

Well, I’ve got a crazy amount of caffeine in me, and definitely wont be sleeping for quite some time (now 4:00am)

I decided to make the coffee list at Q something exceptional, something to match the tea list, and bring us another step closer to a perfect restaurant (in my eyes at least). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I can pursue more knowledge in drinks and new flavor profiles. With the dollar being such a piece of shit, tea is way too expensive for good stuff right now, and my taste in wine drains my cash even faster than that. I thought its good to move into uncharted territory — coffee. Before I really get into the details of what’s going on with that, I’ve been reminiscing about a life event regarding coffee.

During my honeymoon at a cafe in Liechtenstein with my uncle and wife, we sat on a patio and ordered some coffees before heading home. I don’t remember what kind of coffee it was, even to the point of… was it drip? cappuccino? espresso? What I recall the most is the bold, deep flavor it had, it was truly special. I do hope I can find something similar as my studies progress.

Earlier in the honeymoon when we were riding from Frankfurt to Paris, May was reading up on the different tiers of food establishments in Europe, and the criteria for them. The details are fuzzy but with a cafe at the bottom and restaurant at the top of this list, what I took away from it all was “a restaurant should be better than a cafe in every way” — and I am taking that very literally with my role at Q.

Whenever I have a chance to chat with a cafe owner, I feel I have this great positional advantage over them. Our customers are with us for hours not minutes, and we have virtually all of that time to spend with them (if they’re into that). Probably 1/3 of our customers don’t seem to have spending limits, and just want the best of what we can offer. There are some fantastic cafe’s in Calgary, but they don’t do anything we can’t do. It might be a bit ambitious, but I feel we can out-do a cafe’s coffee list with proper rotation of product.

I met some guys from a Calgary based company called Single Origin Coffee Inc, and sat down with them to discuss some plans I have. I have a bunch of samples of their stuff to go through over the next few days / week (a big task if I have to be this wired every night). I gotta mention that their labeling leaves nothing to be desired, it truly has everything you could want. I think I really lucked out with finding them as opposed to bouncing around random stores hoping for the best (like I did with tea)

Today I did a side by side of light vs medium roasted Monsooned Malabar AA Grade. The flavor breakdown was fun, I can’t do graphs like I do for tea because I have no frame of reference yet. I tried to jot down some tasting notes and a profile of the coffee, and according to what wikipedia says — I nailed it. I definitely prefer the light roast, and of everything I wrote about it, I think the most fascinating part was dissecting what the tasting note for “yellow” meant. Banana, curry powder, and fresh grated ginger mixed together. I didn’t have any bananas available, but putting curry powder onto ginger is fucking cool, and I could definitely see the connection in the coffee. I saved some in my fridge and am going to get into it tomorrow when I wake up (and bananas magically appear in the basket, as they do on Saturday mornings) If Light Roast Monsooned Malabar AA doesn’t make the cut onto the first draft of Q’s Boss Coffee list, this is going to be a wild ride.

5:00am, Psytrance is going hard. I have to pee, gonna publish this and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep.