You probably learned the ‘palm press’ method of speeding up the dripper:
Cupping your hand over the top of the personal dripper and then pressing down which adds a little air pressure to the dirpper and speeds up the extraction.
I don’t drink ‘cafe au lait’ often these days because of the sugar.
Here is southern California, there is a company that sells Cafe Sua Da concentrate in the freezer section at the grocery store or even Costco.
Sometimes I will double down on the sugar and pour some of the concentrate over some vanilla gelato. It makes a wicked affogato.
As I recall Cuban coffee is mostly robusta which tolerates the hotter growing environment in Cuba. That explains the logo on the Cuban Coffee Queen take-away cups-
Hisorically robusta coffee was a preferred source of coffee due to economics. Robusta is very disease resistant, the cherries are larger and therefore the seeds/beans are larger. when harvesting Robusta, nobody was worried about ‘quality’ of the beans. They weren’t concerned about picking the cherries at the peak of ripeness or the terrior. They mechanized the picking of the coffee cherries and if you look at photos of the time, they were picking the cherries when they were green.
Many of the south and central american countries economies lived and died on the price of coffee.
In 1954 the president of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas, commited suicide because he could not control the price of coffee exports and the economy of Brazil was suffering.
Too bad the polititions in the US don’t take the concerns for the population as seriously…
There is a great series on YouTube by PBS that has the history of coffee:
“PBS- Black Coffee”. There are 3 parts
Also worth reading “Coffeeland” by Augustine Sedgewick, about coffee in El Salvador.
One of the reasons we are seeing so many migrants from Central America is the price of coffee can’t support the farmers anymore. I cheer when I see coffee prices go up.
That is a sad book, though. What was done to that country was criminal.
Kona coffee is very expensive. People may disagree with me, BUT: I don’t think that it is that much better that other coffees around the world. The coffe farms for Kona are in the US and therefore subject to minimum wage laws.
One hour of coffee labor on a Kona farm is probably the equivalent of a weeks or months labor in central or south America.
I am not saying that the Kona farm workers don’t deserve the pay that they are receiving. It just makes the cost of the end product higher.
Actually she showed me the traditional method which takes longer for all the water the drip thru.
And that’s where you can find all sorts of great Asian foods
I’ll have to find this…
This is a problem not just in El Salvador but all over the big coffee producing countries that price their coffee against the Intercontiental Exchange (ICE) coffee futures prices. The big buyers like Starbucks, Peets, Illy etc. buy based on ICE’s futures contract prices and they take delivery at that price. Recently the prices of those futures contracts have went up a bit. Unfortunately some smaller buyers also use the coffee futures as the starting point for their negotiations.
I completely agree!! Kona, Jamaican Blue Mountain, civet coffee … same boat. I’ve had them and I wasn’t impressed - give me the Bali Blue Moon, a Yemen, Ethiopian, Peru, Sumatra or Chiapas. I have a friend to asked me to find JBM and roast it for him and I told him he’s got to pay market price for the beans plus my time to roast it He didn’t blink because he likes and wants his JBM. I make the analogy to Bordeaux wines (or cult wines for that matter) - I had the opportunity to take some courses with a Master of Wine and he said many times the pricey Grand Crus are not worth it when there is so many good value second and third growth wines from Bordeaux that can also age, although not nearly as long as the Grand Crus. Pricing in the end is supply and demand - pure economics most of the time (plus labor cost).
Regarding wines: I love a really good glass of wine with a good meal and really love going to a restaurant where they have Tappas (small plates) with wine pairings.
I went through stages where my favorite wine was Brunello. What a beast with great complexity and all kinds of nuances. But it needs to breath for a couple of hours before it is ready to drink. Now I like really good Pinots. Much more subtle and sublime.
Quite frankly, my palate (and my wallet) are not sophisticated enough to appreciate Opus 1, vs some of the $20.00 wines. When people ask me what is the best wine to buy, I tell them to drink the wine you like. Same with coffee.
I learned the cafe au lait ‘palm press’ technique from some ex Vietnamese army guys in the 70’s
Not surprising… that is the Little Saigon area of Boston … BUT it is not a particularly safe neighbourhood unfortunately - it’s on the edge of the area you wouldn’t want to be at night for sure. Unfortunately for me that’s 20-odd miles away from my town in the west.
He didn’t blink because he likes and wants his JBM. I make the analogy to Bordeaux wines (or cult wines for that matter) - I had the opportunity to take some courses with a Master of Wine and he said many times the pricey Grand Crus are not worth it when there is so many good value second and third growth wines from Bordeaux that can also age, although not nearly as long as the Grand Crus. Pricing in the end is supply and demand - pure economics most of the time (plus labor cost).