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76. Essay – What I did this summer

Monday’s photo essay on my holiday coffee-drinking adventures featured only some of the great coffeehouses I visited during my holiday.  Here is the complete list with some notes on each.

SMALL TOWNS.

  • Mudhouse
    Charlottesville, VA
    Mudhouse serves a mighty fine espresso and some very good coffees roasted nearby at Lexington Coffee Roasting.  I enjoyed a Tanzanian peaberry with very pronounced blueberry notes.
  • Saint’s Café
    State College, PA
    Saint’s serves up Intelligentstia Direct Trade coffees on a clover in my hometown; during my time there I was able to sample clover-brewed DT coffees from Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Rwanda and Honduras.

MEDIUM-SIZED TOWNS.

  • Coffee Exchange
    Providence, RI
    This Fair Trade roaster and community café is a CRS partner in the Fair Trade Coffee Project and a birthplace of Coffee Kids: co-owner Bill Fishbein co-founded the organization.  The good folks at Coffee Exchange sent me on the road with a Coffee Exchange Backpack Bottle (thanks, Charlie!) and a very complex coffee from Papua New Guinea.
  • Spro Coffee
    Baltimore
    This was bittersweet.  The good news: Baltimore’s best espresso bar has now evolved into a unique coffee emporium that allows you to choose a coffee from among a half-dozen or so great roasters — Barefoot, Counter Culture, Intelligentsia, Origins Organic Coffee, Stumptown, etc. — and select the brew method — v60, Aeropress, Chemex, French press, vac pot, etc.  The bad news: the good folks at Spro waited until after I moved to Guatemala to open a café just blocks from the house where I used to live!  I had two outstanding Ethiopian pour-overs — Counter Culture’s Michicha Sidama natural and a washed Yirgacheffe from Origins.

BIG TOWNS.

  • Peregrine Espresso
    Washington, DC
    DC was a coffee wasteland when I lived there in the 1990s.  Now the scene is beginning to burst, led by this cozy Eastern Market café, which was started by a former Counter Culture employee and brews up private-label coffee roasted by Counter Culture.  I had a berry bright Michicha natural from Ethiopia from the brew bar.
  • Stumptown
    New York
    Lines stretched out the door at Stumptown, where the people-watching was top-notch and I had out-of-this-world coffees from the El Injerto, Chicua and Buenavista estates in Guatemala.

1 Comment

  • Michael,
    Sorry the Spro experience has to be bitter sweet for you. For those of us still hanging our hat in and around Hampden, it’s all sweet! We’ll make sure it’s here for you whenever you return.

    Thanks for the heads up on Peregrine. Will make a stop there on my next trip to DC.

    Katy

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