Aldo Coffee Company

Mexican Brunch This Sunday to Wake Up the Dead

Sunday, November 2, is "Day of the Dead" in Mexico, a festive celebration honoring loved ones who've passed on.

Here at Aldo Coffee Co., it's going to be a "Wake Up the Dead" celebration! 

With all due respect to Mexico, if the beer and tequila companies can co-opt Cinco de Mayo to promote booze, why can't we use Day of the Dead to celebrate coffee?  After all, Mexican celebrants make noise with beads and other items in order to "wake the dead".  So why not add caffeine to the mix?  Besides, the holiday is really a day to celebrate living.  Maybe we'll start a national movement for a coffee holiday...

In that spirit, we're even doing our first "brunch".  Here's what's on the menu:

We'll be serving Chiapas "La Union Coop" all day (roasted by Jake's Java).  It's a sweeter cup, with notes of chocolate and caramel apple.  We'll also have two shop favorites from Intelligentsia brewing: Guatemala Itznama and El Salvador Los Inmortales (both of which border on Mexico). 

We'll also be serving the following for our first ever brunch:

STARTERS:
- Freshly made churros with abuelita (Mexican hot chocolate)
- Pan de muerto (sweet bread made specific for the holiday)
- Chilaquiles, made with fresh tortillas and quesos flown into town by Melinda's mom
- Two quiches, one featuring chorizo and Chihuahua queso, the other poblanos and queso fresco
- Pumpkin soup
- Duck enchilada in mole colaradito
- Pork in green peanut sauce
- Mini Flan
- Guacamole & chips
- A cup of Mexican Chiapas La Union Coop or Guatemala Itznama or El Salvador Los Inmortales

All for the ridiculous price of only $10.  Which is less than two frozen margaritas.

Even if you're not into celebrating Day of the Dead, where else are you going to find Mexican food on Washington Road?  ¡Buen Provecho!

The photo is of a roasted corn stock being made.  We used the cobs from today's sweet potato corn soup.  Not sure what we're going to do with it yet, but it'll find it's way into the brunch somehow.

And don't get used to the idea of us doing a regular Sunday Brunch.  The cook hates to miss Meet the Press.  (And for those doubters, yes, he can cook Mexican. He lived there.)

Sometimes the Coffee Finds You

There's a certain type of coffee shop one sees on various industry forums that insists their coffee can only be prepared properly within the confines of their environmental-controlled shop-cum-laboratory and only on their state-of-the-art equipment.  And they won't prepare coffee outside of that environment.

We're not one of them. 

While it's true that we can't duplicate the experience of serving a cup in the cafe just anywhere, we can come close enough for rock n' roll.  We also believe it's important to get out there in the community from time to time to showcase good coffee, even in less than ideal conditions.

Look at it this way: if you're talking drip coffee, all coffee ages (stales) at a predictable rate once brewed.  But good coffee that's been in a Cambro for an hour still tastes much better than poorer quality coffee brewed and served under the same conditions.

The P-G Takes On the Sad State of Pittsburgh Restaurant Coffee

China Millman delivers a solid article on why that coffee at the end of your meal isn't nearly as good as the meal itself.

It is tempting to say, "You get what you pay for," when talking about restaurant coffee.  But a cup of coffee in most restaurants is often at least as expensive, if not more so, than what you'd get here or at any number of other quality shops around town. 

We're of the opinion that if a restaurant is brewing great coffee with service to match, they'll sell more of it.  Price isn't really the issue.  Quality is.  Why do so many restaurants want to let diners have a terrific meal end with a cup of watery, bitter swill?  We can do better - but only if we demand it.

Disclaimer: as the article implies, we offer training on coffee and espresso brewing to restaurants.  But we also enjoy a good cup after dining out.  And we're not finding much to get excited about.

Lost In Translation

Was looking for some different things to do with turkey.  Came across this:

If you don't know what's wrong here, we've got a Italian seaside villa in Toledo we'd like to sell you ;-)

Podcamp3: Not a Decaf Type of Crowd

Apologies for the "me-ness" of the following post, which is more social commentary than coffee (you can skip to the end for the coffee part). 

I've (Rich) been at Pittsburgh Podcamp3 the last couple of days.  We donated the Sunday morning coffee (Affogato handled Saturday) and to attend some sessions, in between serving up espresso drinks in the "Loungy Lounge" on our Cimbali.

Belly Dancing is to Turkish Coffee as Pole Dancing is to...

Looks like we're getting an interesting new neighbor.

If Pole Dancing is offered as an exercise, is it accompanied by disco accordion?

Oh, it's not that kind of Pole Dancing?

With the addition of Oh My You're Gorgeous along with Avalon Exchange, the Uptown Mt. Lebanon business district is definitely in danger of actually becoming a hip place to visit.

We welcome our new neighbors and wish them the best of success.

Lunch Menu Changes Coming

The patio garden is looking pretty sparse.  We've got about a week's worth of basil and arugula left.  The last few beans will be picked this week.  Doesn't look like we're going to get anymore peppers.  The tomatoes are gone.  Leaving a lot of cilantro and parsley and some hardy thyme, all of which we'll use for infused oils, pestos or flavored butters.

Once the arugula is gone, so are the house salads.  Once the basil is gone, so is the caprese panini.  We're working on some other panini (tuna/olive, cheese/fennel) and thinking about going back to the ciabattinas we used prior to this year - we end up with a lot of end crusts and slices too small to use for anything but bread soups and croutons.  And we've got tons of that already.  We hate the waste. 

Saturdays will feature other soups/stews besides/instead of chili.  We'll still do our Black Cat chili off and on, but doing it every Saturday was limiting.  Today we're doing something wildly different - a sausage-based "Bigos" (Polish/Lithuanian national stew with veal and pork/apple sausages, kielbasa, sauerkraut, cabbage, potato and carrot - we're actually hoping for leftovers). 

We'll be keeping this season's soup menu as interesting as possible - still lots of peasant soups from all regions of Italy.  And some "finer", more delicate and nuanced "classic" soups. But we'll also be expanding our repertoire into other cultures to give a taste of some cuisines that aren't yet well represented in the South Hills.  And due to demand, our New Year's Day "hangover cure" peanut soup will make more than just the one annual appearance this year.

One caveat:  We sometimes make bigger batches of some soups as the process more or less dicates a larger quantity.  So sometimes you'll see "encores" of something we've served relatively recently.  We need to do this in order to clear space for the next recipe.

We appreciate the feedback we get on the soups and we're especially delighted that y'all are keeping an open mind about some of the stuff we're putting out (collard greens!).

We never set out to be food-based, but it certainly seems that there's often more buzz about soup around here than about coffee.  As long as about a taste experience outside the same-old-same-old and we're opening up palates to something different, whether it's coffee or soup or anything else on the menu, it's all good with us. 

New Friday Hours, Entertainment Shifts to Sunday Afternoons

We're now closing at 6pm on Fridays for the Fall and Winter.

We're also moving the Friday night entertainment over to Sunday afternoons, starting this Sunday when crowd favorites Lee Robinson and Tom Reilly play their contemporary folk-jazz originals from 3-5pm.

Next Sunday we'll be featuring Damion Wolfe from Baltimore.  Then on November 9th, it's belly dancing time complete with Turkish coffee service!

More Sunday events will be added.  Check the event schedule in the upper right corner of the website for details.

Coffee for 500

Rep. Matt Smith is hosting a Senior Fair today from 10-2pm at the Galleria.  Matt's always been great to us so when his people asked us to help brew the coffee for the Fair we said "sure".   They needed to put out enough coffee for 500 people and we had the Cambro containers and capacity to do it.

Then we found out that the State was providing the coffee.  In a rare example of PA fiscal responsibility, the coffee was Maxwell House.  Seeing as how the Cambro dispensers have our name on them, we said they could keep the Maxwell House for something else and we'd provide our own coffee.  So we're brewing up about 108 litres of Aldo House Blend this morning in addition to handling the Friday AM rush.

We guess that makes this our first official political contribution as a corporation.

October's Coffee Tasting 101: Introduction to Cupping, Saturday 1pm

We're doing it again this Saturday at 1pm.  We'll be tasting an two different Africans and a Central American coffee.  You'll learn the basics of "cupping", which is how professional coffee tasters and graders sample coffees at origin.