Aldo Coffee Company

What He Said...

Ben Kaminsky of Ritual Coffee in SF speaks the truth about top-end specialty coffee shops and why those of us who specialize in single-origin coffees and promote manual brewing have a love-hate relationship with lattes.

This Is Why You Get Into Coffee

A post that says everything about a personal experience every true coffee pro would love to share from a man we've never met but for whom we have had the ultimate respect, Hunt Slade.

Early Closings Through Halloween

Clara and Sam have college classes. Max has a play he's in up in New Ken this week. Rich has a contract job in Connecticut from Wed-Fri. Neither Lois or Jess has availability in the afternoons. Meaning we don't have enough people to staff late afternoons and do everything else that needs to be done here.

Thus we'll be closing at 4pm all this week, 2pm on Sunday. There WILL be Sunday brunch - this week's origin country theme is Colombia. We'll be closing right after brunch service.

Regular hours will resume on Monday, October 31.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Try Halloween Without Hershey's

There are an estimated quarter million children under age 14 working cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast. An estimated 10% of whom are classified as 'forced labor' or slaves. Figures from various reporting agencies may put those numbers higher or lower, but the fact is, there's a problem, both with potentially harmful child labor and definitely harmful child slavery.

It's a problem that's been discussed ad naseum but without solid progress. In 2001, Senators Tom Harkin and Eliot Engel drafted a measure which would become known as the Cocoa Protocol. It was agreed to by the major players in the cocoa industry, including Hershey's, Nestle, Mars, Kraft, Cadbury, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, among others.

Ten years after the protocal was signed, of that group it can be argued that only Cadbury shows significant progress in doing something about the problem. Others have made some progress.

And one company seemingly hasn't done much of anything: Hershey's.

Bacon

Saw this and just had to share.

On 19 Coffee...

Figured it was about time we posted something about our "new" roaster.

Since we abandoned our own roasting operation and sent the FRS back to Palo Alto, we've been serving and selling beans roasted by 19 Coffee down in Washington, PA.

Why 19 Coffee?

It would be easy to say that the coffee is good. But it's much, much more complicated than that because, well, we're Aldo Coffee.

There Are Only Three Rules. Let's Not Make Up Ones That Don't Exist Here.

We overheard from a customer today that his girlfriend is never coming back here because we won't let her sit in the cafe with a foam cup.

Just about every day for almost seven years Angela has sat here with coffee in a foam cup. For five years Sally has had her chai in a foam cup and Jenny has enjoyed her cappuccino or a mini Americano in a foam cup. And hundreds of others have enjoyed there drinks in foam cups while sitting at a table inside Aldo Coffee.

We even have a recycling box for foam cups inside the store. It's pretty full.

In other words, this assertion isn't true and never has been.

Would we prefer you drank out of a ceramic cup? Sure. We think the coffee tastes better that way and obviously it saves us a few cents.

Will we offer to put your drink in a ceramic cup while you're here then, if you have to leave mid-drink, offer to pour what's left into a foam cup so you can enjoy the entire drink? Yep. Unless we already know you're going to refuse that offer, that's the standard interaction every barista is trained for.

Have we ever turned anyone away because they wanted a foam cup for here?

No.

Happy Happy Day.

We are deliriously happy to wake up to news of Belle and Frank's new baby boy! Photo courtesy of Frank's mom. 

 

Yes, The Roaster Is Leaving. But We're Not Leaving Roasting.

Wasn't planning on addressing this until next week when plans were more firmed up, but as we're now getting lots of questions, guess we should move up our timetable.

The FRS roaster we've had since last October is on the way out. It will be shipped back to FRS on Tuesday. We thought it was going this week, thus the crating was moved upstairs and that area is a bit of a mess.

To explain why we're letting it go is a bit complicated. But here goes...

It comes down to cost, which includes several factors.

About Those Cookies...

Given everything we've done to promote exceptional, ethically-sourced coffee in these parts you'd think that the item that "WOWs" most people would be the coffee.

And you'd be wrong.

There has been no award-winning coffee, no signature beverage, no nothing over the past 6.5 years that has elicited the number of "OMG that's unbelievable!!!!" responses as Melanie's chocolate chip cookies.

Since she started making them a year or so ago, we've gone from selling one tray a day to three or four trays for the shop in addition to taking phone orders for a dozen or more for parties and holidays.

A lot of folks come in and beg for the recipe. Melanie isn't talking. What we will say is that when they go into the oven they're more than a quarter pound each. There's butter, flour, sugar, chocolate chips.

And magic.

We don't know if there's a "Best Chocolate Chip Cookie In Pittsburgh" category in any of the local food polls, but if there is, we think we'll get more than a few votes.

Now, if we could get Mt. Lebanon as excited about coffee as cookies, we'd really have something...