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Between feverish photo editing (I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 photos during my travels) and catching up on email, the task of summarizing my experiences in Mexico is daunting.

I took it as an auspicious sign that one of my traveling companions, Intelligentsia’s Doug Zell, was also lugging around the hardcover of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. Its a potent book, and Pollan’s style of big picture thinking was a useful lens for meditations on the coffee trade.

We arrived in the city of Oaxaca on Sunday unsure of our exact itinerary, and took in the sights. We stayed at a nice little hotel owned by Alberto, a coffee farmer, whom we met Monday morning with the arrival of John from Royal Coffee - the occasion for our first round of Mezcal. As many of my friends will happily point out, I’m a lightweight when it comes to alcohol (and a cheap date for drugs ranging from advil to acid), but this homemade hootch from Alberto was tasty and inspired me to cautiously sip Mezcal in our many subsequent encounters with the stuff. Erowid has a great article on Mezcal’s history and preparation.

Monday being May Day, the dry mills we were to visit were going to be practically closed so the remainder of the day was spent socializing with folks from the mills and co-ops, discussing coffee and sipping more Mezcal.

On Tuesday we would get down to the business of coffee… stay tuned for part dos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.