When he heard we were going to San Sebastián del Oeste, Jack asked if I could stop in at the coffee place just outside of town and see if they had any green coffee available.
"Green coffee?" I asked, wondering if this was a concoction to go with green eggs and ham.
"The unroasted beans," Jack explained. "I roast my own."
"Well, I'll be Starbucked," I said, although maybe not aloud. "I never met anybody who roasted his own beans."
So Tuesday morning, after breakfasting at the restaurant overlooking the plaza and enjoying some local coffee that I found quite delicious (round and full but not acidy or speedy), Dick and Jesse and Judith and I pulled up outside this place...
...not realizing how Mr. Rogersy our visit would be.
The first thing I noticed was a patio with lots of tan stuff spread on the concrete floor...
...which turned out to be...green coffee!! although it doesn't look especially green. It was drying in the sun, getting ready to be roasted (or not, if Jack rescues some of it first). See that darker stuff on the floor in the background? That's the coffee still in its husk, also drying. Because...THIS is what it looks like when it's still on the coffee bush!
Isn't that pretty?? The ones on the left, the darkest red ones, are ripe and ready to pick. We'll call it "pre-coffee".
So the pre-coffee is spread out to dry and turns dark in the sun, and then they tumble it around to remove the part that used to be red. Underneath are the tan (green) actual coffee beans.
Then, unless Jack and Franny are in town, the beans are roasted in this roaster:
(Jack's roaster is smaller. I do not have a picture of it. Yet.)
Sometimes, here at La Quinta, they mix in Oaxacan chocolate and cinnamon when they grind the coffee. It smells divine. You can buy their organic coffee with or without chocolate and cinnamon, along with "dulces tipicos de la región", which means typical candies and sweets of the area, as you may have guessed.
We all bought coffee, roasted. Dick bought some coffee beans with a white sugary coating that he liked, even though he said they made him jittery. Jesse bought some peanuts with a red candy coating which he liked but couldn't eat too many of because he had a toothache.
That woman you see on the bag is Mary Alvarado, who Judith said had twenty-one children, so I guess she at least deserves her picture on a bag of coffee.
They named the place after her, too, which I think is only fair, as she birthed all the workers. We think that fellow in the photo up above holding the basket of green beans is her youngest child.
The purported youngest child told me, by the way, that he had plenty of green coffee beans that could be purchased in 5-kilo bags, 10-kilo bags, 20-kilo bags, or even 100-kilo bags. We'll have to check in with Jack one of these days and see how much he bought.
Our next stop, with the car all smelling like coffee, was a couple of miles down the road. Hacienda Jalisco was built around 1830, when the Spaniards were at full tilt mining the silver in the surrounding hills.
The sprawling casa is now an inn, with spacious rooms, fireplaces, antiques and artifacts from its Spanish history and also from its more recent history. In the early 1960's, its guests included John Huston, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor, who hid away there during the filming of Night of the Iguana. Yes, the inn has a table covered with maps and ledgers from the mining operation. But it also has this game that Huston and Burton and Taylor played at night beside the fire:
Wow! Did you know Rummikub had been played that long? I didn't. Apparently it was first invented in Israel in the 1930's and is now...but I digress. Back to the Hacienda. This is the museum.
Here's one of the old bedrooms on the main floor.
The guest rooms are upstairs, are large and high-ceilinged, and although they have nice modern bathrooms, it would be easy to fantasize that you were back in the 1800's, especially because Hacienda Jalisco is still without electricity and is lit by oil lamps. Lodgings include breakfast and dinner, with many of the ingredients grown right there on the property. There's a lovely patio with a firepit to relax around in the evenings, maybe play a little Rummikub.
There's also a room, down some spooky stairs, that was once the entrance to a three kilometer tunnel that ran all the way to the garrison in San Sebastián so the Spanish could move the silver without attracting the attention of the pre-Revolution bands of rebels who needed the silver to throw out the Spanish. The tunnel worked for a while. Then the Spanish were compelled to skedaddle and the mines came to an end, as all things do--including this post.
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The La Quinta coffee plantation and shop does not have a website, but you can find them on the right hand side of the road on your way into town, or on the left hand side on your way out.
Hacienda Jalisco has a website with some nice pictures and a way to contact them in case you want to go there and pretend it's the 1800's, which seems like fun to me, even though there are no Spaniards or rebels running amok any more.
Hacienda Jalisco
Next Week: I haven't the faintest idea. You'll have to check in and see what I come up with.
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