Caffe Artigiano Calgary officially “opening soon”

It’s great, sometimes, to live in a city in such crazed hyper-growth mode that you can depart for just over three weeks and see visible changes (the good kind, mostly) when you return. I had to head downtown yesterday to renew our street parking permit and to pay a cam-bot speeding ticket (note that Alberta Registries charges $9 for the privilege of paying in person, which came as a bit of a shock). I took the opportunity to espy new stuff between home all the way to the Bow site. All very exiciting. We’re getting a Sisley boutique on 17th in what used to be a Rent-a-Centre. That’s an upgrade.

But for all the building and cranes and such, I was most excited to stop by the now-open Centrium building and defy the construction equipment to snap this:

Yes, this was rumoured to be opening in October, which is almost over now, and peering in the store space confirms that it’s not close to completion- they don’t even have drywall up. I’ve read “January” recently. So it goes; it’ll be January soon enough.

Elsewhere on the coffee front (namely at home)… I bought a Zassenhaus manual grinder in Berlin. These are exceptionally high-quality, well-engineered manual coffee mills that have become hard to find in North America, so when I found one in a shop right near my hotel, and reasoned that I had space in my luggage for it, I took the plunge. I made regular drip coffee at my hotel (my room had a kitchen and a proper coffeemaker, not one of those tiny ones you find in your hotel bathrooms sometimes), which was great, but I was really interested in seeing how it would do with espresso. Well, actually, it works very well. 200 cranks for 14g of beans=a great little workout, but it’s satisfying to use the combo of a hand grinder with a lever machine. Pure tradition.