PRBC results

The initial field of 13, with competitors from Bumpy’s, Good Earth, Caffe Beano, Java Jamboree, Kawa Espresso Bar, Phil and Sebastian, and Fratello in Calgary, Transcend in Edmonton, Museo in Saskatoon, and one intrepid home roaster in Whitecourt, was trimmed to 6 finalists for today’s round. Everybody should be proud to just manage the incredible stress of the competition, and all the finalists deserve big, big kudos.

Here are the results. The top three qualify to represent us in the nationals, in Montreal next October:

1st - Chad Moss - Transcend Coffee (Edmonton)- 679 points
2nd - Jimmy Oneschuk - Museo Coffee (Saskatoon) - 665 points
3rd - Brendan Toyne - Java Jamboree (Cochrane) - 619 points
4th - Joel May - Fratello Coffee Roasters (Calgary)- 607 points
5th - Phil Robertson - Phil & Sebastian Coffee (Calgary)- 590 points
6th - Ashley Madsen - Kawa Espresso Bar (Calgary) - 571 points

I had the good fortune to judge everybody except Joel in the prelims, and I was astonished, watching the finals on its webcast, to see how poised and professional all were today. It was inspiring.

Judging was its own epic- hours of training on Friday and a complete revelation in situ. during the competition proper. I will do this next year- I’d do this for a living if I could. I thought I knew coffee before yesterday… this was like being reborn. I’ll never look at my own drinks quite the same way.

Some pics courtesy of CBC reporter and blogger extraordinaire Andree Lau:

Me not doing a very good poker face, judging eventual champion Chad Moss:

And this was taking notes on what I think was the espresso (seem to recall big-ish demitasses) of Karolina Bukowksa of Bumpy’s. Karolina was using a blend from Big Mountain.

And finally one during my judging the espresso of Calgary (Kawa Espresso Bar) barista Ashley Madsen:

Great, great event everybody.

Coffee coffee coffee and more coffee: Kawa open, De Ville sneaks up on unsuspecting Calgary coffeegeeks, and the Prairie Regional Barista Championship is this weekend

Some of this is a repost from chowhound- I’m just so busy these days…

Kawa Espresso Bar and De Ville “luxury coffee and pastries”

Well it’s been many, many months, but the wait is finally over. Kawa Espresso Bar, on the main floor of the office building at 1333 8 St SW (the space that was once General Audio), is open!

Today was the softest of soft openings- no charges for anything, just tips- this is in part because of waiting for the “maximum occupancy” certification by the city, but the place was buzzing with curious customers being plied with terrific 49th-Parallel espresso (and lattes, cappos, etc) as well as Clover-brewed Columbian. The menu will also include various panini and quesadillas, and, in due course, wines. Seeing the space with its seating, and without all the boxes and construction equipment, is inspiring. Pic of interior, which is going to look stunning at night, too:

Kawa will be open initially 6:30am-9pm seven days a week; they hope to have hours until 11 in time for Stampede.

I got the full poop on DeVille “luxury coffee and pastries” (upstairs at Art Central, Centre Street and 7th Ave) today as I got to speak to one of the owners. As I understand things, this is a venture with Saint Germain who will be providing the sweet stuff (good news as SG has tremendous deserts); they have the same espresso machine as does Kawa (a three-group Synesso) but not, at this point, a Clover. As noted earlier, this shop will be pulling beans from Chicago’s famous and respected Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, and will be the first in Calgary to offer Intelly’s Black Cat espresso (Communitea in Canmore does as well). They’re in the midst of final renos but this pic give a little sense of what the final space will look like, at least around the bar:

DeVille has plans to open next Monday, the 26th. As you can see, they are well on their way; this alacrity is in part because this space did not entail the transition that Kawa did (including change of use permits); this was because De Ville is in the space that was until recently Palette Coffeehouse. Initial hours will be 7-7, 7 days a week, but like Kawa they will aspire to be open later since, like Kawa, they intend to offer wine.

So the 7-days-a-week (even in our downtown!) that Artigiano ushered in seems to be the pattern to follow- even in the case of the new Good Earth in the Lougheed Building, incidentally. Let’s wish all these newcomers well.

Prairie Regional Barista Championships

For the first time, the Canadian Barista Championship participants must pre-qualify at one of four regional contests, with the top three from each qualifying for next fall’s nationals in Montreal. Regionals are Eastern (Montreal), Central (Toronto), Western (Vancouver), and for the first time, Prairies (Calgary). Until now, everybody west of Ontario had to go to the Westerns, and so it was no surprise that until a couple of years ago, almost all of the competitors were from Vancouver and Victoria. As well, the nationals were (in 2006 for example) held in Vancouver as well, AND there was no regional qualifying, so anybody who showed up was eligible- this is how Bob Blumer managed to walk up and come in third, which he did for this Food Network show, Glutton for Punishment. Nobody gets to walk on to the national championships anymore, and neither is there convenience only for BC’ers anymore. I like this.

Anyway, I’m judging! I was toying with the idea until I found out that the contest takes place on Saturday and Sunday of this coming weekend- and Sunday is the 4th Street Lilac Festival, which I cannot miss. As it turns out, judging need not be a full-weekend obligation and I’ve registered to judge in the “early” (10a-1p) slot on Saturday. Training is tomorrow and I think I’d rather judge the “technical” versus “sensory” aspects of the thing (there are separate judgings for each, though I’m not sure if we’ll not be forced to recycle judges- we’ll see). We have 12 competitors signed up; six qualify for Sunday’s finals, then as I said earlier, three qualify for nationals.

My God, look how far the coffee scene has come here. I was just hoping that one or two Calgary baristas would make it to compete in Westerns in Vancouver this year. I never imagined we’d have our own (well, AB-SK-MB and the territories) here.

Dave Rodney’s tax incentives for “fitness”: Dave, please read this.

There is too much happening these days- Kawa Espresso Bar had its last pre-opening inspection and may inshallah be opening, for real, tomorrow; tomorrow is also my department’s annual end-of-year “international dinner,” and as head of the social events committee this is my baby and we’re having it at Mt Everest’s Kitchen, which is one of the few Nepalese restos in North America, and I am terrified that something is going to go horribly wrong (I’m like that); we’re off the see Kids in the Hall at the Jack Singer the day after that (third show for me, and their first appearance ever, as a troupe, in Calgary); a bunch of hapless stingrays died at the Calgary Zoo; the province just eliminated its much-vaunted system of regional health boards; California just kinda-sorta legalized same sex marriage (until a referendum nixes that- don’t start partying now, kids); hundreds of thousands have recently died in natural disasters in China and Myanmar… whew. Add to all this our finally FINALLY resurgent spring (27 today, 28 tomorrow and Saturday! We got our split-type wall-mounted air conditioner charged up, with wall mounts in the living room and our bedroom, and we actually got to run it today), and there’s a lot to talk about.

Thing is, I’m sick. I felt a tiny bit under the weather on Saturday and then got knocked on my ass with fever late in the day, then didn’t have any real noticeable symptoms after than aside from feeling just “off,” and then starting yesterday came THE COUGH. Tickly, annoying, non-stop, and really, really aggravating with/of my asthma. I’ve been through this before and sleep is almost impossible; it feels like being smothered and is scary as hell. So I’m thinking about health, mine and health in general.

See, I’ve been working out more aggressively than I’d been in a long while over the last few months, and what spurred me on was the fact that, at 5′10″ and about 215 pounds, I was technically “obese” per the definition in the BMI. Now that was down from my peak of about 220 at, of all imperfect places, my 20 year college reunion in June 2006, but still nothing to celebrate. A BMI of 30 is obese. I’d moreover have to get down to 174, a weight I last had at around 24, to be “normal.” Well, “normal” ain’t gonna happen for me, but with a little behaviour modification in regard to eating and fitting in some resistance stuff (I can do standing curls with 25 pound dumbbells now, lots of them, 16 a set- I’ve never been able to do that), I’m happy to be under the “obese” bar with a little room to spare. I now weigh 205 on a good day, and I’m not actively trying to lose; just happy to stay here.

Add to this little biological victory the fact that all the results from my last medical exam, a few weeks ago, were stellar. My blood pressure was the lowest it’s been from a doctor’s reading (home is always, always lower for me) since the 8th grade. Lipids are great. Not a trace of diabetes, and since I’m post-40, I got a PSA (prostate specific antigen) screening too, and it’s perfect. So based on, among other things, my metabolic fitness, I am the picture of health. I try to eat right, with increasing amounts of fish in my diet over the last few years, and get plenty of exercise. I don’t and never again will have the body of Steve Carrell (who actually has a great body), never mind Brad Pitt, and my body FAT percentage is embarrassingly high, but no matter. I’m healthy, really healthy.

And I don’t belong to a gym.

Which brings me to the post topic. Conservative MLA Dave Rodney, who was an accomplished mountain climber and generally uber-fit dude before entering politics, is a good guy. He was the first to spearhead a provincial smoking ban (part of the post-Ralph-Klein set of miracles that we thought we’d never in Alberta) and is one of those small-l liberal Tories that make life bearable here. But I have to take him to task for his well-intentioned private member’s bill to give adults tax breaks of up to $1500 to take fitness programs or join health clubs, and a big push is, for some reason, around team sports activities.

Calgary blogger Maureen Flynn-Burhoe does a superb job of dissecting many of the problems with the bill at her blog, and I’ll let those challenges speak for themselves. My issues come down to three:

First, nobody has to join a gym to become and remain fit. I hear this all the time: “I don’t have time to get to the gym,” or “there’s not a gym convenient for me,” or even “I can’t afford a gym,” as if “gym” and “fitness” were coterminous and equivalent. They’re not, and it’s a guarantee for too many people that they’ll never undertake any exercise at all (never mind becoming “fit”) if they adopt this mindset.

Second, merely JOINING a gym and accruing those tax breaks does not guarantee fitness. Not even close. Gyms sell memberships anticipating, and rightly so, that most of those members will rarely, even never, sully the facilities. That’s how they make money. I myself have shelled out hundreds for gym memberships that I stopped using. Add to this the fact, tendentious as it sounds, that a lot of gyms are simply not healthy places. I was turned off the last two that I joined because of the presence of muscle freaks (not “healthy” members but appearance-addled narcissists) who were, in many and maybe most cases, using the gym and their network of muscleheads to buy and sell steroids. THAT is not healthy; in fact it’s dangerous and the antipode of health. This is a terrible environment, and I can say at 44 that I hate gym culture. Of course not all gyms are like that (Brian goes to the Talisman Centre, which is city-managed and a much less creepy space), but this bill doesn’t adjudicate among them. If I join a gym specifically because I know that I’ll meet a lot of “juicers” there, then I get a tax break. That’s terrible.

Third and finally, this bill is not about outcomes. It takes the front end into account and rewards people for taking the INITIAL step but doesn’t consider, at all, health per se and doesn’t give any additional or primary incentive at all for people to get healthy. If we want to give tax breaks with the goal of lessening the social burden of health costs, then let’s reward people for being healthy, not for joining gyms. I got a medical exam; I lost some weight; I saw my blood pressure go down without medication; I have pretty big biceps these days. I’m not asking for a tax break (I’m one of those socialist weirdos who’s happy to pay taxes, in Canada at least where they go for the public good), but if anybody deserves a pat on the back for trying to be healthy, it’s me. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with joining a gym.

Wisconsin, I love you, but I’m married, and you refuse to accept it.

More on that cryptic title in a few lines. I returned from my Midwestern sojourn yesterday after battling too much traffic there and here (big crash on the Deerfoot slowed my trip home, one made longer by a cabbie who has lived in Canada for 37 years and has not mastered English past the lesson on the hour-long unintelligible rant, and I am SO not kidding here) and was really tired when I got back. So let me first say that I had a lovely time, with family and friends and mostly very pleasant weather. I spent three days in Madison and among more formal events I loved to just walk around and absorb that fantastic college town, one that I was a happy (if poor, along with everyone else) grad student from 1986 to 1993.

I lived in seven places in seven years in Madison and for the first time since I left I got to see every one and documented each visit with a picture. Here was my grad student chronology:

First was this private dorm at 1317 Spring Street near Camp Randall Stadium. It was full of foreign students, which was neato, and homophobic undergrads from every corner of Wisconsin, which was not-o.

I got out of there in June 1987 and sublet a room in an apartment at 1034 E Johnson for the summer and then in August moved upstairs into a studio. This building had BATS. Yes, BATS.

After 15 months there (split between two apartments) I moved the next block over to rent a room with a guy named Mike and his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s spaniel named Daniel. I had to walk Daniel the Spaniel because Mike would just as soon as let him starve (and not get walked of course). I was there, at 923 E Dayton, for a year:

Cute house, but I had to move out at the end of my lease since the pending divorce made my presence tenuous. I moved into a townhouse attached to the rear of an apartment building a few steps west at 911 E Dayton:

I lived there with my cool roommate, fellow grad student Tom Conroy. It was nice to have a roommate who wasn’t scary depressed and didn’t bark madly or fly around the room at night. That lasted a year until August 1990, when I moved into my groovy studio- about 180sf, give or take, right off the Capitol Square at 115 S Hancock:

I was there for two years. Then in 1992 I had the misfortune to meet my last-year-of-grad-school abusive partner and we, at his rigid insistence, HAD to move in together, so we rented a one-bedroom in the Cardinal Apartments a couple of blocks east at 416 E Wilson, apartment circled here:

And so ended my life in Madison when I graduated with my PhD in 1993 and absconded for a post-doc at the University of Kentucky.

Madison is, now, a fantastic place to visit; it’s a sort of smaller version of Portland with the same young, laid-back vibe, and one of the coolest things is that everything in the campus and downtown area is priced for poor students… and one thing I am no longer is poor, so value is just insane. My hotel was just fine and there is too much good food, including my two visits to Parthenon Gyros (note that this site wasn’t working when I tried it) for something that is, quite simply, impossible to find in Canada: gyros on a crisp hot grilled Greek pita with a TON of tzatziki and perfect fries in a huge pile. I also made it to Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry where the burgers are without par- beef ground in-house so they ask how one wants it “done,” a rarity nowadays for sure. This pic does not do the massiveness of the burger justice but it’s the best I could do:

I have to finally say in regard to restaurants that I had one “finer” experience on this trip and it was at Restaurant Muramoto on King Street. I had had enough rich stuff in NW Indiana and fries and such in Mad City and my body was crying out for fish, and Muramoto came highly recommended. It was fantastic. I had a starter of a “salad” of deep-fried pork belly (so much for healthy!) on nice greens with shredded apple and a very bright mustardy dressing; I also had two big sushi rolls, spicy tuna and unagi; both were on par with what I might get here at, say, Globefish, but this place was relaxing and not at all crowded (I was the only customer in fact) so I would chat with the staff and such. It was a very nice experience.

The coffee scene in Madison is not quite where I’d hoped it would be; there were a couple of decent places with La Marzocco Lineas and latte art, but both served cappos that STARTED at 12 oz, so I was thrilled to find a REAL third-wave coffeehouse with a Synesso, beautiful beans from a roaster called Kickapoo Coffee (no roast dates sadly- even at Ancora, which roasts their own, no roast dates anywhere) and delicious crepes to boot. I promised to blog ‘em so here’s the exterior:

…with a sign of pure allure outside:

…and the counter with that two-group Synesso:

It was just about perfect. Way to go, Bradbury’s!

So I am almost completely in my element in Madison, and it’s as much a spiritual home for me as Portland or Toronto are, and is (seriously) one place I’ll consider having my ashes scattered. I mean, look at this idyll, a lazy end-of-semester day on Bascom Hill:

And finally yours truly on the Memorial Union Terrace, with sun and people and air that smells of clean water, lilacs, and in a little while, brats ‘n’ beer:

So, since I love the place so damn much, what’s with the weird title for this entry? Well, when I have nice experiences in the States (and this one was enhanced by the great time I had with my family in Indiana and with friends and colleagues in Madison), I start to muse about just maybe moving back. I’ve mused a lot–a LOT–about how awesome it would be to live in Portland, and of course other places as well. But here’s the rub, and it’s not a bad thing, but I’m MARRIED. I’m moreover married, legally and officially, to another man. And this man happens not to be an American citizen. This is a matter much more complicated than most people, Americans or Canadian or gay or straight, can appreciate. Yes, some states have domestic partnership policies and one, Massachusetts, actually allows same-sex marriage. Oregon has one of the best domestic-partnership provisions in the country, and so people sometimes tell me, “you and Brian can move to [Oregon, Massachusetts, California, etc]; they have same-sex marriage there too!”

No we cannot. States do not administer their own immigration programs, and Brian is not a US citizen. I am. He’s not. And the INS does not give the tiniest smidgen of consideration for same-sex couples who are of different nationalities. If he were a refugee then we’d have part of a leg to stand on, but he’s not, and really, the notion of having to subject Brian to the inefficient, protracted agony of trying to get a green card is something I don’t even want to imagine. Being married in a same-sex union and living in Canada and enjoying non-problematic equality as we do now is something that I will not surrender. Ever. I would only consider moving back to the US alone, and God willing, that’s not going to be an option for me for a long time.

Where does Wisconsin fit into this rant? Well, once upon a time, Wisconsin had the most progressive gay-friendly legislation in the US. It was the first state to make discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation illegal in the same sense and in the same contexts as was discrimination on the basis of race. Fast forward to today, and Wisconsin has a draconian “defense of marriage” act, one that also prohibits the state from legalising same-sex domestic partnerships, AND my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is not permitted to offer same-sex partners of university employees benefits (aside from tokens such as athletic center membership and stuff like that). No health insurance! No pension! This is a scandal and while I’m thrilled to see the advocacy from the university to get idiots like this monstrous asshole to appreciate the importance of providing staff with this perk (the same as is offered to all heterosexual staff), I really think the “advocacy” should be more aggressive.

I mean, this is fucking APARTHEID, people. Why are the “straight but not narrow” professors still employed there? Rights means voting with your feet sometimes, and in this case, I am asking UW-Madison professors- and sociologists, I am looking at you- to let the powers that be know that you refuse to work in this environment. It’s not up to the tiny percentage of gay employees to fight this battle. YOU are benefitting. YOU must refuse privilege. Nobody, especially that evil and stupid Huebsch ignoramus, is going to listen to the complaints of a few faggots and dykes.

And yes, I am serious. Wisconsin, I adore you, but I’m married, and you have to wake up and accept that.

Off to the Rust Belt

I depart tomorrow morning (early!) for 6 days visiting my family in NW Indiana and then a few days in Madison, Wisconsin- back May 8, when I expect our pin cherry tree in the backyard to be nice and fragrant for those precious few days in May.

Blog ya later!