Spring is back (again), and a Starbucks experiment

What a day! After the grim last week (the cold and snow didn’t let up for a full seven days), we had some decent if a bit cool weather yesterday, and today is just- wow. Weather amnesia kicks in and I’m happy to be where I am, geographically and meteorologically speaking.

Tulips, daffodils and assorted cognate greenery is looking battered but very much alive:

Chives are doing extremely well- not sure how they taste but they look like happy chives:

And yours truly took the decadent step of standing on the cold muddy lawn in shorts and bare feet to gloat at and tease the melting snow behind (sorry about the quality but shooting myself has always been a challenge):

And so as is so often these days my thoughts turned to coffee. I’ve been seeing lately what I can get out of beans that aren’t necessarily renowned for their artisanal quality; we’re awash in good beans these days in Calgary but I’m still curious about what the lesser-knowns can give me. There’s a credo among baristas: “any bean, any machine,” or something like that, meaning that a good barista can get the best out of unexceptional beans and lesser quality machines. I have a very decent if quirky home espresso machine but am still curious about what will happen if I start to, or have to, buy the beans that I used to before the “third wave” crashed into town- for example, once upon a time I used to get beans from either Second Cup or from the Faema outlet in Toronto. What if I did that now, given what I know and being blessed with better equipment, machine and grinder-wise?

I decided to try this with beans from the silver bags (the beans behind the bar, not the stuff on the shelves) at my local Starbucks (15th Ave and 14 St SW). Now, I have no idea how fresh these beans are but am optimistic that they are a lot fresher than the prepackaged ones. I bought a half pound for $8.95, which is about par for the course for “better” espresso blends. Here’s the bag:

And they are, as expected, dark and oily as hell, which is not considered ideal (at all!) by espresso aficionados these days:

I ground at “6″ on my Rancilio Rocky, which is pretty fine and what I’ve found to be necessary for dark beans (likely because they’re more brittle and less dense, having been carbonised and all).

I pulled a shot with my naked portafilter to witness the extraction, and here is a film of the result:

Well. Hmmm. It looks really good. Beautiful mousetail extraction, nice striping, and it looks nice in the cup with variegated crema, and thick crema to boot. I tasted it with a patina of sugar to see how durable the crema is (to see if the sugar floats on the crema, in other words) and it tasted… not bad. Not not bad- it was good! Not the best shot I’ve ever had but better than many, with some expected chocolate notes but not that much charcoal and just a smidgen of brightness too; I’d have been happy to get this shot in any caffe.

So am I going to start getting coffee at Starbucks? Coffee beans, maybe, sometimes, sure. Espresso from their bar? Never. This was INCREDIBLY better, just ASTONISHINGLY better than the espresso I’ve actually purchased at Starbucks outlets themselves. This makes me happy because I like to see that I can do this, get a nice shot–a really nice shot–from beans that coffeegeeks deride as mediocre or worse. But it also pisses me off: If I can do this, why can’t Starbucks?

“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.”

And yes that’s from Rosalita by Bruce Springsteen. Sorry for the boomer reference (I HATE “CLASSIC ROCK”), but it fits.

One question I get a lot after our move to Calgary is something like, “oh, winters must be brutal!” Actually, no, and this past one was, aside from a couple of the usual arctic outbreaks (-37 one bitter morning as I recall), really not bad at all. In fact, we only had one below-zero (below-freezing for you Fahrenheit junkies- that’s below 32 degrees) high in all of February. March was lovely too.

It’s not winter that’s brutal. It’s SPRING. April? April can be vicious here, from the unpredicted blizzard of a week and a half ago to the torture chamber we find ourselves in now. Four straight days of snow predicted (starting yesterday), and a high of below zero- it SHOULD be 14, or a very pleasant 57F, this time of year- until next Friday. Basically, a week worse than any we had in February. Sucks.

Here’s some of what I saw today, this after a dump of maybe 10 inches yesterday and more coming in flurries all day today. First, our patio:

Puts you in the mood for a picnic, eh?

You might be wondering how my tulips are doing. They’re under there somewhere:

Before setting out (to shovel snow, again, then off to lunch), I had to don these studded things so I wouldn’t slip on all the unshovelled walkways…

…and then I walked across the street to get this amazing (IMHO) shot of our house through the budding poplar branches:

Beautiful shot if I do say so myself, and it says it all- well, not until you see overexposed me, as the SUN was starting to poke through and making everything blindingly bright:

Ah, me. I can’t deny there’s a brutal beauty here, and the moisture is great. I guess another week won’t kill me, unless I die in a car wreck, which is a distinct possibility.

Stay warm! And shovel your damned sidewalks, Calgarians!

Like Christmas morning for demography geeks: 2006 census “ethnic origins and visible minority” stats released this week, and they confirm that Calgary is one heck of a diverse city. Seriously.

In Canada, censes are conducted every five years on 1 and 6, and we’re still seeing releases from the 2006 census. The most recent one is the one I’m most excited about, next to the basic population counts (those came out over a year ago); they’re on “ethnic origins and visible minorities,” and they comprise counts on ethnicity and race. As every student or past student of mine knows, “race” and “ethnicity” are related but quite different concepts, and until fairly recently (1996 to be exact), the Canadian census didn’t even ask about “race” (which determines that cludgy and unfortunately named category of “visible minority”). Before then, anybody interested in the racial composition in Canada could only infer race based on ethnicity, but that poses problems. For example, in Canada, one can’t assume that all people claiming West Indian heritage are “black.” Brian is a perfect example of this, because his “racial” background is South Asian, but before 1996 he’d be presumptively considered “black” after identifying as coming from Trinidad (and since Indians are the plurality in Trinidad that would be a stupid assumption, but such was how things were done). Now, there are good reasons for finding out not only where people come from or what they construe as their ethnic heritage but also, for lack of a better way of saying it, what colour they are. And so Canada now collects this information.

And for those naysayers who say “why are we adopting an American obsession with race,” it should please them to know that what’s considered a racial “minority” in the US is not necessarily considered one in Canada. For example, in Canada, we term Arabs/West Asians as “visible minority”; in the US, they’re “white.” In the US, native Americans are considered racial minority; in Canada, First Nations people are not, though they are counted in a separate census module. Finally and most interestingly (for me), whereas in the US they report “Asian” as a composite blob, in Canada we distinguish among South Asian, Chinese, Filipino/a, Southeast Asian, Korean, and Japanese.

Even with all these caveats about definitions, we can still see matters of fair comparison and contrast between the US and Canada. Canada is only 2.5% “black” versus about 12% of the US, but this proportion in Canada increased 18% in five years. In Calgary it doubled (from 1 to 2%, but still). The area where Canada “wins” is in a much, MUCH larger Asian population, percentage-wise. In the 2000 US census (last one conducted), 4.2% of the country was “Asian.” In Canada, 4% alone was South Asian (and per capita that’s fully ten times- yes, 1000%- larger than the US South Asian population). If we add all “Asian” groups in Canada they exceed 10% of the population. All told, about 16% of Canada is “visible minority,” and if we adopt the American policy of counting Native people as “minority,” then that percentage is more than 20%. Interesting times.

If you consider diversity a good thing, and I do, then we have a lot to celebrate in Calgary. Among Canadian cities (by which I mean CMAs), Calgary not only handily exceeds the national average (remember, it’s 16.2%) with respect to its “visible minority” aspect; it’s actually the fourth most “diverse” CMA in the country (and third among “major” CMAs). First and second are, not surprisingly, the world-leading multicultural meccas of Toronto and Vancouver, with VM percentages of 42.9% and 41.7% respectively. Third is the small CMA of Abbotsford, to the east of Vancouver, with 22.8%, but the vast majority of those persons are South Asian (in fact Abbotsford has the highest proportion of South Asians of any CMA in the country). Fourth is Calgary, 22.2%. What’s more, that percentage for Calgary reflects an increase since 2001 of 44%, versus 20% in Vancouver.

Earlier there was a census release on immigration and migration, and it revealed that Calgary was, proportionally, the third largest immigration magnet (INTERNATIONAL immigration- migrants from Saskatchewan, for example, are not “immigrants” although they are important aspects of population growth here) in the country with respect to recent (2001-2006) immigrants. What that report didn’t say, and I had to do some poking around for this, is that it was also third in all of North America on the same statistic. Toronto is first; Vancouver second; Calgary third; Miami fourth. This does not mean that Calgary is third in North America in terms of the proportion of total immigrants, but with, now, a city comprising 24% foreign born, it’s high on the list.

What’s amazing is that Calgary is, diversity-wise, about exactly where Toronto was in 1991. And as long ago as 1986 Toronto went to great efforts to market its diversity, and that was laudable- I remember seeing a story about Toronto’s diversity in National Geographic way back when, and it was part of what motivated my first trip there (with my ex, Timm Elmer- where are you, Timm?) in 1988. Now we’re in that boat, we’re DEEP in that boat, and I wish that Calgary would make room for it in its own self-promotion.

“…nearly 10% of Calgary’s entire force will be British.” Interesting stuff on CPS and foreign recruitment.

This one sounds sort of like Act 1 of Hot Fuzz. Yarp!

It may be boring but even the villains are polite - British bobbies head for Alberta

A few last words (I hope) about McNally-Robinson

Here’s a nice apple-art cappuccino for ya before the venting starts anew:

And now back to this situation. I’ve been getting a fair number of responses (not all posted because I am only posting comments with what appear to be valid email addresses- you know who I am; I want to at least trust that I can know who you are) to my rant about McNally Robinson, and so I think the issue and my stand on it merits some qualification. I want mostly that readers understand why I’m angry, and what I’m not angry about.

First, I’m sad that McNally-Robinson is closing. This does not mean that I don’t recognise their right to run a business as they see fit. By the same token I’m not angry at Clover Equipment for selling their company to Starbucks, which will, from now on and forever, not sell Clovers to any independent coffeehouse, ever ever. It sucks, it makes me sad and angry, but that doesn’t mean I’m claiming, as one commenter said, that M-R shouldn’t be allowed to do what they want to do to make money. That’s not the point. This isn’t about a company being avaricious; ALL companies exist, at least in part, to make money.

The reason I’m so upset is about how this closing is being sold to us, and the recurring theme in it is, “tough shit, Calgary, this is all YOUR FAULT.” It’s our fault because of the increased costs of doing business here; it’s our fault because the value of M-R’s building was too much for them to resist selling; it’s our fault because rents are too high (and as you can read in earlier comments, Balboa was going to charge M-R $1 million a year), and it’s our fault because our downtown is, as one of my commenters put it, “a ghost town after 6pm.” Actually he didn’t even stipulate “downtown” but you get it.

The problem with all of these excuses, aside from being monstrously and (to me) unforgivably insulting, is that none hold up, unless you just accept the fact that M-R are hypocritical, liars, or both.

First, yes, business costs are high. Labour costs are high. But they’re high in Saskatoon, high in Toronto, and really, really, REALLY high in NYC. This has to be put into perspective.

Second, yes, you made a killing on the sale of your building. Why not be frank about this? You want us to feel sorry for you? We feel sorry for your employees. We feel sorry for ourselves for the loss of a cultural institution here. Do you really expect anybody to feel sorry for you? Well, yes, apparently, given the tone of letters to the editor and whatnot- you’re being depicted as a poor independent business chased from downtown. You aren’t and you weren’t. Stop misrepresenting yourselves.

Third, rents are too high?! This is laughable- you OWNED your building, you SOLD it for a huge profit and now you’re claiming there was something unbearable in the lease terms? Didn’t you discuss this with your new landlord? Did Balboa not expect you’d stay? I’d say it’s shocking that you expect the public to believe this pity party, but again, your PR efforts have paid off. All I’ve heard is “poor M-R, rents are too high for businesses like them to survive.” Amazing spin job there. Shameful, but impressive.

Finally, the “business was slow at night.” You had at your fingertips 120,000 downtown workers every weekday, the biggest downtown workforce, per capita, of any city in North America. You were also mere steps from two huge hotels, the  Hyatt and the Marriot, which house hundreds of potential customers every night of the week. These people shop, eat, and after work pack downtown bars and restaurants. Downtown is not a “ghost town” any more and the outstanding success of theatre and restaurants downtown are testament to this- hell, I commented earlier on how Caffe Artigiano is packing them in on Saturdays and Sundays, and they’re not even on Stephen Ave. Holt-Renfrew is expanding. Fashion Central will be open in 2009. We’ll soon see ground broken a new Eau Claire Market with hundreds of new housing units to accompany the thousands in the Beltline under construction right now. I never saw M-R less than brisk, sometimes incredibly busy, on weekends. If evening traffic was so bad, why not close at 6? And for that matter, if the core sucked so much for you, why not do what you did in Winnipeg and move out of it but to another location in Calgary? You could have adapted. You chose not to.

I’m still angry. I’m angry not only because my favourite bookstore (well, my former favourite bookstore) is closing. I’m angry because of how the owners and the store’s reps, like that manager interviewed in last week’s Fast Forward, keep bashing Calgary and Calgarians with this “you didn’t support us, so we can’t afford to stay” nonsense. Tell the damn truth. You closed the Calgary store because it’s the one you COULD sell off, and at a huge profit, so that you could open new stores elsewhere, in Winnipeg and Toronto and New York City. Godspeed, there, but for the Christ’s sake STOP INSULTING US.