Waking Up at Black Coffee Pond, or, Make Tea Not War

Akwaaba! Those who know us will not be surprised in the least to find that we are dedicating an entire entry to coffee. Those who do not know us and have stumbled upon this blog, will soon know us by our addiction: coffee! The above picture and part of the title of this entry are of/from a card that was sent by a good, rather intuitive friend (props to Tanny Mac!) who correctly prophesied our plight and tripped over the perfect card. It was also, as serendipity would have it, the first piece of mail we received in Ghana. A moment of sheer poetry to be sure (small wonder she's Canada's best wordsmith). Sadly, and as you may have suspected, we have not (yet?!) had the blissful awakening enjoyed by the prancing giraffes in the picture.

Needless to say, things are pretty bleak here on the (un)dark(roast) continent, and our mugs have runneth relatively empty. "The horror! The horror!" (digs here to Joseph Conrad). This is at the very least tremendously ironic as many of our favourite coffees originate from the very soil we inhabit. A certain corporation-in-sheep's-clothing (read as "Starbucks") boasts Sumatran, Kenyan and Gold Coast (Ghana's former name!) brews but we are left without. Don't get me wrong, I'm not wishing the big market bliss, er...I mean "nightmare" that is Starbucks on Accra, but can't a guy get a little Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Paris, Turkey or Italy here?!

I must also give a shout out to the British, for their legacy in Ghana will be lasting...in tea. We have re-instituted our prior evening ritual (from Leicester) of a stiff cuppa after suppa, and this has made for a sensible replacement for our evening coffee. There are some of our favourite brands in the Max Mart (alas, no Marks and Sparks Earl Grey) and the other part of the title for this entry ("Make Tea Not War") is actually a quote from Monty Python's Flying Circus that I lifted off of our cello-bag wrapper of Ty-Phoo tea. While a nice spot of tea is lovely in its on right, it will always live--in our lives and on our palates--in the long shadow cast by a bold cup of joe. Now that I think on it, complaining about the lack of good coffee in Africa feels rather at least as British and colonial as it is trivial and superficial. Well, bully for me!

When I think of coffee, I often think of television's Friends. Chandler was a closet-smoker and he once had a cigarette in the Central Perk, uttering the line: "Hello dark mother--I am once again suckling at your teat." When I find a purveyor of black beans, I will be sure to utter the same line. As an almost unrelated aside, Carmilla and I dreamed briefly of opening a coffee house in Winnipeg (roughly a hundred years ago and before our dozen-or-so children) in what is now the new Klinic building on Broadway. We planned to have a TV upstairs that constantly ran episodes of Friends and Seinfeld. On the middle floor, of course, there would have been an ongoing used book swap. I mention this just in case you doubted how seriously dependent we are on our morning caffeine injections. It was almost what we did for a living. Now we just do it in order to live. We are once again entertaining becoming the solution to our own problem as there is certainly an ex-pat market for it!

Part of the problem is that while we have found a decent producer of java--South Africa's House of Coffees--we have been unable to find a decent substitute for coffee cream. The claim of Everfresh is almost as scary as it true but these UHT processed milks tend to suck the joy (literally and figuratively) out of dairy product. We have even tried an assortment of evaporated milks, but they too have fallen short. The other thing about finding a coffee we like is that by the time we try it and decide we are ready for more, there is none of it to be found. This has been the case for many things and we are beginning to buy all of what we find, when we find it. We figured this out too late for our latest batch of coffee so we have resorted to this, which I shall call "Italian Surprise," for the next couple of weeks. Wish us luck.