Cafe de olla
I toured a 100-year-old coffee plantation while in Oaxaca and was served what just may have been the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. It came from beans grown under the jungle canopy, hand harvested, and roasted that morning in a small red roaster.
Full disclosure: the owner had plied me with his home brewed mezcal before lunch, after which we had the coffee. My judgment may have been slightly impaired. Not so impaired as to think bad coffee was good, but altered enough by the moonshine and delicious home-cooked lunch of amarillo de pollo and tamarind pork and company which was charming enough to be charming despite a lack of common language beyond food vocabulary and a mutual love of coffee to think an excellent cup of coffee was the best ever cup of coffee.
I also had cafe de olla. It is made cowboy-coffee style, by adding the grounds to hot water and letting them sink to the bottom of the pot. It is brewed with cinnamon sticks and sometimes other spices, and sweetened with piloncillo, those dark cones of relatively unrefined sugar that have a decidely molasses flavor hanging about them. I can imagine over-sweetened versions out there that may be not be so tempting, but the few cups I drank had just a touch of piloncillo, adding a deep, dark, rich flavor to the coffee that wasn’t syrupy or cloying at all.
