A Blend For Main Street

On one of the first sunny mornings of spring, I took the bag Thomas Reese gave me the day before and looked inside.

There they were: beans from three different continents, some dark tan, some dark brown, some with a flat coat and some with an oily sheen.

I stuck my nose in the bag and inhaled without hesitation .

A deep, toasted fragrance filled my nostrils. Few things in life smell like coffee.

This was going to be good. After weeks of cupping single-origin beans and blends from various parts of the world with Thomas, coowner of Walla Walla Roastery, the two of us had settled on a blend for the new coffee shop, but I hadn't yet tried this "composition."

He calls it "Main Street" and so will we. Some time ago, he sold it to help raise money for Walla Walla's Main Street, but he hasn't used the name for the blend since then. I felt " Main Street" was fitting because that's where we will be, hoping to raise morning spirits of our little downtown with a taste of some of world's best joe.

I poured the beans into my kitchen grinder and looked at them one more time before reducing them to a filterready powder. Thomas explained this was a Vienna roast, somewhere between a medium and a dark.

He has the right philosophy when it comes to roasting, at least in my opinion. Roasting beans is a bit like making whole-wheat toast. You want to brown the bread just enough so it exposes the rich flavors in the grains. Too dark and they get carbonized, with the burnt taste overpowering all the wholesome complex notes you've just tried to bring out.

That makes me a rebel when it comes to Starbucks. Their dark-roasted coffee tastes burnt to me. I have the same problem with bold, oaky wines. They hit your taste buds over the head with a 2x4 and leave your mouth reeling from the shock. I prefer the more subtle, complementary smoothness of a Pinot over an obnoxious Merlot any day, Sideways or not. But we can have that debate some other day.

A few degrees east and west of a medium roast is just perfect to help bring out the coffee beans' personality to the fullest extent.

I place the cover on the grinder and push the button. It's early still, but the kitchen is far enough from the bedrooms so the whine of the machine won't wake the rest of the household.

As the sound turns to an even tone and I know I have the right grit, I stop the appliance and pour the powder into the coffee maker. I could have opted for the French press but didn't want to wait for water to boil. I close the lid and turn the switch. This will still be like watching a pot of water boil, so I look out the window into the alley between Main and Coppei, where the sun is lighting up the trees full of buds. The birds have begun to come back.

Coffee is a berry seed. It grows on bushy branches that look a bit like stunted cherry trees. The ones I just ground to a coarse dust are from Africa, Central America and India. Let's start with Africa, more precisely Ethiopia - the birthplace of coffee.

Of the five different beans in the Main Street blend, two are from the cradle of gourmet arabica: natural Sidamo, which Thomas describes as being the treble note on the taste equivalent of a musical scale, and Harrar, a bass note with hints of wild currant and blueberries.

The third African bean is from Yemen, also deep with hints of chocolate.

Two thirds of the Main Street blend is made up of these Red Sea beans. A bit less than one third comes from Guatemala in the form of full-body beans from the El Injerto estate in Huehuetenango. But this group accounting for 95 percent of the blend would be too acidic if left unbalanced, so Thomas added the Monsoon Malabar from India, with its deep, bass notes and hints of spices and nuts to mellow out the other beans, rounding out the taste profile.

The origin of Monsoon Malabar is worth recounting here. It dates back to the time of the British Raj, when the beans from India traveled for months by sea before arriving in European ports. The humidity and sea winds from the ocean voyage combined to ripen the green beans to a pale yellow, adding depth and character.

After modernization in shipping increased the cargo's protection against the elements and shrank the time on the routes, the beans arrived greener but lacked what Europeans had appreciated about the Malabar beans. Now, the open-ocean voyage is replicated by drying the beans in the sun and then exposing them to moistureladen monsoon winds inside a well-ventilated warehouse for up to 16 weeks.

The "humidity" from the coffee dripper is almost done extracting all these personalities from my beans. It's wild to think I have a small-scale international beans convention in there.

It's done dripping. I free the glass pot and poor the dark gold liquid into a cup.

Now I have to wait some more. I can't scald my palate or I won't properly taste the brew. I won't do what professional cuppers do - slurping loudly, almost inhaling the liquid so all the nerve endings in the mouth and some in the nose are awash in the flavors drawn from the beans.

I look at Dizzy, my labradoodle retriever mutt extraordinaire, to kill some time. He looks at me as though he's convinced I'm going to give him more breakfast, but I turn to my cup and take the first sip.

My mouth is filled with a deep and full but soft and slightly berry-like flavor. Other notes linger: some with a nod to cacao, others subtly nutty. But none of the notes are dominant, all are as balanced as they should be in a masterful composition.

Bravo, Thomas. Our house blend is here.

It's a great morning.