Museo Proprietary Cold Brew. Coming to a Museo bar near you!
Stock Report
Four new origins are hitting out shelves this week. Sulawesi Tana AA, Ethiopia Baaroo, Peru Puno Typica and Bolivia Villa Rosario. Mk6 and decaf is restocked as well.
Museo closed at 4pm for exhibition opening
A quick reminder to those of you on the social interweb, Museo will be closed at 4pm on Friday January 25th. Regular hours resume on Saturday.
Holiday hours
Coffee lovers rejoice, here are our hours for the holidays:
Dec 24 - 9-2
Dec 25 - closed
Dec 26 - 12-4
Dec 31 - 9-5
Jan 1 - 12-4
Closure reminder for Thursday Dec 6
Museo will be closed at 2pm today for a Mendel event. No other weird hours until Christmas.
Museo, now with bigger capacity
We’ve brought in a newer, bigger, badder mixer that’ll allow us 5-6 times larger batches if pastries. What this means for you: we’re 5-6 times less likely to run out of our highly addictive cinnamon buns!
It’s Armistice Day!
Yes that is correct, it was Armistice Day yesterday, and we are operating from twelve hundred hours until sixteen hundred hours on the following statutory holiday. Perchance we will see you upon our business premises and you will imbibe yourself one of our fine coffees, dear friend.
Fully stocked for the weekend. New origins: Costa Rica Hernan Solis Villa Sarchi Varietal and Guatemala Finca El Carmen. Mk6, Swiss Water Decaf, Ethiopia Kochere and Sumatra Dolok Sanggul also in stock.
no milk, sugar, babies or wifi?
Another shop bans strollers, in addition to milk and sugar (aka the condiment bar), this one in Berlin.
The logic is pretty sound on the milk and sugar. Condiment use is a culturally learned behaviour adapted from the until-recent predominance of low-grade coffees, which need milk and sugar to be palatable. Indeed a sweeter, milkier drink is the whole point of a latte, where the steaming process, if executed correctly, breaks down relatively unsweet lactose and galactose into very sweet glucose. You wouldn’t add sugar to bitter IPA beer or a full-bodied red wine, so why to coffee?
The baby/stroller issue is perhaps more contentious, but in small cafes where hot drinks are being carried from bar to table, strollers present a safety hazard. The flow of patrons is a carefully considered thing, and losing seating to supersized strollers is problematic. Perhaps more pressing is the growing trend of free-range parenting, with kids free to roam the cafe - or even worse, a child left to scream in a room full of customers who come to a cafe for respite from the stresses of their day.
Probably the most recurrent issue is wifi and laptop users parking for an eight hour day, tying up a table when no others are available, forcing would-be customers to go elsewhere. Since the 17th century, the cafe is a place of social engagement and political discussion; the growing absence of conversation is troubling. The first cafe to take a stand on the issue was Seattle’s Victrola. Indeed I had the chance to visit their cafe on a Sunday in Seattle in 2004. Three quarters of their tables were occupied by laptop users, and the space was lit more by laptop screens than by their table lights. The din of laptop fans and typing, with no talking - something akin to a library - was somewhat disturbing, given at my regular cafe near Chinatown in Victoria BC, the normal soundtrack is a symphony of happy, engaged voices, and often one hears 3-4 languages spoken in the room at a time. The difference of the two places could not be more acute.
I would say at present, not all of these issues are problematic at our Mendel cafe and I would rather educate instead of legislate rules. If something isn’t acceptable in a restaurant, then why is it acceptable in a cafe? There is hope the trend of cafes enacting rules might usher in some behavioural self-awareness and bring about a revival of social etiquette in the cafe space, from which in the end, we all benefit.
