O Toddy, My toddy

It’s iced-coffee season again and I’m stuck with extra strong coffee dumped over ice from Alterra. Bah. Last year, the New York Times published an article about the cold-brew method and its superiority to any other way to brew coffee that you intend to water down with ice cubes. This is so true.

Toddy is my favorite way to brew cold coffee. You need one pound of coffee beans (ground for drip) and 9 cups of filtered water. Let it sit 8-12 hours. Then pour the concentrated coffee over ice in a glass, filling only about 1/3 full. Then top the rest off with filtered water and stir. Then drink it, maybe with cream and sugar if you like. So what’s that… a 2:1 water to Toddy coffee concentrate ratio.

This type of brewing also produces a lower acidity coffee for people with sensitive stomachs. Not lower caffeine though. So it’ll still rev you up on a hot summer morning.

Banana Republic

No one’s going to make a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis that details in haunting fashion the rise of a fruit magnate in the the early 1900s. But a journalist who writes for Popular Science might draft a book about how banana plantations have shaped our modern political and economic structures using many of the same ruthless methods for which oil companies are famous. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel is my favorite idea for a book that I haven’t yet read.

Were I an illustrator, I’d draw an image of the topless Chiquita banana girl but with many limbs, reaching out across an antique map of the West Indies, Central and South America. You’ll just have to imagine.