9/26/2007

Mysore Nuggets

 

Feeling safe and secure in your job? Worried that too many jobs are being outsourced to places like India? Well, I wanted to see if we could reverse this trend on my recent trip to India. Where I went was far from the densely concentrated call centers of Bangalore where you will be routed if you try to reach me when I’m not in the office. I went up in to the mountains of Southern India to a Kipling-esque area of beauty and oddity. The place names bounce off your tongue with an odd cadence: Kerala, Karnataka. They may speak English at the call centers but you will find a veritable jumble of native tongues as you reach into the Hindi hinterlands. The jungles where the coffee grows are just as jumbled with tropical delights: mango, bananas, pineapples, guava and coconuts hang heavy from trees. Their aromas float on the humid air. Smaller trees around the coffee serve as ladders for the climbing vines of vanilla and pepper. All of these flavors influence the coffee that is grown there. We found a coffee in a town called Mysore and since English is the lingua franca here they decided to call it Mysore Nuggets (extra bold). Extra bold doesn’t refer to calling it Mysore Nuggets but to the very large size of the nuggets. Are we speaking the same language here?

The coffee has a language fluent in the flavors of what grows around it. You can really taste spiciness in the cup, very peppery when you brew it as a drip coffee. The aroma is very sweet and concentrated like caramel or toffee. It has a full body but extremely low acidity which means it can double as an espresso or be used in an espresso blend. For whatever reason when we have poured this coffee as an espresso it has the most incredibly thick crema incubating the goodness underneath like cheese on a French onion soup. The coffee is earthy and has notes of cocoa without the sweetness. It reminds me of a complex, dry red wine, like a Burgundy.

Dryness is not something normally associated with this part of India and the monsoon rains are what allows all these varied crops to grow. We were spared the torrential downpours and grew to really like the different types of coffee in a country known primarily for tea. The topsy-turvy world that is India got us thinking that as we progressed from a nation which manufactured goods to a place where we had other people manufacture them for us so we could do more white-collar work, then we outsourced our white-collar work, engineering and computer programming, maybe we could start manufacturing again. So we decided to have India outsource its natural resources (coffee beans) to us so we can handle the manufacturing (roasting).

In this time of uncertainty be extra bold and put yourself on the “in” side of outsourcing by getting your hands on (a cup of) Mysore Nuggets.

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