The Chai Chronicles
Chapter 1: The Journey Home
It is a difficult endeavor to find a good Chai latte on the road. Over the 1600 mile or so space from Boulder, Colorado to Guelph, Ontario there seems to be a void covering most of the Interstate between Chicago and Buffalo where you cannot even find a Starbucks. And let me just say right off, that Starbucks doesn’t even qualify as decent chai, but it is often all you can come across in a pinch.
Starting at the beginning; I have lived the last 12 some odd years of my life in a lovely little bubble called Boulder, Colorado. I am 25 now so I arrived in Boulder at a ripe age for impression. A complete book I could perhaps write on the many interesting ways Boulder has changed me, real or perceived, but this is not about all of that, this is about chai. At least the latter 10 years of these 12 I have become increasingly enamored of the elixir of happiness commonly known as the chai latte, soy latte in my case. The affair began in Boulder and has taken a number of sojourns around and about the globe and currently simmers on in Guelph, Ontario but more on that later. A good deal of the early courting and romance occurred in a downtown café called Trident.
Established in 1982, the Trident Bookstore and Café has provided excellent coffee, tea, and books in a community environment for over 20 years. (www.tridentcafe.com.)
This café was in fact established before myself, I came on the scene 2 years later, fashionably late, though not onto the Trident scene until sometime in the vicinity of 1998, not so fashionable… but I couldn’t help it, I was Canadian.
Chapter 2: The Perfect Café
Oh ho a dog friendly café! Bricks, wood paneling, scuffed wood floors, eclectic light fixtures, rotating artworks, outdoor seating, impressive menu, and love of loves a pre steeped chai mix most suitable for making a strong chai latte.
They say that you judge all loves against your first and I have already detailed my first in the fine establishment that is Trident Café. I cannot say at such a young age what perfection is, but café perfection is effectively Trident to me, though I am trying to keep an open mind… Pardon me, I’m sure you won’t have noticed my absence but I just now became slightly lost and nostalgic in the pages of Trident’s website. I found myself perusing the concert and movie calendar for events I could not possibly attend… Ahh love.
Well, moving on, as I’ve said I am no longer a resident of lovely Boulder, Colorado but a recent transplant to the similarly minded University town of Guelph, Ontario. Guelph is roughly equal in size, but greater in span (Boulder’s growth being very much constrained by vast parcels of open space.) Guelph has a feel slightly more “city sized” in the downtown area and is not bordered by any mountains but is a perfectly nice town in its own right. It is considerably wetter here than Boulder and in that regard is perhaps better suited to café life, if we accept Seattle, Washington as the café Mecca of North America (a known rainy place). Boulder and by extension most of Colorado’s front range is sunny nearly every day (to most a selling point), and don’t get me wrong this is great but it makes one feel less at ease indoors. It’s a little more difficult to enjoy the café experience when one is always thinking there is surely some outdoor activity one should be engaging in at any given time. Now assuming the café has a really nice outdoor patio this is a little easier to contend with but even so. Anyway it’s considerably rainier here providing a convenient excuse to spend even more time indoors and what’s better than a spicy hot chai in a cozy café on a rainy day? Very few things I tell you, very few indeed.
Chapter 3: The Search Goes Ever Onward…
I’ve spent most of this first (since the return) summer not in Guelph but in the countryside of Caledon, Ontario. Now if we accept that even in a University town such as Guelph it is no small order to find a good chai… don’t even bother in the countryside. Around here (love it as I do, I was born and raised in Caledon, until that whole Colorado thing) you are lucky if you can find a dairy alternative in a café (or a place that happens to have chai more commonly which does not really deserve the title café).
(I may be going a little overboard with the parenthesis here but I can’t help my interjecting and digressional thoughts.)
I’ve tried chai’s wherever I can find them and some have been alright. I even feel they’re getting better on the whole but this is no doubt more due to my slipping standards. I find it hard to compare one taste to another that is slipping away into the torn sieve of memory. Most places out here in the Chai boondocks seem to find it acceptable to make a latte from a tea bag. What they are thinking I don’t know, I swear they heard of making chai into a latte somewhere and thought, we only have teabags so…. No one seems to have thought to steep them into a pitcher before hand so there is actually a strong mix. Places that have mixes usually have Tazo ® or Oregon Chai ®, neither (in my snooty opinion) are any good, both are far too sweet and not nearly spicy enough. I don’t think either even had any ginger in them!
With results such as these I suppose it’s no wonder I have had to turn to my own abilities to blend spices with other things and produce tasty things. In my past this skill has mostly been kept in the realm of cakes and stir fry’s but I have expanded my repertoire to include chai. First purchase I made toward this noble goal of enlightening this area to the benefits of good chai was an old (‘50’s era) stove top coffee percolator. I figured I could put the spices and tea in the strainer bit and boil it all for a long time until it was tasty. Man did this process smell divine! Mmmmm…. Complete liberty to add as much dang spice as I desired. Some of these first experiments met with decent results. Better than chai I could buy, but my lack of a steam wand made lattes a little on the flat and not-so-foamy side. I do like my lattes foamy.
I still don’t have a steamer and so my chai experimenting has dwindled a bit. Also it’s been ungodly hot and humid and I have not craved spicy and heated beverages so much. But I did recently purchase another must; a dedicated coffee grinder, so I could make even spicier chai now if I desired. So far I have used it to grind chai spices and make a chai spice cake. It was delicious, but admittedly not liquid. Soon though, soon the chai project can continue: In another two weeks I shall re-relocate back to Guelph and start Graduate school. I cannot imagine, University without chai so I will start up the grinder and the coffee pot brewing delicious, delectable smelling chai concentrate to be added to lattes. Oh the anticipation!
It is a difficult endeavor to find a good Chai latte on the road. Over the 1600 mile or so space from Boulder, Colorado to Guelph, Ontario there seems to be a void covering most of the Interstate between Chicago and Buffalo where you cannot even find a Starbucks. And let me just say right off, that Starbucks doesn’t even qualify as decent chai, but it is often all you can come across in a pinch.
Starting at the beginning; I have lived the last 12 some odd years of my life in a lovely little bubble called Boulder, Colorado. I am 25 now so I arrived in Boulder at a ripe age for impression. A complete book I could perhaps write on the many interesting ways Boulder has changed me, real or perceived, but this is not about all of that, this is about chai. At least the latter 10 years of these 12 I have become increasingly enamored of the elixir of happiness commonly known as the chai latte, soy latte in my case. The affair began in Boulder and has taken a number of sojourns around and about the globe and currently simmers on in Guelph, Ontario but more on that later. A good deal of the early courting and romance occurred in a downtown café called Trident.
Established in 1982, the Trident Bookstore and Café has provided excellent coffee, tea, and books in a community environment for over 20 years. (www.tridentcafe.com.)
This café was in fact established before myself, I came on the scene 2 years later, fashionably late, though not onto the Trident scene until sometime in the vicinity of 1998, not so fashionable… but I couldn’t help it, I was Canadian.
Chapter 2: The Perfect Café
Oh ho a dog friendly café! Bricks, wood paneling, scuffed wood floors, eclectic light fixtures, rotating artworks, outdoor seating, impressive menu, and love of loves a pre steeped chai mix most suitable for making a strong chai latte.
They say that you judge all loves against your first and I have already detailed my first in the fine establishment that is Trident Café. I cannot say at such a young age what perfection is, but café perfection is effectively Trident to me, though I am trying to keep an open mind… Pardon me, I’m sure you won’t have noticed my absence but I just now became slightly lost and nostalgic in the pages of Trident’s website. I found myself perusing the concert and movie calendar for events I could not possibly attend… Ahh love.
Well, moving on, as I’ve said I am no longer a resident of lovely Boulder, Colorado but a recent transplant to the similarly minded University town of Guelph, Ontario. Guelph is roughly equal in size, but greater in span (Boulder’s growth being very much constrained by vast parcels of open space.) Guelph has a feel slightly more “city sized” in the downtown area and is not bordered by any mountains but is a perfectly nice town in its own right. It is considerably wetter here than Boulder and in that regard is perhaps better suited to café life, if we accept Seattle, Washington as the café Mecca of North America (a known rainy place). Boulder and by extension most of Colorado’s front range is sunny nearly every day (to most a selling point), and don’t get me wrong this is great but it makes one feel less at ease indoors. It’s a little more difficult to enjoy the café experience when one is always thinking there is surely some outdoor activity one should be engaging in at any given time. Now assuming the café has a really nice outdoor patio this is a little easier to contend with but even so. Anyway it’s considerably rainier here providing a convenient excuse to spend even more time indoors and what’s better than a spicy hot chai in a cozy café on a rainy day? Very few things I tell you, very few indeed.
Chapter 3: The Search Goes Ever Onward…
I’ve spent most of this first (since the return) summer not in Guelph but in the countryside of Caledon, Ontario. Now if we accept that even in a University town such as Guelph it is no small order to find a good chai… don’t even bother in the countryside. Around here (love it as I do, I was born and raised in Caledon, until that whole Colorado thing) you are lucky if you can find a dairy alternative in a café (or a place that happens to have chai more commonly which does not really deserve the title café).
(I may be going a little overboard with the parenthesis here but I can’t help my interjecting and digressional thoughts.)
I’ve tried chai’s wherever I can find them and some have been alright. I even feel they’re getting better on the whole but this is no doubt more due to my slipping standards. I find it hard to compare one taste to another that is slipping away into the torn sieve of memory. Most places out here in the Chai boondocks seem to find it acceptable to make a latte from a tea bag. What they are thinking I don’t know, I swear they heard of making chai into a latte somewhere and thought, we only have teabags so…. No one seems to have thought to steep them into a pitcher before hand so there is actually a strong mix. Places that have mixes usually have Tazo ® or Oregon Chai ®, neither (in my snooty opinion) are any good, both are far too sweet and not nearly spicy enough. I don’t think either even had any ginger in them!
With results such as these I suppose it’s no wonder I have had to turn to my own abilities to blend spices with other things and produce tasty things. In my past this skill has mostly been kept in the realm of cakes and stir fry’s but I have expanded my repertoire to include chai. First purchase I made toward this noble goal of enlightening this area to the benefits of good chai was an old (‘50’s era) stove top coffee percolator. I figured I could put the spices and tea in the strainer bit and boil it all for a long time until it was tasty. Man did this process smell divine! Mmmmm…. Complete liberty to add as much dang spice as I desired. Some of these first experiments met with decent results. Better than chai I could buy, but my lack of a steam wand made lattes a little on the flat and not-so-foamy side. I do like my lattes foamy.
I still don’t have a steamer and so my chai experimenting has dwindled a bit. Also it’s been ungodly hot and humid and I have not craved spicy and heated beverages so much. But I did recently purchase another must; a dedicated coffee grinder, so I could make even spicier chai now if I desired. So far I have used it to grind chai spices and make a chai spice cake. It was delicious, but admittedly not liquid. Soon though, soon the chai project can continue: In another two weeks I shall re-relocate back to Guelph and start Graduate school. I cannot imagine, University without chai so I will start up the grinder and the coffee pot brewing delicious, delectable smelling chai concentrate to be added to lattes. Oh the anticipation!
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