The Best Coffee in California

Oh how wonderful to escape a city by car! In a jet, you are simply airlifted from one urban clog to another, but my rental car took me gradually out of San Francisco. The gaps between suburbs grew incrementally greater. Hayward... Pleasanton.... Livermore. Finally I reached that hatch of recognition, simultaneously breath-catching and serene (it's like emerging onto the upper deck at a baseball park and getting your first glimpse of green), where I knew there would be no more business routes lined with fast food and auto glass shops, motels and gas stations, Safeways and WalMarts. Don't get me wrong: I'm not full of pastoralia about escapes from cities. I like the business routes of fast food and motels, and I love cities -- prefer them, in fact, to the country. The traffic congestion that grows as you arrive from miles off is a comfort, just as much as leaving is a revelation.

Heading east, I branched off the interstate, stopped near Yosemite, and had an ostrich burger for lunch. (Here's my explanation for the failure of ostrich meat, the Next Big Thing of a decade ago, to catch on: it has no flavor.) Highway 49 coiled up into the Sierras and turned south. I grew very tired; my body clock was still set on Asian time. When I began to smell strong coffee in the middle of nowhere -- even with my windows rolled up -- I thought I might be hallucinating. But soon I saw the sign: Mariposa Coffee. I turned in and parked, and discovered that it wasn't some unlikely bohemian outpost cafe but an even unlikelier torrefazione. I went in and spent an hour talking to the proprietor. His name is Gerry Caputo, and he runs his own roasting and shipping business from a dilapidated shack in his driveway.

Gerry went inside his house and made me some coffee from his beans. Before roasting, he "cleans" them using a unique, apparently handmade vacuum system -- it really is like a longnecked Hoover that sucks stuff up through a hose. He insists that this treatment removes impurities like bugs and dirt, thus making the coffee healthier and tastier. You know something? He's right, at least about tastier: the coffee has a deep aroma, full, almost creamy body, and a clean finish. (The decidedly lowbrow but totally innocent slogan on Mariposa Coffee labels reads, So rich and smooth you can drink it black.) I had just enjoyed great coffee in Indonesia -- and in Laos, too, where it's exceptionally rich, almost chocolatey -- but Mariposa Coffee was every bit as flavorful.

I hung around and watched Gerry work. The power went out partway through one cycle, ruining a batch of beans, which prompted Gerry's profane diatribe on the corrupt so-and-sos at California Power and Light. (At the heart of every entrepreneur is a paranoid conspiracy crank who believes that the entire military-industrial complex functions exclusively to ruin his own little business.) I suffered his "assistant," a white-bearded guy who had two duties: to take the packed beans to the post office and ship them; and to bore the rare visitor with a desultory monologue about his attempts to write scripts for Hollywood. I wondered how Gerry tolerated it every single day. That postulant, that acolyte who awoke in me overseas seeking faith and tutelage, came bleating from within:

Maybe Gerry's sick of this old blowhard; maybe he'll hire me to be his assistant. He'll teach me to roast beans, he'll send me to Honduras, to Sumatra, to seek and gather them. I will ship them from the Mariposa P.O. and live in a woodburning cabin in the high Sierras and marry Gerry's daughter, if he has one, someday, when she's old enough.