Artwork to come
Pasadena, a Craftsman porch, half past seven
Brief · A vintage mid-century travel postcard illustration. Style: printed like cheap vintage four-colour lithography, with a COARSE VISIBLE HALFTONE DOT SCREEN across the entire image — especially sky and water. Fine stipple and engraved tonal detail underneath the screen, but no bold black outlines, no woodcut, no comic ink, no photorealism, no 3D, no gloss, no digital gradients. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 plus one blue — dusty teal #90c0c0 and slate #607878 when sun-bleached, saturated cyan #30c0d8 when vivid. Muted olive greens in foliage. Composition: the subject sits in the RIGHT THIRD; the left two-thirds is nearly empty sky, water or ground. Low horizon. No people, or figures so small they are marks. Scene: the deep front porch of a 1910 Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena at mid-morning — tapered columns on brick piers, a low-pitched roof with exposed rafter tails, wisteria on the rail, a quiet residential street with mature camphor trees beyond. Mood: refined, still, slightly antique. Nobody about. Optional single small red accent: a single potted geranium on the step. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Typica
Ethiopia → Yemen → Java → the Americas · 1700s
“A Craftsman porch in Pasadena, and about as productive.”
Why this place
A Craftsman porch in Pasadena is a beautifully made thing that costs a fortune to maintain and does not do very much. Tapered columns, exposed rafter tails, wisteria on the rail, and a level of care that nobody would commission today because the arithmetic no longer works.
Typica is that arithmetic. It yields badly, catches everything going, and has been replaced nearly everywhere by hardier descendants. What you get in exchange is a cup of extraordinary delicacy — clean, sweet, chocolate and hazelnut, with a texture people reach for the word velvet to describe and then feel silly about.
Everything on this page came from it. It went Ethiopia to Yemen to Java to the Caribbean to the whole of Latin America, and then got improved on.
- In the cup
- Clean and sweet, chocolate and hazelnut, a velvet texture. Delicate rather than loud
- Lineage
- The ancestral line. Nearly every Latin American variety traces back through it
- Grown
- Increasingly rare — Jamaica, Hawaii, parts of Peru
- Altitude
- 1,200–1,800 m
- Brew it as
- Filter, and do not over-extract it. There is not much to hide behind
Our opinion
Increasingly hard to find, and worth the search once a year. Jamaica Blue Mountain and Kona are Typica, which is why both are expensive and why both are so often disappointing — you are frequently paying for the postcode rather than the lot.
Do not over-extract it. There is nothing to hide behind: no big acidity, no heavy body, just sweetness and clarity. Pull it too far and you are left with warm brown water and a receipt.
Filter only. And drink it black, at least the first time.
Sources
Out past the break
The Typica Set
More from The Typica Set