The Fix

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The Fix

25 Jul

Welcome back, hypercaffeinated readership. And yes, Google is telling me that hypercaffeinated isn’t a word vis-a-vis the red line of death beneath it. To heck with that. Heck I say! Language evolves for the same reason everything else does. Nature set progress on autopilot billions of years ago, and the only time it stops is when people make the absurd choice to stop it. In the interest of not turning this blog into a liber querulus, I’ll leave that at that.

My home city certainly appears to be evolving. That would be the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This is actually my first time looking for coffee in Harrisburg itself since sometime in 2019. What can I say, sometimes you miss things that are right in your backyard. I almost failed to mention this fact, for some reason assuming that people who read this blog know by now that I’m from there, even though I’ve kind of been everywhere over the course of this project. As I drove down Walnut Street I noticed this new cafe out of the corner of my eye, sitting pretty in a building that had been abandoned during the chaos of 2020. I would later learn that owner Lakshmi Tanniru and business partner Liz Albayero opened in October of that year. I love when the owners of a coffeehouse are as bold as their brew.

Ms. Albayero clearly strove to bring Latin flair to her little corner of the American dream. As a matter of fact, this is the first Latin-American owned coffee shop in Harrisburg. Although they do have a Salsa night apparently, most of the overt cultural infusion seemed to be reserved for the coffee, and it really shines through in the quality. Yes, my bias is showing. Readers probably know by now that I’m a fan of Latin coffees in particular. You tend to get a not-quite-earthy richness from them, at least in the ones the roaster cared about. The roaster obviously cared here. I learned that the owners source their coffee directly from El Salvador. The blend I had was a Guatemalan-Salvadoran. It was indeed rich but balanced, just like a Central American coffee should be, the flavor (with a near-floral aftertaste) still clearly evident in spite of my adding too much almond milk to the mix. In my defense, I don’t think anyone can actually get almond milk right.

In the end, it seemed I missed the lines. From what was written in a recent article of The Burg magazine, there was a crowd here that early-autumn day when it opened. Like I said, we coffee lovers are a daring sort. May we always be. If you’re in the Burg and need a fix, consider The Fix. People who fight this hard for what they love deserve respect (and patronage). As for me, I’m off to another corner of PA to look for some more prime brew. No hints this time; I’m going where the wind takes me.