The Benicia Crew Goes to Eon Coffee

The Benicia Crew meets once a month, usually on a Saturday, to talk about writing and share our work.  we usually meet at Sailor Jack’s in Benicia. All four of us are alumnae of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.

Terry is working on a contemporary YA novel, about a girl struggling with a serious health issue, and getting no help, or the wrong help, from her family and friends.

JC’s book is a mystery that explores psychological and ethical issues.

Sue is working on a moody, atmospheric thriller set in Sweden.

I bring various short, or not so short, fantasy and science fiction pieces.

In December, the four of us spent a weekend in Mendocino. We have a great time until Saturday night, when Terry slipped and broke her arm.

Since Terry couldn’t drive (she broke her dominant arm and she drives a stick shift), we decided to go to her in January, so instead of Sailor Jack’s we met at Eon Coffee, on Hesperian Avenue in Hayward, across from Chabot College.

This place looks like it got started as a Pizza Hut or a Round Table.  As you face it the extended wall on your right is made of distressed brick, and holds a fireplace on the inside. The alcove that the fireplace anchors was probably the beer-bar forty years ago.

The place has good, friendly service, tasty sandwiches and decent coffee. It also has edge-of-the-fringe woo-woo health food stuff; green noodles made out of, I don’t know, seaweed? Krill added to the sandwiches, and “pi” water. I’m not sure what pi water is, but here are some comments from their website. Apparently, it makes our brains work better.

(Krill always reminds me of “Team Krill” in the hilarious Karen Russell Story.)

The Opposite of Instant:

Eon Coffee also had this. This contraption is a “Dutch Extractor.” The globe up top is filled with water, which drips through, drop by drop, down the pipe into the trap that contains the coffee grounds. The grounds fill up until they are saturated, and then drop by drop they spill down the second pipe into the pot. This leaves you a really rich, concentrated coffee… and it takes about eight hours to complete. The cafe uses this for iced coffee, of course, and you could use it for cooking (chocolate cake, mousse, etc, where a strong coffee flavor is wanted.)

It’s an extreme — and somewhat silly — way to make coffee, but it looks awesome, and it’s  a nice model for geology, really. Imagine that nicely filtered water in Lynchberg, Tennessee, used by Jack Daniels. That’s just water that fell and percolated through limestone, kinda like this, only for a lot, lot longer. Suddenly eight hours doesn’t seem ridiculous.