Oh. Hmm. There seems to be a blog about liquids. And I seem to be an editor. That’s weird. Somebody should have told me.

Anyway, it looks like we’re back from an unscheduled vacation. Where did we go? Um, nowhere. It got hot, and my modus operandi shifted from, “Run around like crazy drinking random liquids at odd hours” to “sit directly in front of the fan and try not to do or think anything, ever.”

Having grown up not all that far from Las Vegas, I know a thing or two about heat. The most important thing I know is: “When it’s hot, stay inside under the cooler.” This worked relatively well back when I lived someplace with air conditioning. Unfortunately, this newfangled invention seems not to have caught on here just yet. This puts me in a bit of a bind.

Approaching this problem scientifically (this is, as always, a lie), I’d break the problem of summertime into two components: 1) It makes you really hot, and 2) it makes you really lethargic.

This morning, while kicking myself for not going to grad school in, say, Svalbard, I realized a potential 2-for-1 solution: iced coffee.

I decided to grab a book and try out the unintuitively-named 1369 Coffee House in Inman Square. I’ve been to their Central Square location before (and found the cappuccino to be very satisfying), but Inman is a pretty cool place to hang out and drink coffee.

Well, at least, normally it is. Today, it was so hot that I would have expected to see tumbleweeds blowing across the street. (If you were wondering, that really does happen in the desert. When a tumbleweeds the size of certain imported cars blows across the road, you try to miss it.) Unsurprisingly, the streetfront was deserted.

To go along with that, the nice air-conditioned coffee-shop was full almost to capacity. Dripping sweat (gross), I ordered my coffee (”Can I get a large iced coffee?” “24 ounce or 32 ounce?” “Whatever the largest size is.”) and a pastry and staked out a spot in the very corner, which was the only seat in the house.

Normally, a huge amount of coffee and a decent book are enough to keep me entertained for a while, but it quickly became apparent why the seat was empty: it was as far from the A/C vent as possible, and directly in front of the window, the sun merrily shining through and ruining everything.

The coffee helped, but not really enough. I sucked it down in a hurry and was out of there in less than 15 pages.

It’s a real issue when you live in a major city: the good places are always crowded (in Cambridge, the coffeeshops are the only things more crowded than the bars). In good weather, this doesn’t trouble me so much; a good cup of coffee and a brisk stroll compliment each other well. In bad weather (which, for a very conservative definition of “bad”, is about three months out of the year ’round here), you’re stuck indoors with everyone else who had the same brilliant idea you did.

(On that note, the one nice thing I can say about the Tavern in the Square is that they have outside seating. I despise sports bars and their food is unspectacular, but patio seating makes up for it in the right season.)

There’s probably no solution. I imagine that if there were enough coffeeshops in Cambridge, then they would all be modestly full but not overcrowded. Of course, given the cost of real estate around here, that probably means they’d all go bankrupt. And whatever the case, it’s not like I’m interested in opening up a coffee-shop and trying this proposition out myself.

Anyway, the coffee itself was good. I tend to find iced coffee to be kind of weak, but that’s probably because of the ice. (In my mind, I’ve devised a solution that would involve making ice cubes out of coffee and then combining that with coffee chilled to — say — 35F. But I have problems.) They use a nice medium roast there that’s sweet enough that the flavor comes out even when it’s chilled; it’s very accessible. The 1369 at Inman has about the same feel as the one at Central: the music’s strange but not too loud or angry, the space feels bigger than it is (both venues are much deeper than they are wide), the people there are the people you’d see at any coffeeshop. I will most assuredly be back.

And when I am, hopefully I’ll be able to snag a seat under an A/C vent. Because hoping New England weather stop sucking is probably a waste of time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Boston, Coffee.