Coffee, that aromatic, democratic beverage, is a passion of Andrés Franco, director of City of Asylum.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began last March, the native of Medellin, Colombia in South America, became a certified barista. For the past five years, he has studied the history of coffee and the role coffeehouses have played in educating people from all walks of life.
The beverage got him through college in Bogota, where he studied piano performance. Espresso fuels his energy when he conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra or leads other major orchestras around the world.
Mr. Franco, who became director of City of Asylum last October, is launching an occasional series called Coffee With Andrés on Friday at noon. Available on the Crowdcast platform, the event will repeat on Sundays at 3 p.m. and remain available online whenever people wish to watch it.
“It’s a way for me to get to know people and for people to learn more about me,” he said during a conversation at Alphabet City, a former Masonic Temple that City of Asylum renovated and turned into a restaurant, bookstore and performance venue.
A few blocks from Alphabet City, in the kitchen of Mr. Franco’s Sampsonia Way home on the city’s North Side, 15 coffee makers are attractively displayed in front of a white subway tile backsplash.
There’s a black model by Decent that looks as if it were designed for Batman. There’s an elegant silver model by La Pavoni from Italy and a Siphon coffee maker that looks like a fugitive from a science lab. A sleek, stainless steel model goes in his luggage on numerous overseas trips.
Beethoven, Mr. Franco says, counted out 60 coffee beans to brew his cup of courage. A man with many interests, including hiking, literature, freedom of expression, political activism and photography, he usually drinks two espressos in the morning and one in the afternoon.
During his first conversation over coffee, he joins Mai Khôi, an artist, political activist and singer often called the “Lady Gaga of Vietnam.” He will play the piano at Alphabet City while she sings.
Mai Khôi fled Vietnam after her outspoken opposition to censorship in that country prompted police to begin raiding her music rehearsals and concerts.
In 2016, Mr. Franco said, “She was going to run for office on an anti-censorship” platform. In 2018, she received the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. Last fall, Mai Khôi arrived in Pittsburgh as an Artist Protection Fund Fellow of the University of Pittsburgh. Mai Khoi is an Artist Protection Fund (APF) fellow in residence at the University of Pittsburgh with participation from City of Asylum.
Mr. Franco and the Vietnamese activist will discuss free expression, censorship and Vietnamese coffee, which is made with a device called a phin. Vietnamese truck drivers leave the road to enjoy coffee and often carry their own hammocks with them, which they string up at coffee stands.
Like any coffee connoisseur, Mr. Franco likes sampling beans from all over the world, including coffee roasted by Luna Coffee in British Columbia; the beans are sourced from Rwanda, Ethiopia, Yemen and his native Colombia. He also has ordered from the local business, Commonplace Coffee, as well as from the Double Shot Coffee Company of Tulsa, Okla.
Stock exchanges in London, England and on New York City’s Wall Street began as coffeehouses, Mr. Franco said, adding that for Massachusetts colonists who protested the tax on British tea in Boston in 1773, “drinking coffee was a political act. [Thomas] Jefferson said, ‘Coffee is the favorite beverage of the civilized world.’ ”
Marylynne Pitz at mpitz@post-gazette.com or on Twitter:@mpitzpg
First Published: February 23, 2021, 10:45 a.m.
