L.C. Huffman's Blog

In this post, I’m going to share with you my current list of the top ten iced lattes in North America. The first ever Intergalactic Iced Latte Award is given.

Background

This is what my week looks like so far in coffee: Sunday, I had one iced latte in Somerset, Kentucky, two iced lattes in Louisville, and one iced latte in Indianapolis. Yesterday I had two iced lattes in Madison, Wisconsin. Today I tried three different ones in Milwaukee.

You probably think I’m a caffeine addict, but at this stage I don’t know if I feel any effects of it at all—I do it for taste. My work, schooling, and even musical pursuits have brought me to some of the coolest coffee shops in the United States and Canada. I always order an iced latte at whatever coffee place I go to, and searching for the best one in the universe has increasingly become a way for me to explore new regions of the country. I normally have one or two iced lattes a day (sometimes three) and my wife, Jess, calls me a connoisseur, which inspired me to write this post. Jess has been a barista for a long time, and she always gives me good insight of the coffee-related processes while I supplement my own plant science knowledge from my education.

Methods

When searching for coffee in an area, I tend to go to google first because it is easy, and look for the coffee roasters in the region. I also look for the highest-rated coffee shops and work my way down from there. Oftentimes, I end up hearing by word of mouth from friends and random people what other places I should try out. In any case, I always start out with a plain iced latte with oat milk — so this is my standard. However, since I’m picky, I may end up trying other milks as well if their coffee sucks with oat milk, since some definitely do. If the coffee shop is famous for a certain type of coffee or latte, I often try that as well to get a good feel for the place. I typically don’t like to go to big companies like Starbucks unless I'm at their original location, so I skip over them when I’m searching on google. Finally, I try to prioritize searching out organic coffee, fair trade, and shade-grown if possible, but this top ten list isn’t measuring that as much as taste.

Evans Brothers Coffee in Sandpoint, Idaho, https://www.evansbrotherscoffee.com/

This is my favorite iced latte in the world hands down. I’ve had upwards of 900 iced lattes from here in the past few years. I actually included this coffee in my fiction book and made my character drink it.

Captain’s Coffee Roasting Co in Homer, Alaska, https://captainscoffee.com/

This one came as a surprise. I had just done a coffee tour of Alaska and did not expect to have my second favorite latte on the list to be in this tiny town.

Dark Matter Coffee in Chicago, Illinois, https://www.darkmattercoffee.com/

This is my most recent discovery from a week ago. The consistency was phenomenal—a bit of froth and such.

Oso Negro Café in Nelson, British Columbia, https://osonegrocoffee.com/

Oso Negro is incredible. Also in a small town in Canada and was rather unexpected. However, they do not serve iced drinks in the winter, or at least they didn’t when I came in December of 2022.

Green Salmon Coffee Co in Yachats, Oregon, https://www.thegreensalmon.com/

This was the highlight of my honeymoon. Yes. This iced latte.

Black Coffee Roasting Co in Missoula, Montana, https://www.blackcoffeeroastingco.com/

I bought merch from this shop, and I don’t do that a lot. The iced latte is consistently great.

Harden Coffee in Campbellsville, Kentucky, https://www.hardencoffee.com/

My dad actually recommended this one to me. It is his favorite and I have to say it is up there for me. Dad drinks more coffee than me, but his standards are less consistent commonly having a cortado or cappuccino along with his iced lattes.

Seven Coffee Roasters in Seattle, Washington, https://sevencoffeeroasters.com/

One of the best Hawaiian coffee iced lattes I’ve had was here—better than in Hawaii on my coffee plantation visit.

La Brioche True Food in Madison, Wisconsin, https://www.labriochetruefood.com/

This one is tough. I think I've had every single coffee shops’ iced latte in Madison a few times, and while there are some great options like Ancora and Wonderstate, I think La Brioche is most consistently fantastic, which is ironic considering coffee is probably not their main source of income.

Caffe Ibis Coffee Roasters in Logan, Utah, https://www.caffeibis.com/

This is the only iced latte on the list that is not good with oat milk. I normally get it with almond milk when I’m around but I would get regular old cow milk if I wanted the best taste. It is a unique one in that Utah’s coffee culture is small, but this one competes with the big dogs.

These are the top ten so far of the thousands of iced lattes I’ve had in the U.S. and Canada. I haven’t had as many in Mexico so this is not as reflective of their coffee shops. Even still, I have a nearly uncountable list on my phone that spans mostly every corner of the United States and a lot of Canada. Anyway— the moment you’ve been waiting for:

By the power vested in me, I hereby bestow the first Intergalactic Iced Latte Award to Evans Brothers Coffee!

A bit overkill…I know. Had to do it.

This one contains a bit of a spoiler, so I don’t recommend reading this first if you prefer to find out everything through the book.

The world of Holt’s Almanac is one of fantasy and lore passed down from many North American cultures. When the plot begins to resolve, the genre shifts suddenly to more of a sci-fi vibe with the knowledge of what is actually going on around Holt. Up until that point, the audience is intended to question Holt’s sanity, with all of his idiosyncrasies and experiences.

This world is introduced from the start of the book, but isn’t quite explained until the end. When I started writing, I did not intend to stop Holt’s Almanac where it ends now—in fact I had another 200 pages listed than what the page count reflects now. The sequel is in the works, and I am honestly much more excited to write about the years after the “freeze” as it’s called, than I am to currently market Holt’s Almanac.

The concept of life existing outside of the dimensions that we are familiar with, is something that has confused and fascinated me since elementary school. After years of research and can confidently say that I don’t know much more than when I started, but my fascination has only grown. I think the premise that these folklore legends could exist in another dimension is an interesting twist on the question of why there isn’t a lot of 3rd dimensional evidence for them. I personally believe in God, and that he does not exist on the same terms humans do, possibly spanning all conceivable dimensions, or outright defying them, considering all laws of science and universal structure could be created by him. Obviously this is difficult to back up currently, but fun to speculate. The science behind religion is something I would love to talk about more with those who are interested, so feel free to reach out to me on social media or email.

I first studied dyslexia when I was taking a psych class in high school. Reading about the symptoms, I realized I was having many of them right then and there. I had been told my whole life that my poor reading skills were due to possibly having ADD, but for some reason, reading was the only skill heavily affected by this. After watching many videos, and actually having the chance to converse with some of the most influential researchers of dyslexia at that time, it became clear to me that I fell in this category.

Sure I was a mild, self-diagnosed case, as I still have some reading comprehension, but I could pick out most of the symptoms listed by others and identify with them. It typically takes me around 30 minutes to read a single page of my coursework in college. While my letters and words experience movement such as reflection and reversals, these are not the most definitive symptoms. Many times I will simply stare at a word and cannot remember it’s meaning, or if it is a real word at all.

After learning all of this, I became so fired up that I attempted to make my own set of graphemes that would be less likely to move, with more identifiable and memorable characteristics. I created this “font” as some called it (although it was actually a transliteration of our English alphabet) and began to print it off and read it. After much research on obscure linguistic theories and methods of comprehension, I felt that I had honed my “font” to help a portion of dyslexic people that might have similar symptoms to myself. I consulted with Christian Boer and tried to get a large enough test group to try out the “font” on kids who struggled with reading. Unfortunately my idea was largely shot down after I met with a lot of individuals from the Kentucky school systems, saying that it wasn’t feasible. Sadly, I began focusing on other avenues and decided to put away that endeavor.

As I started to write my book (Holt’s Almanac) at 19 years old, wherein it was foremost an exercise for my mind, and the plot had no direction at all. Grammarly was extremely helpful in filling the gaps of my constant errors and misspellings. Needless to say, I would probably not have been able to be an author with my dyslexic symptoms before these amenities were around. It took a considerable amount of methodical time to get the book from that stage to now, and there are still a few errors in the published work, but that is to be expected without an editor. I hope that anyone who reads it can look past any of these errors and see Holt’s Almanac for the plot. I additionally hope that if any of my audience is struggling with dyslexia, that they are encouraged by this: I am a horrible reader, but I was still able to write a book.

As some of you know, I wrote an instrumental score to my book, Holt’s Almanac, based on the scenes and happenings of the plot. I haven’t uploaded this to the internet yet, but I plan to do so if there is enough interest.

On the other hand, when reading Holt’s Almanac, there are a lot of songs mentioned, which were meant to act as a sort of soundtrack excluding the score that I wrote. They act additionally as a means for the radio (a character) to give input on surroundings. These songs are wildly varied in genre, just as the geography in the book is varied. The soundtrack encompasses everything from Cake’s version of a Black Sabbath song, to Ricky Skaggs’ bluegrass picking. Here is a link to a playlist I made on Spotify and Apple Music with all of the songs mentioned in the book sequentially:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Rp...

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/h...