JavAmoré Café
10101 Main St, Penngrove, CA
Facebook only: https://www.facebook.com/pages/JavAmore-Cafe/
Yelp: http://www.yelp.com/biz/javamore-cafe-penngrove
Review date:  Oct 22, 2014

This little café, which is only open until 3:30p, is a 15-second drive from our favorite sausage/chili shop, Yanni's, on Penngrove's two-block long Main St. Similar to Graton and Occidental's downtowns, they are the figurative hop, skip and jump from ever-busier Hwy 101, yet they're a world away in true small-town terms. 90% of tourists probably never stop as they whiz from winery to restaurant to more wineries.

Sonoma Cty isn't like the Napa Valley. It's still got real farms, not just endless acres of vineyard after vineyard. These are small cities where people commute to jobs outside the wine industry, that behemoth which sits atop rural Northern CA in the same way the spectre of Wal-Mart hovers over traditional retailing. 

There's a strong, laid-back, leftover-from-the-'70's hippie element to these kinds of towns. JavAmoré is across the aisle from Bauman College, where you can get a degree  in holistic nutrition. Or you can buy some very good bread from Full Circle Baking Co., also across the parking lot, assuming you can find anybody in the back to stop for a moment and sell you one of the loaves they have sitting out on shelves by the unattended cash register out front. It's a laissez-faire, relaxed attitude that assumes you could just as easily help yourself to a couple of loaves and leave the money on the counter, if you'd like. They may be less than 6 miles from Petaluma, but Penngrove still retains the small-town trusting attitude that Petaluma lost long ago.

We only stop here for coffee. We don't usually eat breakfast when we travel, and for lunch Yanni's has everything we'd want, only better than JavAmoré. But what JavAmoré does well, is coffee. They're Fair Trade only (of course) and make their coffee (fresh) very well. It comes noticeably hotter than most, with the water temp always gauged correctly so that it comes through the beans at 190 degrees minimum, usually 195.

Today they were pouring Ethiopian, which I hadn't had in quite a long time. It was amazingly sweet and floral, so good it was still fine when we took it with us and it cooled down to room temp. I used to do a French Roast/Ethiopian/Guatemala Antigua blend, but long ago switched to all French when the quality of Ethiopian coffee dropped drastically during their civil war. 

Ethiopian beans are very low-acid, but have more character than Kona. We subsequently tried some of Peet's Ethiopian beans (they have two kinds, regular and Sulawasi) but neither one came remotely close to what JavAmoré served us.

We like JavAmoré - like Yanni's, a casual, non-pretentious place that beats McDonald's and Jack In The Box every time. The latter two - and other chain outlets - are just down the street near 101, only a few minutes away. 

People who are too busy to drive just a little bit further at breakfast or lunch, don't realize what they're missing.