firehose

Last fall I visited the growing, drying, and production facilities for Ancho Reyes chile liqueur near Puebla, Mexico. I learned a lot about chiles. 

We flew into the city of Puebla, and the chiles are grown not far away in San Martín Texmelucan de Labastida. 

Ancho chiles are the dried version of poblano peppers, much like chipotles are dried jalapenos. 

Poblanos: The Reaping

We visited a field where the chiles for Ancho Reyes were being harvested. These fields are 2000 meters above sea level in a volcanic valley. Water comes down from nearby volcanoes and makes the fields very wet . We had to travel standing in the back of a big truck to get through all the mud on the roads. The water is good, because poblano chiles require lots of it. 

In March and April the seeds are germinated and planted. They are delicate plants and require lots of care. The plants are supported by lines of string, so that they won't fall in the mud when the heavy peppers grow on them. It takes about 6 months before harvest. 

Poblano chiles are harvested one time per year. The first ones harvested are sold as fresh green chiles. 

Chiles that will become dried anchos are left on the vine longer than the ones harvested for fresh poblanos. Leaving them longer on the field concentrates flavors and sugars. 

All There Is To Know about the Drying Game

Around a bend on a small street in the town of San Martín Texmelucan de Labastida, you come across a cement fence with cacti on the top in place of barbed wire. Behind it are guard dogs; a double-incentive not to hop over the top. 

Inside is what looks like the foundation for a large building not yet started - a big patch of dirt, but it has been combed up to wide plateaus with narrow ditches dug through every ten feet or so. On top of those raised beds are zillions of drying poblano peppers in a limited rainbow of colors from red to brown, some still with their green stems sticking out. 

Beneath the peppers are what looks like a hay mat (actually small encino oak), which allows air to flow around the peppers as they dry. 

The chiles dry for between 15 and 30 days here, being flipped over every 3 days or so. The drying process both concentrates the flavor and sugar in the chiles, makes them shelf stable, and gives them more flavor complexity according to our hosts. 

Not all chiles you'll find in stores are dried this way - many now come from China, where they are dried in ovens. 

The Blend Of It All

The recipe for Ancho Reyes is "inspired by" a recipe from 1927. 

The actual recipe is:

• 90% Ancho chile peppers
• 10% Guajilla and Pacilla peppers 
• A small amount of secret ingredients
• Alcohol - 55% ABV cane syrup from Veracruz, Mexico
• Sugar syrup, also from Mexico

Guajilla peppers are hot and spicy, while pacilla are more earthy. Dried chiles come into the production facility in big bags. 

The chiles are cut up with scissors. Some but not all of the seeds are discarded to get the right amount of heat in the final product.

Then the pieces of chli are infused into 1000 liter tanks of alcohol. About four of those huge bags go into each 1000L tank. They are stirred once per week and infuse for around 6 months. 

Each of the three chile varieties are infused separately, then the product is blended at the end along with sugar. When they blend, there is no set amount of sugar - they match it to the heat of the product each time. 

All the color of Ancho Reyes comes from the chiles; none is added. 

Also: It is fun to drink. 

Security experts have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw that for more than a decade has made it possible for attackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected traffic passing between Android or Apple devices and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, including AmericanExpress.com, Bloomberg.com, NSA.gov, and FBI.gov.

In recent days, a scan of more than 14 million websites that support the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols found that more than 36 percent of them were vulnerable to the decryption attacks. The exploit takes about seven hours to carry out and costs as little as $100 per site. The so-called FREAK attack—short for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys—is possible when an end user with a vulnerable device—currently known to include Android smartphones, iPhones, and Macs running Apple's OS X operating system—connects to a vulnerable HTTPS-protected website. Vulnerable sites are those configured to use a weak cipher that many had presumed had been retired long ago. At the time this post was being prepared, most Windows and Linux end-user devices were not believed to be affected.

Attackers who are in a position to monitor traffic passing between vulnerable end users and servers can inject malicious packets into the flow that will cause the two parties to use a weak 512-bit encryption key while negotiating encrypted Web sessions. Attackers can then collect some of the resulting exchange and use cloud-based computing from Amazon or other services to factor the website's underlying private key. From that point on, attackers on a coffee-shop hotspot or other unsecured network can masquerade as the official website, a coup that allows them to read or even modify data as it passes between the site and the end user.

Brian Hibbs has put up his great yearly analysis of the Bookscan numbers over at Comic Book Resources, and they reflect a change that’s slowly dawning on many people in comics right now: books for women and children are where the money is. Nine of the top twenty books sold and tracked by Bookscan last year were by women, and twelve of the top twenty were books for kids.

When it comes to the bookstore market, the comics that have been the focus of the Direct Market for decades just aren’t cutting it. It’s starting to look like bookstores are the harbinger of what’s to come for the comics industry, as comics publishers who focus on the Direct Market seem to be increasingly aware that women and kids are where their future lies as well.

Hibbs has done a lot of analysis and it’s all very informative. Sales overall were up 17% in both units and dollars over 2013, which is the largest growth in sales since 2006. The top 20 chart looks like this:

176,197 — SISTERS
152,220 — TALES FROM A NOT SO FABULOUS LIFE
150,523 — SMILE
129,679 — HYPERBOLE AND A HALF
94,152 — DRAMA
84,707 — BIG NATE GRT MINDS THINK ALIKE
83,639 — STAR WARS JEDI ACADEMY
78,132 — STAR WARS JEDI ACADEMY RETURN
74,581 — DORK DIARIES OMG ALL ABOUT ME
72,520 — CANT WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING M
68,064 — WALKING DEAD COMPENDIUM 1
67,849 — BIG NATE THE CROWD GOES WILD
54,520 — ATTACK ON TITAN 1
53,755 — PERSEPOLIS 1
53,470 — WALKING DEAD COMPENDIUM V 2 TP
52,872 — BIG NATE I CANT TAKE IT
45,316 — WALKING DEAD V 20 ALL OUT WAR
39,446 — BIG NATE GAME ON
39,367 — AMULET 6 ESCAPE FROM LUCIEN
38,416 — SAGA V 3

If you’re big on knowing the full breakdown of numbers, I encourage you to give Hibbs’ full post a read. The basic gist, though, is that Raina Telgemeier is our new queen and her comics (Smile, Sisters, and Drama) grossed more in bookstores in 2014 than anyone’s other than Robert Kirkman’s. In fact, at over $4.6 million, Telgemeier’s books grossed more than double such creators as Brian K. Vaughan, Geoff Johns, Alan Moore, and Bryan Lee O’Malley. That’s Bookscan numbers alone, and these are books aimed at young girls.

That top 20 list has no super hero books on it at all — and the only books there that were Direct Market darlings as well are The Walking Dead and Saga, which unsurprisingly appeal to the bookstore crowd.

Publishers like Image, Marvel and DC are represented in the Bookscan numbers — while they may not have a lot of individually top selling books, they are some of the top selling publishers because of the sheer volume of trades and graphic novels they put out each year. The companies that dominate the Diamond lists fade a bit into the background on Bookscan, although they’re still seeing growth along with the entire industry.

It’s interesting to compare these numbers to Diamond’s 2014 charts, where the top single issues are unsurprisingly dominated by super hero books like Amazing Spider-Man, Rocket Raccoon, and Death of Wolverine, and the top graphic novels are dominated by The Walking Dead and Saga (and by Image in general, who locked down 9 of the top 10 GNs in 2014) but without many of the graphic novels on Bookscan’s list. Yet Diamond reported sales were up just 4.39% in dollars and .64% in units — a far cry from the 17.77% and 17.39% increase, respectively, that Bookscan reported. In some ways, it’s like we’re looking at two different industries.

So is that the future of comics? Comics aimed at women and kids soar at the bookstore, while the usual monthly comics continue to dominate the Direct Market? The industry is in the midst of a shift towards diversity, and numbers like the ones Bookscan is reporting are the kind that could help comic shops — if only they could tap into those audiences. Meanwhile, companies who have long focused on the Direct Market and straight white guys are hiring more diverse creators and putting out more diverse books.

These numbers could look completely different next year, but it seems likely that we are not yet done with this upswing in sales — or the influence diversity may have on our industry.