Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michaele Weissman is a journalist and author who writes about food, families, business, and American culture. Her work appears frequently in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Her coffee blog can be found at michaeleweissmanwrites.com/godinacupofcoffee. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband.

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Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen.

In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation's most heralded coffee business hotshots—Counter Culture's Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia's Geoff Watts, and Stump-town's Duane Sorenson.

Weissman tells the absorbing tale of an odyssey she shares with these and other brash visionaries who devote themselves to coffee with near-religious fervor, unquenchable energy, and geek-like attention to detail. This journey through the rituals and rivalries of today's ultra-premium coffee business begins in a sweltering Central American hotel, where "cupping" competition judges sniff and spit their way through hundreds of cups, detecting tobacco, chocolate, and blueberry in the brews.

Then, visiting remote farms in Nicaragua, Panama, and Burundi, the buyers encourage growers to improve coffee quality, offering fabulous prices for exquisite beans, and in so doing, they unwittingly upend existing markets. Dealing directly with farmers, the buyers sometimes run afoul of governments, the Fair Trade movement, cooperatives, and the farmers themselves. In Ethiopia—the mother ship of the coffee universe—the young coffee guys search for the birthplace of the legendary Geisha coffee, presumed genetic parent of the coveted, prize-winning Hacienda La Esmeralda Special. Instead, they discover a world of coffee not yet known—thousands of varieties never cultivated, never catalogued, never cupped.

Back home, Weissman examines how specialty roasters tap into a growing consumer fascination with premium coffee. She visits Stumptown in Portland, the rock-and-roll coffee roaster some consider the most cutting edge in the world; tracks the progress of Chicago's Intelligentsia, which will go anywhere and spend any amount to acquire the best beans and is now engaged in a high-stakes gamble to conquer the Los Angeles market; and explores Counter Culture's approach of teaching students, chefs, and foodies the secrets of high-end coffee while wholesaling beans to the hottest coffee bars and restaurants up and down the East Coast.

With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America—a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist's pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee—or a great adventure story—you'll love this unprecedented look up close at the people and passions behind today's best beans.

Aus dem Klappentext

Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen.

In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation's most heralded coffee business hotshots Counter Culture's Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia's Geoff Watts, and Stump-town's Duane Sorenson.

Weissman tells the absorbing tale of an odyssey she shares with these and other brash visionaries who devote themselves to coffee with near-religious fervor, unquenchable energy, and geek-like attention to detail. This journey through the rituals and rivalries of today's ultra-premium coffee business begins in a sweltering Central American hotel, where "cupping" competition judges sniff and spit their way through hundreds of cups, detecting tobacco, chocolate, and blueberry in the brews.

Then, visiting remote farms in Nicaragua, Panama, and Burundi, the buyers encourage growers to improve coffee quality, offering fabulous prices for exquisite beans, and in so doing, they unwittingly upend existing markets. Dealing directly with farmers, the buyers sometimes run afoul of governments, the Fair Trade movement, cooperatives, and the farmers themselves. In Ethiopia the mother ship of the coffee universe the young coffee guys search for the birthplace of the legendary Geisha coffee, presumed genetic parent of the coveted, prize-winning Hacienda La Esmeralda Special. Instead, they discover a world of coffee not yet known thousands of varieties never cultivated, never catalogued, never cupped.

Back home, Weissman examines how specialty roasters tap into a growing consumer fascination with premium coffee. She visits Stumptown in Portland, the rock-and-roll coffee roaster some consider the most cutting edge in the world; tracks the progress of Chicago's Intelligentsia, which will go anywhere and spend any amount to acquire the best beans and is now engaged in a high-stakes gamble to conquer the Los Angeles market; and explores Counter Culture's approach of teaching students, chefs, and foodies the secrets of high-end coffee while wholesaling beans to the hottest coffee bars and restaurants up and down the East Coast.

With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist's pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee or a great adventure story you'll love this unprecedented look up close at the people and passions behind today's best beans.

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God in a Cup

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

PETER GIULIANO, COFFEE BUYER AND MINORITY OWNER OF Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, North Carolina, describes himself and the other Third Wave coffee guys driving the fast-growing specialty coffee industry as "a bunch of freakin' nutcase obsessives who have trouble hacking it in the real world.

"When I was studying music in college I had to figure out what was the most authentic expression of northern Mexican accordion music," he explains. "I spent years of my life figuring this out. Then I applied my attention to cocktails. In my house I had a thousand dollars invested in obscure kinds of alcohol. My friends would come over and I would make them a martini the way they were made in 1934."

Take Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago or Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon. "You think these guys are normal?" Peter will ask, raising his eyebrows.

Peter has a point. The top tier of the specialty world is full of people who obsess about the details. These are individuals who will drive themselves past the point of reason to get it right, who will spend five years figuring out the perfect protocol for controlling the temperature gauge of their espresso machine. Guys who compare great coffee to great wine and are able to detect hundreds of flavors and aromas in a coffee from a small farm in Guatemala as great wine masters discern countless subtleties in an aged Burgundy.

Tasting-cupping is the term used in the coffee industry-ten or twenty coffees is never enough for guys like this. As Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia, a leading specialty coffee roaster/retailer, talking about his education in the industry, explains, "I wanted to cup two hundred coffees. I wanted to cup two thousand coffees. I wanted to know everything you could know about the nuances of flavor and aroma and then I wanted to know more."

Geoff and the other specialty guys would tell you that their devotion has been generously repaid. Considering his career and that of other industry leaders, Peter comments, "The beautiful thing about specialty coffee is that it rewards that obsessiveness. It uses all our talents. It fosters the development of lost kids like me."

Most Third Wave coffee guys you talk to will try to convince you that they invented specialty coffee, but they are wrong. As the organized high-end sector of the larger coffee industry, specialty coffee has been around since the early 1960s, and it has been evolving ever since.

Coffee itself has a long history in the United States. Ever since a band of enraged patriots tossed ninety thousand pounds of expensive tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773, coffee, after booze, has been the beverage of choice for Americans.

Early Americans drank coffee in convivial coffeehouses, and either roasted coffee beans at home or bought them from merchants and grocers, who sold freshly roasted coffee that their customers carried home in paper sacks. This coffee came from high-quality Arabica beans-the Arabica species originated in Ethiopia and was cultivated commercially in Yemen, from where it spread throughout the Islamic world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, coffee was smuggled into Europe. Shortly thereafter, European adventurers transported coffee to the New World.

Throughout the nineteenth century, most American homemakers purchased freshly roasted coffee. Grocers often roasted their own, and most towns and cities of any size were home to one or more coffee roasteries. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, coffee, like other foodstuffs, fell victim to the industrialization of the food supply. Consolidation. Technological innovations. Standardization. They all led to one outcome: heavily advertised national brands of coffee sold in supermarkets in vacuum-sealed cans. And after World War II came the lowest blow of them all: water-soluble instant coffee. By the time instant became the next new thing, American consumers were so acclimatized to bad coffee that they failed to notice the introduction of lower-quality beans from the far less expensive species called Robusta that price-conscious mass marketers had begun adding to their blends.

In his history of the coffee industry, Uncommon Grounds, economic historian Mark Pendergrast summed up decades of "progress" in the American coffee industry with this comment from an unnamed attendee at the 1959 National Coffee Association Convention: "There is hardly anything," said this fed-up coffee guy, "that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper."

Just as casseroles made with canned string beans and ersatz cream of mushroom soup led to Julia Child and the foodie revolt in the 1960s, so did the ubiquity of Nescaf and other caffeinated insults lead to the birth of the specialty coffee industry.

The First Wave

Coffee guys aren't always the greatest historians, and there are many debates about what and who compose the First, Second, and Third Waves of the specialty coffee industry-all the young coffee dudes seem to believe without question, though, that they, the Third Wave, are the stars of the movie.

Coffee consultant Trish Skeie, who popularized the wave idea, described the First Wave as the people before and after World War II "who made bad coffee commonplace ... who created low quality instant solubles ... who blended away the nuance [in coffee] ... and forced prices to an all time low."

The Second Wave

Trish has written that the Second Wave began in the late 1960s and extended into the mid-1990s. Among the Second Wave were a number of coffee-centric northern European immigrants who settled in California after World War II. These transplants carried with them old-world knowledge of coffee roasting, tasting, and sourcing.

Among this group was Alfred Peet of Peet's Coffee, who opened his first store in San Francisco in 1966, and Erna Knutsen, founder and president of Knutsen Coffee Ltd., based in northern California. It was Knutsen who coined the phrase "specialty coffee" to describe beans from specific "appellations." Like appellation wines, Erna said, specialty coffees are grown in distinct geographic microclimates and they possess unique flavor profiles.

Second Wave entrepreneurs such as Peet and Knutsen as well as Don Schoenholt of Gillies Coffee in New York; Ted Lingle of Lingle Brothers Coffee in Long Beach, California; Kevin Knox of Starbucks; and George Howell of Boston's Coffee Connection created the specialty coffee business in the United States. They introduced American coffee drinkers to high-quality coffees with discernible differences in taste from around the world. In 1982, a group of Second Wave guys founded the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). On their watch, specialty became the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. coffee industry, with sales in 2007 of more than $12 billion.

Starbucks emerged in this period, the brainchild of Second Wave guys. The first Starbucks store opened in Seattle in 1971, selling high-quality coffee, dark roasted by Alfred Peet. Soon the company had half a dozen stores and was roasting its own. The chain grew slowly until 1987, when it was bought by Howard Schultz. In 2006, with 12,500 stores worldwide and total sales of $7.8 billion, Starbucks reported its...