The Joy of Coffee: The Essential Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying - Revised and Updated: The Essential Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying - ... Source for Beans and Home Espresso Equipment - Softcover

Preface to the 2003 Edition

In the twenty years since I began obsessively researching coffee, it has become a lot easier to find a good cup in the United States. Where I live, in Boston, I have American coffee history and the always changing world of beans from distant lands within easy reach. I can drink the benchmark blends of Peet’s, the Berkeley-based chain that inspired the American movement for coffee with real flavor and integrity, and buy the beans to brew my own at home. I frequent cafés that use beans roasted in Seattle by Batdorf & Bronson or Torrefazione Italia, two companies that rode the quality-coffee wave and managed to keep afloat after it crested. I can stop in for a cup of defining East Coast coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, the ubiquitous chain that got its start near Boston and has been influenced by the national move toward better beans. If I want to buy extremely fresh roasted beans, I can watch the process through a neat plastic window at a gleaming new branch of Whole Foods, the national chain of supermarkets dedicated to raising the standards of how food is raised and sold. A few years ago, Whole Foods bought a pioneering Colorado coffee roaster, Allegro, and incorporated its mission to educate people and supply fine beans. Or I can go to the gleaming new Copacafé, the brainchild of one of America’s coffee greats, George Howell, who is roasting just a few of the world’s finest coffees, hoping to bring world attentionand higher prices to the people who grow them.
All these companies show America’s increased focus on coffee quality, which is probably unrivaled in any other country except Japan or Italy. They also show the reality of how the coffee renaissance, which was steaming through the country just when the first edition of this book appeared, has shaken out. What I can no longer do is go from alternative café to café, where impassioned hobbyists turned semi-professional fuss over roasting machines that look like old locomotives and waft heavenly smells through the store and the neighborhood.
This is because of Starbucks, the Goliath of the coffee world. From the time I began chronicling coffee, I have watched Starbucks move from a company with ambitions to increase its Seattle base a bit north and south to a national chain that bought out and dissolved many competitors including, most notably, The Coffee Connection, a Boston-based beacon of quality for the whole country which was founded by Howell. Now, of course, Starbucks is an international company practically as famous as McDonald’sand a similarly reviled and admired symbol of America.
Starbucks changed our view and expectations of coffee. Whatever can be said about its expansion techniques and the commodification of the quirky delights of café life, the company has made an immense number of people care about decent coffee and allowed them to find and drink it. Critics point out that Starbucks plowed over the independent local competition in its drive for hegemony. I, too, miss the many small, dedicated experimental roasters who proudly display prize burlap coffee sacks on the wall and urge customers to try their latest find. Such impassioned people are the transmitters of coffee wisdomthe people who can set others on lifelong quests to find, as The Coffee Connection’s slogan had it, the ultimate cup.” Expert coffee men like George Howell, Jerry Baldwin and Ernesto Illy gave me my educationand will give you yours, in the pages of this book. While the independent, dreaming roasters will always have my heart, it is Starbucks that holds the key to the future. The origin of the company was an idealistic group of men, including Baldwin, who wanted people to sample and enjoy the coffee they discovered and loved. The degree of personalization changed utterly as the approach became sheerly corporate. This everyone knows. There’s plenty more to criticize, too, about Starbucks, including the varying degree of freshness in beans roasted thousands of miles away and the dark roasts that can smudge the delicate differences coffee farmers sweat and sacrifice to achieve.
But it is also true that thanks to Starbucks, a wealth of coffee information and, yes, coffee quality is available to millions more people than a few years ago. Starbucks held the line at flavored coffees, which as the coffee fad took hold threatened to paint the country in lurid crayon colors, and bought a leading espresso-machine maker to provide the shiny, steaming heart of its stores.
And then there’s the crucial question of the welfare of coffee farmers and the land they workthe question that has become foremost to anyone who loves coffee and cares about the world, the question that has taken oon urgency since the first edition of this book appeared. Here, too, Starbucks holds the key. With its worldwide reach and immense buyingg ppppower, Starbucks has the ability to affect the future of coffee with the choices it makes and the policies it sets.
Especially in the last few years, the outlook for quality coffee hasn’t been good. Fewer and fewer farmers can make a living. The news in recent years has been the startling rise of Vietnam from a very minor producer to the world’s second largest, after Brazilheartening for a Southeast Asian country with a tormented history but terrible for Central and South America, home to relatively disorganized groups of smallholders who have the potential to grow great coffee. So do farmers in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which, since the book came out, has only become more politically troubled, meaning that distribution is uncertain even when good beans are grown and processed. Both Latin America and Africa have the altitude and cool nights required for arabica, the species of coffee with real flavor. All coffee in Vietnam is robusta, the low-growing kind that can withstand the heat and humidity of Southeast Asia. Robusta is cheap filler coffee.
The bright spots in the business today are the increasing number and ambition of groups that aim to help small farmers. The International Coffee Organization, for decades the cartel that attempted to keep prices reasonable by having its members stockpile coffee, has for the first time since the 1980s announced the revival of a price agreement. This could be good news for many member farmers, who for years have been forced to sell their crops at a loss. The ICO is also trying to improve the quality of coffee in its member countriesoverdue efforts by a long-moribund group.
When I first wrote this book, people were coming alive to the idea that coffee could have real taste and realizing that something they’d viewed as simply a commodity that woke them up in the morning could have a wonderful range of flavors, flavors anyone could capture at home. Now coffee drinkers are awakening to the recognition that it is people who grow the beans, that families work to raise coffee trees, and that their labor and sometimes love should always be amply rewarded.
As in agriculture everywhere, though, middlemen pocket payments that rightfully belong to the farmer. Several groups that existed when I wrote the book have expanded their programs in the hopes of righting this wrong. Equal Exchange, a for-profit and right-minded group, pioneered the concept in the United States of buying and selling organic Fair Trade coffee from farmers and cooperatives in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The international Fair Trade program requires importers to guarantee farmers a minimum price and extend credit to them, and it provides technical assistance to help farmers make the transition to organic growing. Oxfam, the international aid group, has taken an active interest in coffee growers, devising a Coffee Rescue Plan to encourage big international companies to buy more Fair Trade coffee. Paying the modestly higher price for Fair...