In this revised and updated edition of the most authoritative guide to coffee, Corby Kummer travels the country and the world to give you all the latest information you need to make a great cup at home: • The best beans and how to buy and store them • The grinder that's essential for great coffee • Incisive reports on brewing and espresso-making equipment and tips on how to get the best from them, with photographs of current models • A complete, up-to-date list of sources for beans, equipment and Fair Trade organizations "Unquestionably the most definitive and engagingly written book on the subject." The New York Times "I have long been a fan of Corby Kummer's superb writing in The Atlantic Monthly, and this magnum opus is in the same tradition-incorporating impeccable research and insight, along with Corby's usual sense of humor." -- Martha Stewart "This book tells it all." Gannett News Service One of the country's most respected food journalists, Corby Kummer is senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His 1990 series on coffee, on which this book is based, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Kummer writes regularly for Martha Stewart Living, Self, the New York Times Magazine, Travel-Holiday and Food & Wine and is restaurant critic for New York Magazine. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. 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, w