The Joy of Coffee: The Essential Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying

Discusses the growing, roasting, grinding, and brewing of coffee, and provides recipes for coffee-compatible cookies and cakes

With coffee bars springing up on every urban corner, this engrossing guide couldn't arrive at a better moment. Kummer writes on food for the Atlantic very well, thanks, because he injects his own physical experience with his subjects into the exposition. Here, he takes us through the coffee bean's progress from tree to tummy, eyewitness-style. He tells us what it's like to pick coffee because he went and picked it, what it's like to cup coffee (the method by which roasted beans are qualitatively sorted) because he cupped with the pros, what it's like roasting coffee because he tried it at home as well as scrutinized it being done as a business, etc. He analyzes and advises on grinding and brewing methods; he appreciates espresso and its appurtenances; he describes the coffees of different growing countries; he discusses caffeine and its health effects; and then, he wraps the book up with coffee-complementary dessert recipes and a resource section. Kummer's Baedeker of the exquisitely bitter brew is, as the old slogan says, good to the last drop. Ray Olson