The name of this little book intrigued me.  Bound to be controversial, I thought, and loving a good controversy I nestled into my favorite reading nook to have a taste of God in a Cup.  Wow!  The reading session turned into a couple of hours with this fascinating tome about a subject which we all pretty much take for granted – coffee.  Now, I relish a great cup of coffee and always considered myself to be pretty coffee savvy.  I do all the right things – buy whole specialty coffee beans from elite coffee stores or what I thought were great on-line sources.  I buy in small amounts, trying coffees from different origins.  I use expensive, sophisticated coffee makers with built-in grinders, or use a French press, first grinding the beans in what I thought was a great grinder.  But after about twenty pages into this book, I realized I didn’t know beans about coffee!

 Ms. Weissman, on assignment from the New York Times to interview three of the country’s biggest movers and shakers in the specialty coffee industry, became totally involved in the whole specter of the intriguing and convoluted world of coffee, from the plight of the impoverished growers in Third World countries who are at the mercy of corrupt bureaucrats, to the unlikely young entrepreneurs who are rewriting the rules of the coffee trade and altering what the culinary world expects from a cup of coffee while endeavoring to work with the farmers who grow the coffee varietals they seek to produce better coffee, and in turn, make better profits.  This book provides a capsulated history of coffee, tracing its origins to Ethiopia, where coffee trees have grown wild for tens of thousands of years even though coffee was not brewed as a beverage until the 1500s.

 Weissman began her adventure into the world of coffee with Esmeralda, a rare coffee bean from Panama that sold at auction in 2007 for the record-setting price of $130.00 a pound wholesale.  In her year-long quest Weissman traveled with two with two of the most respected young coffee buyers in the world – Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee and Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia Coffee.  These two thirty-something entrepreneurs possess an energy and anti-authoritarian spirit which are re-shaping the specialty coffee industry.  In her travels with the pair, Weissman traced the roots of the Esmeralda coffee back to Ethiopia, traveled to Nicaragua, Rwanda, Burundi, and later crisscrossed the U.S., learning about espresso and how the green coffee beans are roasted.  She attended a barista competition – exploring the entire, hyper-hip café culture.  She gives the reader an in-depth look at coffee competitions and the art of “cupping” coffee to determine its flavor characteristics and quality.  Every bit as much pomp and circumstance involved as at a high-level wine tasting and auction!

 It’s a really fascinating read on the subject of coffee.   Along the trail of her adventure the author explains the way coffee is processed from the picking at the precise time when the “cherry” containing the bean is at its ripe best, and the intricate processing to produce the green coffee beans which are purchased by coffee brokers from all over the world.  I had no idea of the scope of this high-stakes market, but Weissman has laid it out for us spanning the entire coffee chain – from farm to café and consumer.

 I loved this book – and in the final chapter “Making Great Coffee at Home” I learned that I need to throw out all of my coffee-making equipment and start over!  One thing for sure, I’ll never look at that anticipated morning cup of java in quite the same manner again.

http://www.thetexasfoodandwinegourmet.com/review_story.asp?category_id=25&story_no=5#%20

In a courtyard in a Uighur district of western China, a tourist watched a man inflate a sheep’s lung with liquid, tie off the windpipe and put the bundle into a wok. Later the tourist found the man selling chunks of the boiled lung, served with rice-stuffed sheep’s intestines. The tourist dug in without hesitation. After all, she had traveled thousands of miles and taken a year off from work in search of just such a culinary experience.

The pursuit of a memorable meal (or a really good cup of coffee) has become a life’s work. Or so the writers of several new food books would have us believe, as they detail their obsessive, expensive and all-consuming food odysseys. In addition to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Chinese-food adventure travelogue, "Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper," there’s the new "The Saucier’s Apprentice," for which journalist Bob Spitz nursed a midlife crisis by taking a four-month sabbatical to cook in Europe’s finest restaurants. In "The Man Who Ate the World," British restaurant critic Jay Rayner traveled the globe in search of the perfect high-end meal. For "God in a Cup," Michaele Weissman visited far-flung outposts of the high-end java industry in search of a transformative cup of coffee. But in a time when we are worrying about the global food supply, combating an obesity-fueled diabetes crisis and questioning the environmental impact of flying exotic foodstuffs around the world, one wonders if these books are merely another helping of an already overstuffed genre. There may be something distasteful in the way the writers of these books ascribe fetishistic significance to the elemental act of consuming enough calories to make it through the day.

Although Thomas Jefferson was a pioneer of gourmandism, introducing ice cream and macaroni to American palates, our culture viewed food primarily as fuel well into the 20th century. (It’s a notion we shared with the English, who have historically taken a perverse pride in their dismal national cuisine.) It wasn’t until after World War II, when cultural ambassadors such as Jackie Kennedy and Julia Child brought French cuisine to American dinner plates, that we began to associate food with pleasure. Meanwhile, the American food industry converted munitions factories and introduced shiny new appliances to encourage women who had worked during wartime to return to their stoves. Revised editions of "The Joy of Cooking" included exotic-for-the-times spices such as chili powder. Over the next decades, Child, M.F.K. Fisher and Alice Waters wrote about transformative food experiences in Europe, sparking a gourmet revolution back home. Child’s "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," which came out in 1961, begat our current era of the Food Network, "Top Chef" and a "food writing" (as opposed to plain old "cooking") section in bookstores. (Swaggering celebrity chefs such as Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain made cooking a safely macho pursuit for men, too, and have both written best sellers about their kitchen adventures.)

If the progression of our culture’s attitudes toward what we eat has been food as fuel, followed by food as pleasure, the latest iteration is food as the destination of a spiritual quest. Whereas the search for truth traditionally involved a negation of the flesh, the pursuit of sensory pleasures is now considered a legitimate path to enlightenment by the writers of these books and the like-minded foodies they encounter on their journeys. One coffee buyer tells Weissman a certain cup of joe was so aromatic, "he felt as if streams of light were pouring out of it." Another fanatic says, "I am the least religious person here, and when I tasted this coffee I saw the face of God in a cup." "These books are about a longing for something more satisfying than just food," says Carole Counihan, editor of "Food and Culture: A Reader." "We want food that satisfies our bodies and an experience that satisfies our souls." But, as most of the writers discover, sating physical hunger is an easier task than satisfying deeper appetites.

In "The Saucier’s Apprentice," Spitz savors moments of culinary transcendence over a perfect tarte tatin, but there is a bittersweet quality to the narrative. "It occurred to me that perhaps the dream had gained some kind of purchase on my life, with cooking schools pinch-hitting for that elusive gold ring," he writes. Toward the end of his travels, Rayner still hasn’t found epicurean Nirvana. "The whole process of the restaurant meal," he writes, "suddenly seemed so feeble, so ephemeral when examined so closely … Was I really losing my religion?" Even Dunlop is let down by her dish of boiled sheep’s lung: "You might imagine you were eating an English pudding," she writes, "if it wasn’t for the odd tube poking out."

For the reader, these books may allow us to indulge our most gluttonous fantasies without gaining a pound (or leaving the sofa); the extremity of the writers’ quests may put our own pilgrimages to the corner store for a pint of mint chip into perspective. As Counihan says, "I love to eat, but there’s something strange about putting all of our meaning into the consumption of food. Is the perfect plate of pasta going to give you meaning in life? I don’t know." One thing is clear, though: our appetite for ever more exotic food books remains insatiable.

© 2008

http://www.newsweek.com/id/140491

During this 23 minute podcast, I chat with Michaele Weissman, author of God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. This is another great summer read. If you drink coffee and/or are interested in fine foods, you will enjoy this podcast and the book. Michaele goes deep into the world of the high-end specialty coffee industry - an exploration that takes her to several countries and behind the scenes of a enigmatic slice of the world.

You can listen to my podcast with the Michaele Weissman by clicking here:

You can also download an MP3 version of the podcast here.

http://managementcraft.typepad.com/management_craft/2008/06/fireside-chat-1.html

When I lived in San Francisco, the Bay Area’s best microroaster was a block away from my house. I was an avid fan, but SF has been so far behind Seattle when it comes to coffee geekery that when I moved here two years ago, I’d just learned the term “Third Wave” and had never heard of Cup of Excellence or Clover machines. I had a lot of catching up to do.

I just found the Clif’s Notes. Michaele Weissman, a DC-based freelance writer, converted to the mystery and magic in Third Wave coffees a few years ago, and has parlayed articles on coffee for the Washington Post and the New York Times into the just-published God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. It’s a grand point of entry into both the promise and the overheated attitudes of today’s coffee culture.

Weissman follows legendary coffee scouts like Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts and Counter Culture Coffee’s Peter Giuliano to Ethiopia, Burundi, Nicaragua, and Panama. She attends Cup of Excellence judgings. She chronicles the brouhaha around Hacienda La Esmerelda, which has sold for $130 a pound — unroasted. She spends time in Los Angeles and Portland with Intelligentsia and Stumptown baristas to get a sense of coffee hipsterdom and profiles competitive baristas.

Yes, Seattle gets snubbed in favor of Portland, though she does profile former Victrola barista Glanville Kyle (now in LA) and talks about Vivace owner David Schomer’s espresso mastery. And the book unfortunately made it to the printers before Starbucks bought out Clover, screwed over Stumptown, and ignited a huge controversy in coffee geekdom.

The author enrobes a lot of technical information in a chatty, travelogue tone that makes the book read smoothly — it wasn’t hard to finish the book in a couple long sessions on the couch — but the alt-weekly journo in me also felt like she missed the chance to flush out her central portraits of what appear to be some deeply conflicted, fascinating people because she was too content to befriend them (though despite her best efforts, Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson emerges looking like a bit of a prick).

I also would have appreciated more detail on how the Third Wave differs from the Second. While differences in the way Stumptown and Starbucks roast, brew, and market their coffees are obvious, Weissman doesn’t give readers a good sense of how Third Wave coffee buying and importing practices might improve upon the improvements that the Second Wavers introduced to the field decades ago — other than driving up the prices of the beans that win coffee competitions.

What does come through most clearly from God in a Cup is how fragile a product high-quality coffee is. So much can spoil a crop — politically, agriculturally, technologically, economically — and ruin a farmer. Most of the best beans, just like the worst ones, are grown by subsistence farmers and make their way to consumers through labyrinthine supply channels that recall the Spice Route. I finished the book not determined to sniff out blueberry and tobacco leaves (aromas, Weissman admits, that may only appear to experts conducting formal cuppings of perfectly roasted, ground, and brewed beans) but to support the businesses that put shoes on children’s feet and schoolrooms in communities.

Side note to Wiley Publishers: Whoever your proofreader is, he or she should consider a new career.

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/voracious/2008/06/book_review_god_in_a_cup.php

The Grub Street bookshelf continues to fill up this season with focused nonfiction books about our favorite subjects. The two latest, both out this month, are Michaele Weissman’s God in a Cup, the story of a coffee bean that has taken the world of specialty-coffee dealers by storm, and Susan Bourette’s Meat: A Love Story, the latest New Carnivore tome justifying the ways of man to meat. (The Shameless Carnivore and The Compassionate Carnivore were the last two.) Both books are fascinating in the way they focus on coffee and meat, respectively; by the time you’re done, you feel ready to tramp around Panama seeking the rare Hacienda La Esmeralda Special or going to Alaska or Texas for whale hunts and cattle drives. Despite our predilection for meat, we enjoyed God in a Cup a little more. You can eat meat anywhere, but the legendary coffee the latter book describes is unavailable in New York and therefore belongs to the world of aspirational, or rather devotional, appreciation. And that’s the plane on which the best food books excel. On the other hand, we’ve never gnawed on whale blubber.

http://nymag.com/daily/food/2008/05/coffee_and_meat_celebrated_in.html?om_u=AhPfn0&om_i=_BIGivzB7Q$NiMS&aid=388690249&mid=2068046690&time=1209674739&
issue=_BIGivzB7Q$NiMS

On her first try, Florence Edelblute was not convinced McDonald’s can do coffee and espresso as well as it does burgers and fries.

The San Leandro resident said she decided to try one of the flavored espresso-based drinks after receiving a coupon in the mail announcing the new offerings.

"I like good coffee," she said. Some of her favorite coffee roasters and shops include Peet’s, Starbucks and Arizmendi, a bakery, in Oakland. "I had the coffee here and it just didn’t match up to other coffee I’ve had."

Edelblute, like other critics who have trouble equating the fast-food giant and high-quality coffee, is the symbolic hurdle McDoanld’s must clear to succeed in its attempt to merge the two main segments of the breakfast market: hot, fast service food and coffee.

The Bay Area is one of the first markets where McDonalds, the country’s largest fast-food chain, has begun rolling out its new McCafe concept that includes espresso and specialty coffee beverages.

The chain expects to add this lineup to all of its 12,000 stores by next year.

"Our unique proposition is that we’re offering excellent quality at a great price and more convenience," said Jason Goldblatt, who owns several McDonald’s franchise stores in the East Bay. "People want coffee, but they also need to eat."

Breakfast, one of the fastest growing segments of the food and restaurant industry, is tough territory for retailers that want to please consumers looking for substantial food offerings and the morning caffiene jolt.

Quick service restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s offer quick and inexpensive hot items for breakfast. Coffee shops and chains like Starbucks and Peet’s, on the hand, offer high quality coffee, but carry fewer food options.

On the sidelines, are chains like Emeryville-based Jamba Juice and Panera Bread Co. are also trying to corral morning customers. Jamba recently launched a breakfast menu featuring a new lineup of baked goods, yogurt and granola blends and thicker smoothie options. Panera has just premiered a line of breakfast sandwiches made with grilled Ciabatta bread.

"It’s been interesting to watch this trend over the last 10 years," said Matthew Ramerman, principal of HL2, a Seattle-based advertising agency that focuses on restaurant chains. "Consumers have been saying ’I’m looking for a breakfast solution.’"

Thanks to products like the Egg McMuffin, Illinois-based McDonald’s claims to "own breakfast" and the move into specialty coffee is an effort for the burgers and fries giant to take a bite of the coffee niche lead by Starbucks.

McDonald’s breakfast options include a $1 menu that features yogurt and fruit parfaits, sandwiches and hashbrowns as well as breakfast platters that come with pancakes and scrambled eggs.

"It’s hard to deny that McDonald’s provides one of the very few on-the-go alternatives for breakfast," Ramerman said. "I don’t know that there’s been a serious competitor entering that space partly because no one’s challenged them ... Coffee replaced breakfast for many people, but now consumers are looking for something more substantial."

McDonald’s had introduced higher quality coffee blends a few years ago and began selling espresso-based drinks in January.

The drinks, made and served from a special espresso bar, include lattes (espresso and steamed milk) and cappuchinos (espresso, steamed milk and foam) available in flavors such as vanilla, caramel and mocha. The drinks can be served warm or iced.

So far, the beverages are available in at least seven Bay Area locations including three sites in the East Bay on 14th Street in San Leandro, Los Positas Road in Livermore and Pleasanton’s Stoneridge Mall.

The other four are inside Wal-Mart stores in Mountain View, Salinas, San Jose and Gilroy. McDonalds expects all of its stores to offer the drinks by the end of the year.

Coffee experts credit Starbucks for making artisan-brewed coffees and espresso drinks an everyday product for the masses, but later got involved in other aspects of retail including merchandise, music and broader food selections. It introduced a breakfast sandwich in 2005 that it plans to discontinue this summer.

The company’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, has recently vowed to bring Starbucks back to its original mission of serving great coffee.

"What Schultz is saying is that there’s just no way to deliver quality fresh food at that many outlets," said Michaele Weissman, author of the forthcoming book, "God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee."

"The freshness part is hard to pull off. ... The high-end coffee business is so unbelievably complicated and then to become a fast-food restaurant is unbearable. The logistics are so impossible."

Peet’s offers artisan baked goods and that’s it.

"In the case of Peet’s, when you’re exceptionally good at something, you want to be stay focused on what you do best and what customers appreciate and know you for," said Chris Lansing, Peet’s chief marketing officer. "We offer breakfast items that will complement that experience, but not overwhelm the experience."

Weissman explained that for several decades after World War II, most Americans were used to drinking coffee that was poor on taste, but cheap to buy and easy to prepare at home. That changed with gourmet pioneers like Alfred Peet, who started Peet’s Coffee and Tea, and the global expansion of Starbucks Coffee.

"What the whole speciality industry is trying to do is to train and educate consumers in what good coffee tastes like," Weissman said.

Now, many coffee roasters and companies like McDonald’s are trying to capitalize on the growing interest in specialty coffee.

"McDonald’s sees that the growth is in the high-end," Weissman said. "There is an aspirational aspect. There are people who will go into McDonald’s, buy the product and feel like they are stepping up to the next level."

The other part is that equation is whether coffee lovers will love McDonald’s coffee.

Weissman said McDonald’s push to brand itself as a specialty coffee shop will not easily win over consumers or critics.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade-group based in Long Beach, says that specialty coffees "is defined as a coffee that has no defects and has a distinctive flavor in the cup."

Sales of specialty coffee reached $12.3 billion in 2006, the most recent data available, which represents a 48 percent increase compared with $8.3 billion in 2001.

Factors that influence whether coffee can be considered specialty is the region where the beans were grown, how the beans were roasted and how the coffee was prepared for drinking.

In Northern California, McDonald’s coffee supplier is Los Angeles-based Gavina Gourmet Coffee, a family owned-company that has been in business for more than 130 years.

Even if McDonald’s does cultivate a new crop of coffee drinkers or pulls some business from the coffee chains, the additional competition could benefit the industry as a whole.

"Customers who truly love coffee will eventually gravitate to Peet’s," Lansing said. "From the very beginning, Peet’s has always been about sharing, growing and developing this category."

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_9097327

From Ethiopia to Panama to Portland, journalist Weissman shadows today’s vanguard “coffee guys” in their pursuit of the perfect, caffeinated beverage. With increased demand for specialty roasts superior to the mass-marketed offerings at Starbucks, Weissman illustrates how the origin, flavor compounds and socioeconomic impact of a cup of coffee are relevant now more than ever. Alongside industry leaders from some of the U.S.’s top roasters—Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and Stumptown—Weismann treks to the birthplace of coffee, remote plantations, and international competitions where the best coffees in the world are cupped (or tasted), scored and where winners like Panamanian grower Hacienda La Esmeralda’s revered “Geisha” coffee earn $130 per pound. Visiting both ends of the producer-consumer spectrum, she sheds light on the partnership between those who sell premium coffee and the impoverished who farm it—examining how specialty standards enable improved production, exceptional beans, fair prices and fatter pockets across the board. On the imbibing end, Weissman penetrates today’s amped-up coffee culture: its sleek coffee bars, tattooed coffee-geeks behind the counters, fiercely competitive roasters working alongside champion baristas. Tagging along behind the main characters in today’s specialty coffee scene, Weissman travels from the exotic to the expected to artfully deconstruct the connoisseur’s cup of coffee. (May)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6545566.html?q=god+in+a+cup+by+michaele+weissman

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