I’ve been drinking coffee for years, but I never really knew much about what I put into my cup until last year. I only knew that I liked the taste and that it kept me awake.
In the last year, I’ve read every blog and a few books along the way, learning anything that I could about coffee. I don’t want to be one of those coffee snobs, but I wouldn’t mind being an expert. Don’t worry, I’m keeping it real, earlier I headed over to Wendy’s to “analyze” their Coffee Toffee for tomorrow’s blog post.
The first book on my reading list was “The Perfect Cup: A Coffee Lover’s Guide To Buying, Brewing, And Tasting” by Timothy James Castle. He’s the president of a specialty coffee importer in Santa Monica, California, but has the ability to translate the technical and complex coffee world into English. Even an average joe coffee drinker like me could understand and even enjoy it so much that I didn’t want to put the book down until I finished all two hundred plus pages.
“The Perfect Cup” covers everything that I wanted to know about how to taste coffee, the vocabulary and the different ways that it’s made. He goes into where coffee is from, how it’s grown and how it’s turned into the drink that we enjoy every morning.
The book was published in 1991, so some of it’s out of date, but overall, it’s an informative book for anyone that wants to know more about coffee.
The only part of the book that was dramatically affected by that was the section “How To Buy Coffee And Whom To Buy It From.” He talks about various coffee shops, interviews their owners and the information is pretty dated in some cases. An example is when he writes about Starbucks, which had only 63 stores in a few cities at the time it was printed. They now have something like 15,000 locations across the world.
The section is a little too long to the point where it becomes redundant and makes me jealous of all of the coffee places he’s been. After a few stories, I felt like I knew what the next owner was going to say even before I read it. It’s really the only part that dragged and made me want to skip ahead.
However, the coffee recipes that come later in the book, make up for it. I really need to set aside sometime to try the Cappuccino Muffins and make the Coffee Burgers..
If you’re looking for book to expand your coffee knowledge, I’d check out this book.
Buy it from Amazon for a little more than $13 bucks new or as little as a penny used.
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