Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

Rating:
Summary: Just black ma'am.
Review: Coffee is best just black and smooth tasting, like this wonderful read. The author reveals intriguing information about the history of coffee through the rascals that discovered it, coveted it, and brought the savory bean to the world.

Rating:
Summary: Just black ma'am.
Review: Coffee is best just black and smooth tasting, like this wonderful read. The author reveals intriguing information about the history of coffee through the rascals that discovered it, coveted it, and brought the savory bean to the world.

Rating:
Summary: Far, far better than I thought it would be
Review: I picked this up after being very entertained and informed by Uncommon Grounds. But I didn't read it right away because the text was so old (1934). When I did start reading it I kicked myself for not doing so sooner ... it is excellent.

Nothing has changed in the history of the business of coffee, the trees are still lovingly grown and harvested by hand by the poorest of peoples in the world. And those people still, as the book maps out clearly, live hand to mouth by the cyclic boom and bust of the worldwide supply and demand of the crop.

This is the living story of the commodity, not told like a text book but first hand by a man living through the Nazi/WW2 political aspects of the crop and the Cartels and the mass burnings of entire plantations and the hidden reserves and all the other ways that the supply levels has been manipulated to control the prices and the markets. It does not condemn, it just reports.

In a way, even the current glut of cheap robusta beans from Vietnam is here, because their recent pattern of ignoring the quotas followed by the rest of the coffee countries and their undercutting the prices at the certain real peril of their own citizens was done by other poor countries in the past.

It is a facinating little book for a lover of coffee or of history or of finance... because it is all still going on today. Exactly the way is was going on then.

Recently Mr. Schultz announced ath SBX prices would be going up due to the limited supply as though it was some revelation ... an announcement made by other major controllers through the generations ... while SBX continues to charge $1.50 per shot which is quite a markup from the half cents (or less) that that shot's amount of coffee costs them even after the the import and roasting costs. If you wonder how such statements can be made while SBX still is forcasting record growth... read this book, it's a game that has been played many times before.

Team this with the excellent dvd/video "The Passionate Harvest: Chronicling Coffee Production Around the World" (which you can't yet get from Amazon but can with a google search) and you will look at the ubiquitous beverage in a totaly new way.

btw: I am not against SBX per se, New York Marketing man Schultz and his team of former fast food and soft drink executives are in business to turn profits and they have done it very very well and made customers very happy, breaking the mold by keeping prices higher rather than lower which has been good in many ways for the specialty coffee industry. But after reading this book you will see that the company is a perfect example of the adages "nothing new under the sun" and "it fooled them before, let's do it again" ;-)