Eat All About It

When I first picked up Coffee Love, the new book by Daniel Young, I figured readers would welcome its ’round-the-world anecdotes and succinct nuts and bolts overviews: Storing and roasting beans, selecting a coffeemaker, steaming milk, and so forth. After reading it through, though, I — perhaps slow on the uptake here — realized it’s a resource for making the sort of coffee drinks at home that are usually reserved for coffeehouses or bars or ethnic restaurants. Even for those with home espresso machines (required for some, but not all, of the book’s 50 recipes), it’s rare to find a home kitchen brewing up anything more complicated than a cappucino. If at-home baristas have been waiting for recipes, now they can do anything from a Thai iced coffee to a flambeed Cafe Brulot. 

Young, former restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, kindly answered questions on the book by e-mail from his home in London. Don’t miss his message to Seattle readers and Starbucks haters, at the end:

Q: As we Seattleites like to think the coffee universe revolves around us, I’m glad to see you divide the world (in the book) into pre-Starbucks, Starbucks, and post-Starbucks. But it does beg the question: Where do you see the specialty coffee trade going from here?

A: If the industry follows the geeks, I think the next wave is lowtech.  Up until now, everybody wanted a coffee at home like the one they got in their favorite coffee shop.  Soon they will want a cup at the coffee shop like the one they can have at home. There has been too much coffee technology, too much automation, too much hype about $10,000 brewers. And there’s almost a stigma to the pod machines that do everything except harvest the beans. I see a return to the hands-on, coddling-the-coffee experience that’s possible with a pour-though manual cone filter (Chemex, Melitta), a Japanese vac pot (siphon brewer) or even a Thai coffee “sock” (muslin bag filter).

Q: I’m curious to hear more about how the book came about, and how you researched it.

A: Prior to COFFEE LOVE I co-wrote a Greek-English book FRAPPE NATION, which was less about frappé (the fabulously frothy iced coffee cherished by Greeks) as it was about the culture and lifestyle surrounding it.  I thought it would it would be rewarding to compile the stories and recipes of other national coffees and this evolved into COFFEE LOVE. Much of the research required my visiting coffeehouses in Rome, Milan, Venice, Budapest, London Prague, Vienna and of course Seattle, speaking to experts, then testing coffees, recipes and equipment at home. The travel part of the research goes on, thankfully.

Q: What sort of coffeemaker(s?) do you have at home?

A: I have 1 manual ceramic cone filter, 1 Hario vac pot, 2 moka pots, 3 espresso machines, 1 French press, 1 Vietnamese filter pot.

 Q: If you have the necessary equipment, the recipes aren’t technically difficult. Plenty of them don’t even require special equipment. Any thoughts on why more people don’t make these drinks at home already, instead of regularly, almost automatically, shelling out $5+ apiece?

A: Often you’re getting more for $5 than a coffee. It’s a real estate transaction, too, a prime spot for peoplewatching, Tweeting or escaping work and responsibilities for x amount of minutes. Still, they say that dining in is the new dining out. So hopefully my book will encourage that to happen with coffee.

Q: There’s a lot of personal preference at play when it comes to buying coffee beans… that said, are there any brands you particularly enjoy or would recommend?

A: Were I in Seattle I would support the home teams and buy local (Zoka, Victrola).  I don’t just love their beans. I love the passion of the best microroasters and their sharing their observations and discoveries with you.  The extra expense, per cup, is very small. If you must cut expenses, better to use less shampoo and conditioner in the shower and keep brewing a good Ethiopian coffee.

My message to Seattle readers:  When you travel around the US and the UK or even surf the Web you find so much hatred of and backlash against Starbucks.  It’s an obsession. I did not find much of this at all in Seattle. This pleased me very much because:

(A) Though Starbucks may be ruining the world, as some insist, we do have Starbucks to thank in large part for the vast improvement of coffee in the US.

(B) The Zokas and Victrolas have Starbucks to thank for letting the quality of Starbucks coffees and service deteriorate so. If Starbucks were doing a great job, sourcing and custom roasting the very finest coffees and hiring the most passionate and conscientious baristas, than there would be less demand and business for the indies.

(C) Starbucks may deserve the abuse and it pains me to think of the seas of water they waste every day, but I think the bashing has gotten really boring.