INTRODUCTION
Coffee, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!Coffee is nothing new. Humans have been enjoying it steadily since the sixteenth century, and its origin story goes back millennia. Chances are you grew up drinking it, and have memories of how everyone in your your family liked to take theirs—cream or no cream, maybe honey, as a breakfast table staple or weekend afternoon snack with cookies. But in the last decade something special has happened to this age-old beverage: a new boom of quality and entrepreneurship (embodied by pioneering coffee companies like Stumptown and Blue Bottle) has been met by a great wave of public interest and enthusiasm, leading to an unmistakable new golden era for coffee lovers worldwide. Coffee tastes better and means more than it ever has. There have never been more ways to drink it and brew it, and coffee’s place in our society gets bigger every day.
Wherever you live on the planet, chances are there’s a new place serving coffee in your neighborhood. That’s not an accident—it’s part of something much bigger.
Thus,
The New Rules of Coffee. We hope this book can serve as a helpful primer to the wonders of modern coffee, while paying respects to the beverage’s past and looking ahead to the future. Whether you’re enjoying a pumpkin spice latte or a delicate AeroPress of rare, exotic Wush Wush (that’s a coffee cultivar), it has never been a better time to be a coffee drinker—and a coffee lover.
We’ve spent the last decade at Sprudge reporting on coffee every day through stories big and small, from our homes in Portland, Oregon, and from cafes, coffee farms, and coffee festivals around the world. We work with hundreds of journalists all across the planet, chasing coffee stories wherever we can find them, and over the years, we’ve learned a thing or two about coffee along the way. We’re sharing everything with you in the pages that follow.
With these fifty-five rules, we’re dishing it all to you: from advice and travel tips to background information on what coffee actually is and why it matters now more than ever. And while we’re sure this book will be responsible for kicking off a new coffee obsession or two, we hope above all else that it brings you a little bit of satisfaction, a moment of enjoyment, a chance perhaps to laugh and wonder—not unlike a nice cup of coffee.
Copyright © 2018 by Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
