7 books
Jessica Easto
No espresso in it at all, which is the first thing worth knowing. Easto sticks to manual brewing and covers ten devices — French press, Chemex, V60, AeroPress, siphon, cold brew, the lot — and treats them as variations on…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Anna Brones; Johanna Kindvall
Fika started as slang — Swedes flipped the syllables of kaffe and got fika. It’s a coffee break, but that undersells it. It happens once or twice a day, everywhere, at every workplace, and it’s a verb: You fika with…
Wendy Trusler, Carol Devine
Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young…
Michael Pollan
Four plants, four human desires, and the argument runs backward: The apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato didn’t get domesticated by us so much as they figured out what we wanted and got us to plant them everywhere. Sweetness…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic” and introduced me to Michael Pollan. He tackles four meals, traced all the way back to their sources. There’s a fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to…
James Hoffmann
Hoffmann won the World Barista Championship, and the first third here is the practical part — how coffee grows, what varietals are, the difference washed and natural processing makes in the cup, how roast level actually works, and brewing methods…
