Words to Coffee By: Non-Coffee Required Reading for Coffee Pros

Before the new year, a couple of folks requested I write out some individual books that shifted the way I think about coffee. This has proven a useful exercise as we get Diaspora up and running, as many of those same books impacted the way I looked at a number of elements in hospitality at large. 

By and large, the coffee reading list is limited: most books popularized are either methods (think Scott Rao) or feel-good boosterism (Good Coffee Time). Promotional books, such as Joe: The Art of Coffee and the Blue Bottle Coffee book are both useful for perspective, pretty to look at, and are very good brand building materials. There are uses for these all, but they are limited; Rao is really providing a single perspective, for example, without being comprehensive; booster books are fine, but they don't contribute an understanding of what we are as an industry. Baristas who read Rao and Pendergrast are doing well, but if we want to better professionalize and create links between baristas and the rest of our industry, we all need to expand what it means to "know coffee". 

Ive been lucky enough to have had a full background in food studies, along with working in kitchens and having access to environments like Omnivore Books and Kitchen Arts & Letters to expand upon the knowledge base. But even living in the co-ops at Cal, I had a full roster of books that helped influence the way I thought about food and cooking. A lot of that goes back into the books that follow: many do not have a direct link to coffee, but the lessons pulled from them are, I think, essential to understanding how to grow in our industry. I limited the list to 5 books, however, there are others; feel free to get in touch via twitter or e-mail to find out others in other specific topcs.

1. Cooking by Hand, by Paul Bertolli. Formerly a lead chef at Chez Panisse and then at Olivetto in Oakland, Cooking by Hand is less a cookbook than a a manual on how to approach thinking about cooking. Items like how to concieve of menu planning in the seasons -- considering weather, available produce, the heaviness or lightness or textures or flavors evolving over the course of a meal -- gave some definite food for thought. He also looks to the long view -- his chapter on aging balsamic vinegar, what it does, what it accomplishes, and how it is distinct from the mass production stuff -- encourages us to take the long view of our products and consider carefully how we address them. It's the culinary equivalent of lessons in mindfulness.

2. The Art of the Restauranteur, by Nick Lander. The author is the food critic at the Financial Times in London, and the book, profiling not chefs but the people who run and manage restaurants, gives an insight into conceptualization and operations and thinking both big and small lens of running a business -- understanding scope, how growth impacts and changes, how to maintain core concept. It's a book of case studies in how to best conceptualize built environments, and doing so without losing focus of the core goal of providing guest-led experiences. This is an especially important book for owner-operators who don't understand how to produce a coherent experience or environment from the various elements at play in their business plans, which leads to....

3. The Lapsed Anarchists Approach to Building a Great Business and other titles by Ari Weinzweig. The books put out as part of the Zing-Train management course from Zingermans in Ann Arbor, MI, have been some of the most useful exercises for day-to-day operations. Ive used the exercises in this book specifically with consulting clients in order to understand one thing: management does not survive on fiat. Just because you are an owner does not mean your rule is absolute, especially when it comes into conflict with your proposed values. Systems, operations and communications can be derived from strongly written mission statements and visioning exercises that make transparent the values underlying your organization. And places that are successfully able to do that retain staff, build clienteles, and have strong brand-currency that you cannot find if you believe in branding making up for bad product and form. It also includes the most valuable lessons from Danny Meyer's "Setting the Table", which while a fine book is also filled with a lot of fluff. This book and its siblings serve you better, not only as business owners, but as professional baristas attempting to set your own long-term goals and core values in work environments.

4. On Sweetness and Power, by Sidney Mintz. Coffee does not exist in a vacuum. The modern worlds relationship with it goes back hundreds of years and our relationships with coffee growers are still connected to a painful history. This book, which covers the growth and spread of sugar plantations and slavery in the New World, paints the picture that most modern commodities of the tropics -- coffee, sugar, cocoa and tea -- are connected with to this day. If you have people wonder why moving beyond the C-market, or moving people away from quick consumption, or specialty coffees obligation to changing consumption patterns matter, read this book.

5. On the Wine Trail, by Kermit Lynch. Coffee is also a product of dozens of moving parts, yet we focus on very few -- faddish things like varietal seperation or non-local processing methods don't match the big picture of what things matter on the production side. While the wine to coffee analogy doesn't always hold up, the nature of finding and encouraging good coffee, understanding the ecological, biological, and processing and transport mechanisms of coffee are better understood after reading about the various interactions Lynch has travelling through France. It's also a fantastic book for understanding the importance of place and encouraging small producers to excell, because if they aren't making money, there won't be anyone producing good coffee in the future.

*6. The Taste of Place, by Amy Trubek. Suprise! I tacked on one, which wraps up those last two books very cleanly and succinctly. See, Trubek specializes in researching on terroir and its economics, and its impact. And more than anything else, she is comprehensive in her understanding of what the concept means ecologically, economically, historically and (most relevant) socially. If baristas cannot understand the context of terroir both locally -- within the cultures of consumption in which they most directly participate -- and globally -- the context and actions of the trade networks and what they mean at origin -- then a lot of what we do, talking about direct trade, or specialty coffee, or what it means to change consumption patterns, doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot. Ultimately, specialty coffee, to me, means breaking away from conventional commodity consumption at large and at home, and building new economic and social patterns. There is a lot wrong with modern consumption patterns, and this book provides some clues as the ways we, within our industry, can rectify it.

(Also see: The Life and Death of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, Food Justice by Gottlieb & Joshi, The Oxford Compendium on Wine by Jancis Robinson, The Ethics of the Way We Eat by Peter Singer, & Miguel Altieri's research on agroecology, for a start.)