All About Learning Coffee
Over the holidays we read a stack of enthusiast, roaster-written, and history books about coffee—not company records, but context for how we talk about brewing in the 2010s next to the Hoffmann–Hayman archive.
Titles
Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival (2003) by Kenneth Davids
The Art and Craft of Coffee: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Selecting, Roasting, and Brewing Exquisite Coffee (2010) by Kevin Sinnott
The Coffeeist Manifesto: No More Bad Coffee! (2012) by Steven D. Ward
The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes (2012) by James Freeman
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (2010) by Mark Pendergrast
Family stories talk about coffee at a friend’s table in childhood, but the first clear memories for this project are Styrofoam cups with powdered creamer, college nights with diner coffee, and a software team that used afternoon Starbucks for design reviews. A first good cup in Las Vegas and later a trip to Jamaica and Blue Mountain register before the factory collection became the main focus.
What the set keeps repeating:
- Glass carafes on hot plates are a weak default for quality.
- Buy whole beans in small amounts.
- The grinder is the most important piece of equipment.
- Insulated serving beats leaving coffee on a burner.
We focused next on better drip and pour-over at home; siphon and espresso stayed on the later list. A month-by-month whole-bean subscription ran in parallel with the reading list to give the books something fresh to calibrate against.
