James Hoffmann (1)

A solid, commonsense guide to the world of coffee and coffee-making (focusing mainly on pour-over devices, french press, and espresso machines). Provides a lot of background about coffee roasting practices, brewing considerations and the like. However, Hoffman recognizes that there is a lot of pretentious bullshit surrounding the world of coffee-based drinks and so he repeatedly offers useful base-line approaches with an emphasis, ultimately, on making the kind of coffee that will satisfy you personally--but being able to do that consistently. Even as someone who is relatively experienced in making different types of coffee drinks over the years I still learned some valuable lessons. He also busts a lot of myths (the origin of the Americano, for example). The illustrations could be a little better and many of the images are not captioned, so it often isn't clear what exactly you are looking at. A solid intro text, but of limited repeat use, I would suspect.… (meer)

A fascinating book for any coffee lover!

Half of the book is dedicated to the coffee-related history, processes and preparation methods while another half focuses on particular countries growing coffee.

I think that the book stands for its name - "The World Atlas of Coffee". Well illustrated, painstakingly explaining every step from coffee history and tree types to the cup. Reading hardcopy is a pleasure because of its superb quality (even book cover resembles a coffee bean bag material).

Highly recommended for those, who consider coffee to be way more than the following quote from the book (it is lovely to notice the author's aversion to commodity coffees):

[...] a generic product from somewhere tropical; an efficient, if bitter, way to get caffeine into the bloodstream and to clear the mind in the morning.

… (meer)