Starbucks may not have invented the status latte, but as Mark Pendergrast documents in his book “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World” (Basic Books, $30), Seattle’s caffeine kings did much to reposition coffee as a chic, upscale refreshment. That’s just one subplot to Pendergrast’s sprawling 522-page history of the beverage that, along with oil, ranks as one of the world’s two most valuable traded commodities.
Pendergrast, the Vermont author of books about Coca-Cola and recovered memory, considers coffee from a wide variety of angles, from the seriously sociopolitical to the purely whimsical. He was quizzed at a Boston bookstore and coffeehouse.
Q. Why coffee?
A. “Coffee is really just the pit of a tree that grows wild in Ethiopia. It’s a non-nutritional substance and the world’s most widely taken psychoactive drug. Yet every time the price of coffee climbs precipitously, we hold governmental hearings on who’s to blame. How and why coffee became so valuable involves a lot of interesting characters, issues and locations. Coffee is a perfect way, for instance, to look at the troubled relationship between Latin America and North America.”
Q. Did you know much about coffee before this project?
A. “Not really. I didn’t write this book because I was a coffee nut; I became a coffee nut because I wrote this book. The coffee I first drank, when I was in college, was terrible stuff. It was typical of America in the 1950s, when everything was `modern’ and `instant,’ including instant coffee. Back then the technology was so poor that it didn’t matter whether processors used good beans or bad beans. Naturally they used bad beans–robusta beans, not the superior arabica variety–because they were cheaper. At the same time, housewives were brewing their coffee weaker in order to save money. So for a long time most Americans were brewing swill and drinking dishwater.”
Q. What makes a good cup of coffee?
A. “The four key elements are taste, aroma, body and acidity. Acidity does not refer to pH levels, incidentally, but to snap or brightness on the palate. It’s rare to find a coffee variety that balances all four in one cup, which explains why a lot of coffees have to be blended to be much good. Two of the best are Jamaican Blue Mountain and Hawaiian Kona. Guatemalan Antigua and Costa Rican Tarrazu are also excellent and don’t cost as much.”
Q. The most exotic coffee?
A. “Well, the most expensive coffee I’ve run across is Kopi Luwak coffee, which costs $300 a pound and is highly prized in Indonesia. The reason it costs so much is because the bean or pit is harvested from luwak poop. It literally travels through the gut of the civet cat and comes out the other end. I didn’t care for the taste much. I’ve described it elsewhere as `gutsy,’ which I’m rather proud of.”
Q. Why do you devote so many pages to the geopolitics of coffee production?
A. “Coffee by definition grows in some of the world’s most beautiful places, tropical paradises like Guatemala and Costa Rica that are also incredibly poor places. And while it’s grown in almost universally poor places, it’s consumed in almost universally wealthy places. The irony that we can drink a $3 latte and be paying the equivalent of the daily wage for a Central American coffee picker is a profound one, in my view. I’m wary of knee-jerk liberalism. I did not begin my research assuming that the evil North has been exploiting the poor old South. But, in fact, that’s pretty much the case.
“I should add that there’s nothing the matter with coffee per se. It’s a perfectly nice product. I just wish it were not such a troubled industry that presents so many problems for the people who rely on it for their living.”
Q. Are there varieties of coffee that are both good for the palate and good for the soul, politically speaking?
A. ” `Fair trade’ coffee strikes me as a good idea. To be labeled as such means growers are guaranteed at least $1.26 a pound for processed green beans. Right now the billing rate is about $1 a pound, which is terrible. Unfortunately, there’s not a huge market there yet. Shade-grown coffee is another. This is coffee grown under a shade canopy, which provides an important habitat for migratory birds. Too often growers have been cutting down shade trees to grow inferior coffee, a double-edged disaster.”
Q. Who or what changed Americans’ attitude toward coffee, specifically our appreciation of good coffee?
A. “Alfred Peet did more than anyone. Peet came along in the ’60s, when there were small bastions of other specialty roasters around but none quite like Peet. A cult developed around his Berkeley store. He became an enormous influence on others in the business, including George Howell, who started the Coffee Connection in Boston, and Jerry Baldwin and pals, who started Starbucks in 1971 and later bought out the Coffee Connection.
“It’s amazing what Starbucks has done. … Starbucks sells a lifestyle, not just a beverage. If you drink their coffee, it means you’re hip and intelligent and believe in good causes. I criticize them for some things, like their tendency to open new outlets next to locally owned businesses. But they deserve a lot of credit too.”
Q. You contend that a lot of coffee advertising has been misguided in the past. How so?
A. “It’s been too negative and defensive. When Postum came along, the message was, `Our coffee doesn’t give you coffee nerves.’ That’s dumb. Chase & Sanborn had a cartoon ad that began with a husband throwing hot coffee on his wife because the coffee’s no good. In the last panel, she’s wearing a catcher’s mitt and a shield. Really, what kind of a message is that? There was this sexist theme going that if you don’t make good coffee, your husband will divorce you. Or beat you. It continued with Folger’s Mrs. Olson and Maxwell House’s Aunt Cora, played by Margaret Hamilton–a fine actress otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West. General Foods picked Robert Young to sell Sanka. Its message: Coffee makes you irritable and ruins your marriage.
“The Juan Valdez campaign and Taster’s Choice ads, on the other hand, have been both clever and effective.”
Q. What have you learned from your own research?
A. “I make my coffee properly now, in a French press pot that mixes the coffee directly with the water and then separates the grounds by plunger. And, of course, I use only arabica beans, freshly ground.
“I’ve even gotten into roasting my own beans at home. All you need is a little aluminum pan with holes in it. You roast the beans in a 450-degree oven for about 11 minutes. If you can make cookies, you can roast coffee.”
