Specialty coffee shops are percolating more than ever: You almost forget: What's brewing is an old industry.

By Rebecca Gray

"Nice extraction," Barth Anderson says kindly, complimenting his business partner Gregg Charbonneau. Happily for me the two are not dentists but coffee roasters, the extraction not a tooth but an exceptional cup of espresso. The three of us are standing reverently before the chrome-plated espresso machine at the far end of Barrington Coffee Roasting Company's roasting room in Barrington, Massachusetts. Gregg is grinding freshly roasted Indian beans and filling the machine's metal filter cup, turning water pressure knobs, drawing liquid through to the spigot and into a cup, then dumping both grounds and coffee into a trash bin.

He repeats the process three times, discards what looks quite acceptable to me, then hands each of us a demitasse of deep, rich elixir foamed over with a creamy chestnutcolored froth - termed the crema, it is the mark of perfectly extracted espresso. Its taste is exquisite, a testament to Barth's and Gregg's expertise and attention to detail; and perhaps more, the intense flavor manifests a new (old?) way of thinking about coffee drinking - and is part of what's putting the jolt back into the coffee business.

In the 1970s Americans consumed about half of the world's coffee output and 75 percent of Americans over the age of 10 drank coffee; by 1990 that figure had dropped down to 50 percent and probably would have continued its decline through the decade if it were not for the specialty coffee people. The Specialty Coffee Association of America reports that there were about 2,000 specialty coffee retailers in 1990, and more than 11,000 by the end of 1995.

Of course, way out in front of the specialty pack is the $465 million a-year Starbucks, whose most phenomenal growth came in the l990s; earnings grew ten times through 1991 alone and sales were up 63 percent in 1995. Starbucks had started in the 1970s as a microroaster selling dark roast coffee beans (some roasters fondly call them "Charbucks"), then ten years ago they began taking to coffee cafes, airport kiosks, and historic register hotels to educate a whole baby-boomer generation about latte, cappuccino, and full city roast coffee. We didn't just learn to walk the walk and talk the coffee talk with Starbucks; more importantly we began to pay attention to all the elements that must precisely blend to make a great cup of coffee: aroma, agricultural heritage, quality-control, the art of identifying and accentuating flavors and, of course, the "buzz."

Coffee has always had a unique edge over the world's other taste sensations: caffeine. Such an advantage is borne out in the legend of its very discovery when in 844 AD an Arabian goatsman noticed that his goats were friskier after chewing on the berries of a certain small shrub growing on the hillsides of Ethiopia.

The stimulant's druglike qualities would continue to pervade its history as in 1601 when the English adventurer Anthony Sherley brought coffee back from his Persian expedition and introduced it to London Society, where it sold for 5 pounds an ounce - a price worthy of any preferred pharmaceutical. And 50 years later coffee ads boasted that the beverage could cure scurvy, gout, and other maladies.

In 1807 Napoleon had his troops drink coffee rather than alcohol as a stimulant, until British troops cut off imports and the coffeeklatched French troops were obliged to mix their eversmaller coffee supply with chicory. War would later cause another coffee panic: In World War II the hoarding of it in the United States would lead to coffee rationing, as citizens were limited to one pound every five weeks - not a lot, but perhaps enough to keep them alert and awake.

We are indeed awake - and we're smelling the coffee. Coffee aroma is one of the more distinctive and vital attributes of coffee and helps define its taste. In an attempt to understand coffee aroma, Colombia's (second to Brazil in coffee production) National Coffee Growers' Federation commissioned a team of French researchers to categorize the world's top coffees according to their woody, fruity, vegetable, spicy, toasted, and animal aromas, much the way wines are categorized. The 1997-8 project, titled, "Le Nez du Cafe" ("A Nose for Coffee") identified 36 signature smells of the finest coffees. One of the researchers wrote, "As coffee is the aromatic belt of the world, nothing was more logical than to compose - using these 36 notes of olfactory music - a symphony for five continents." For many, the rich coffee smell summons a pleasant memory - breakfast

with a favorite grandfather; a cool, starry night around a campfire - and, as the words of this professional sniffer imply, a whiff can also conjure the exotic places of a bean's origin.

The global coffee-growing belt stretches from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. Coffee came to the Western Hemisphere in 1723 when a French Naval officer, Gabriel-Mathieu de Clieu, stole a seedling from the French Jardin Royale and then made his way to Martinique, sharing his water ration with the plant on his long sea journey. That one seedling was to become the ancestor to most of the coffee bushes in the Americas - and the American coffee industry would eventually produce 90 percent of the world's coffee.

Coffee plants must have a cool dry season and warm rainy season, so equatorial, subtropical countries are optimal for growing. The finest coffee, coffea arabica - named for its original fifteenth-century promoters, the Arabs - grows best at an altitude of between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. Coffea robusta, the dominant bean used in canned blends, can grow at sea level, is cheaper and hardier, but lacks in depth of flavor when compared to the arabica bean. Invariably, the best coffees come from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Kenya. Jamaican "Blue" and Hawaiian Kona Coffee (Hawaii is the only state to grow coffee) have earned goldstandard reputations, too, unfortunately with price tags to match - so valuable in price that "counterfeit" scams have arisen.

Price has affected much of the world's attitude towards coffee. The British turned to tea as their favorite beverage and caffeine source when it was determined that one pound could yield up to 200 cups. This made it more affordable than coffee - except for the colonists who'd had a tea tax imposed; the high price of tea incited protest not only in the 1773 Boston Tea Party but also in the form of a campaign to increase Americans' coffee intake. Bostonians were already great coffee drinkers and could claim the first colonial coffeehouse, ironically named the London Coffee House, opened in 1639. Yet, coffee would do an admirable job in its attempts to replace tea and liquor. By 1851 coffee consumption would soar to six-and-a-half pounds per average capita - in 1821 it was one-and-a-half-pounds - as alcohol was replaced by coffee stimulants in support of prohibitionist sentiment. Then in 1869 disaster struck: The coffee rust, Hamileia vastatrix, appeared in Ceylon and spread across the Orient. The sky-high coffee prices destroyed the coffee industry, and tea cultivation replaced the bean's propagation there - and foreshadowed what could happen to coffee consumption when natural disasters forced high prices. "Black frost" would decimate Brazil's coffee bushes first in 1975 and then again in 1994; not coincidentally the 20-year span when consumption dropped 25 percent. However, Corby Kummer suggests in his book, The Joy of Coffee, an additional factor in coffee's decline - and an explanation for the explosion of the specialty coffee industry: Understanding that higher prices meant lower consumption, the big commercial coffee companies used more of the cheaper robusta beans to keep prices down. The coffee cost less, but its taste suffered, too. As a result, consumers scurried to soft drinks as their beverage choice (in the United States, coffee drinking was surpassed by soft drinks in 1975); except for those who knew about the good stuff. They figured out how to identify, develop, and promote great coffee and found that people would pay for taste.

Back at Barrington, Barth stood with me in front of the roasting machine. Laying across it was a board holding handle-less white cups and small roundbowled spoons. "This has a bit less acidity, more body though, don't you think?" He was discussing a "cupping." Like a wine tasting, a cupping has a protocol for determining coffee flavors and is used by professionals in the business to evaluate a sample of beans. It involves pouring hot water over ground coffee, "breaking the crust" - or plunging the spoon through the floating coffee grounds - closely smelling the coffee, then removing the crust and loudly and emphatically slurping the coffee from the spoon so as to spray it over as many taste buds as possible. Finally you're supposed to spit the coffee out. All quite impolite, of course, but it works.

You can truly taste the differences in the beans - we sample a Costa Rican, Sumatran, and a Jamaican Blue Mountain. The color of the roast was perceptible, too - there was cinnamon, city, and a French roast to test (from lightest to darkest the roasts are commonly termed: cinnamon, city, full-city, Vienna, Italian, and French). Yet what the cupping ultimately revealed of flavor went well beyond the color of the roast or the bean's origin to reach the art involved in roasting coffee beans.

Green or raw coffee is unroasted, the flavor locked inside. Heat is what releases the flavor complexities, but the application of fire to beans can accentuate or destroy the flavors. It requires skill and a sense of art - with the roasting ranging precisely between 12 and 16 minutes - and demands a knowledgeable eye and nose to determine readiness. As with any art, what you like is a matter of taste; and many of us have developed our own idiosyncratic preferences in coffee. The roaster becomes the maestro and collaborator in fulfilling the coffee flavor quest. As we have grown from the relative charbucks sameness, it's not surprising that the number of microroasters has grown from 400 to 1,400 in just ten years.

"Do you like the lemon taste of the Costa Rican? Or the body in the Sumatran?" Barth tries to analyze my preferences. He is an accommodating roaster. And when I arrive home from Barrington and find tucked amongst some coffee paraphernalia a small surprise package of Jamaican Blue, I know I've been revealed through just a cup of coffee. But, oh, what a cup of coffee!

REBECCA GRAY drank four lattes and an espresso to get this column turned in on time.

© Copyright 2002 US Airways Attaché.

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