Coffee Table Book of: Coffee (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Coffee is a large-format coffee table book about coffee, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two. It follows coffee from cherry to cup: the plant, the farm, the harvest, the roast, the brew and the old coffeehouse.

It opens with the coffee plant: a branch crowded with small white star-shaped flowers, a honeybee at the blossom, cherries ripening from green through yellow and orange to crimson, and a cherry cut open to show its two pale seeds.

Then the harvest: a woven basket brimming with red cherries, cherries sunk in a tank of clear water with a few afloat, beans raked into long furrows on a drying yard, whole cherries drying on raised mesh tables, beans glistening with a sticky amber coat of fruit pulp, and stacks of plain burlap sacks in an old warehouse.

Then roasting and grinding: an old roasting machine of dark iron in a brick-walled room, beans roasting in an iron pan over charcoal, a ring of small heaps running from raw green to nearly black, an old wooden box mill, and a brass Turkish mill beside coffee as fine as powder.

Then brewing: a white pour-over cone over a glass carafe, a glass siphon above a spirit lamp, a French press, a moka pot over a low blue flame, a copper cezve in a tray of hot sand, a black clay jebena on a straw ring, a brass dallah with a beaked spout, a tall slow-drip tower, and an enamel percolator over a campfire by a lake.

Then the cup: a latte with a leaf-shaped rosetta, a cappuccino dusted with cocoa, Turkish coffee with rose-pink Turkish delight, iced coffee swirled with milk, an affogato, a bowl of cafe au lait beside a croissant, and an Irish coffee by a rain-streaked window.

Toward the end, still lifes and close studies: a heap of glossy roasted beans, a cup on a rainy windowsill, the dried ring of a spilled drop on pale marble, a cup among cardamom, cinnamon and star anise, and the crema of an espresso seen from above.

Short notes run through the book; none is a recipe. They are about coffee rather than about the pictures: what brings a coffee farm into flower all at once, why coffee beans darken as they roast, who registered a paper coffee filter in 1908, and how long cold brew steeps.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.