WHERE THE WILD COFFEE GROWS
The Untold Story of Coffee From the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup
By Jeff Koehler
268 pp. Bloomsbury. $28.
Once upon a time, there was a tiny kingdom in the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia where coffee grew wild in the forests. This realm was protected by its trees and its animals, or so the people of Kafa believed. They were ruled by a king whose feet were not allowed to touch the ground, who was hand-fed by servants, morsel by morsel, and who had, among the symbols of his power, a gold ring. Koehler’s re-creation of this lost realm — the Eden of the misnamed Coffea Arabica — is enchanting and tragic. His depiction of its disappearance is almost Tolkienesque. Kafa would be engulfed in the late 19th century by the Ethiopian empire, whose soldiers, armed with European guns, would not be repelled by Kafa’s unusual weapons: red ants and bees hurled at the invading forces. The last king, on his way to imprisonment in Addis Ababa, takes off his ring and slips it into a river, where it is lost forever.
Koehler weaves an absorbing narrative of politics, ecology and economics: the spread of Arabica (which should have been known as Aethiopica) to farms and plantations around the world, and the continuing perils it faces from fungal invasions, deforestation and global warming. There are cameo appearances by Isak Dinesen and Arthur Rimbaud, both part of Africa’s coffee trade — her farm in Kenya, his post-poetry career. There is one more poetic touch: The dangers the plant now faces may be mitigated by the surviving wild coffee of Kafa, which still holds, deep in its forests, the ring of power in the form of primal yet diverse genetic material.
BY THE SMOKE & THE SMELL
My Search for the Rare & Sublime on the Spirits Trail
By Thad Vogler
291 pp. Ten Speed Press. $27.
You can learn practical things from this book — like how to smell Cognac. If you dip your nose in the glass the way you sniff wine, you’ll overwhelm the olfactory cells linked to your taste buds. Bring the spirit only close enough so you can just sense the aroma, appreciating its qualities from a distance. There’s nothing distant or pedantic, however, about Vogler’s bracing, deeply personal narrative of his travels through the homelands of Calvados, Cognac, Armagnac, rum, scotch and mezcal, in search of the soul of those spirits.
The author is the owner of Bar Agricole — a restaurant with perhaps the most exacting standards for spirits in San Francisco — and has ambitions for the book beyond aesthetics. The adventures he and his drinking companions share in search of liquid truth are argonautic, with sleepless labors in France, labyrinthine exertions in Cuba and one near cataclysmic encounter in Mexico. He cites a friend who describes the magic of the drinks they seek: “That’s why they call them spirits. They are freed to the heavens in the form of vapor, an escaped essence, only to be recaptured and brought back to earth.” Vogler’s stories are heartfelt, wise and moving, if occasionally overwrought. He is particularly worked up about human greed. The tragic theme he repeats is of the consolidation of small distilleries bought up by soulless corporations. It’s an infernal reversal of the biblical begats as scores of artisanal enterprises with names out of poetry are swallowed — big gulp by big gulp — by giants who turn them into brands bereft of authenticity.
Continue reading the main storyMIRACLE BREW
Hops, Barley, Water, Yeast and the Nature of Beer
By Pete Brown
279 pp. Chelsea Green. Paper, $19.95.
Brown considers only four elements in his peripatetic exposition on beer but each is examined to the molecular level. Thankfully, he leavens his magisterial tour of fearsome science and vast brewery history with cheery anecdotes, humor, vivid you-are-there prose and a clever eye for personality — or its absence — among the many experts he meets. At one point, he even has the perky spokeswoman of a maltster in Bamberg, Germany, provide her spiel in the Comic Sans typeface.
Malting is how beermakers trick barley into germinating, beginning the process of turning their starches to sugar, at which point they will be introduced to water and yeast. It’s yeast that transforms those sugars into alcohol. We become familiar with the two main types: Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae for short, the more sober of the duo) and Brettanomyces (a.k.a. “Brett,” a wilder character) and their roles in creating rival types of beer. Brown’s descriptions of the beermaking process are acute: You feel his pain as he harvests hops with bare arms and realizes that their sharp little tendrils have created a network of red welts.
His rhapsodies about the meaning of life and the meaning of beer are stirring. It’s “something of a cosmic joke,” he concludes, that a beverage as complex and beautiful as beer is so cheap and “taken for granted.” His expertise and insight will leave you with a glimmer of infinity every time you hold a bottle of it in your hand.
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY WINES
Exploring Wine One Country at a Time
By Mike Veseth
217 pp. Rowman & Littlefield. $24.95.
A wine book with Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” as its dominant metaphor may seem like a clever idea, one that should provide scaffolding for the many narratives that can emerge from a global wine tour. Veseth’s breathless text does have a good share of observations worth sharing or debating at a cocktail party: the gender of wine bottles, Bordeaux (masculine) and Burgundy (feminine); the origins of the global natural wine movement in 20th-century Lebanon; a Chinese riesling that won an international wine award in 1915, when grape-based wine was still a novelty in that country; how port inspired David Ricardo’s classic economic tract on free trade.
The book, however, is too much possessed by the galloping spirt of Phileas Fogg, the hero of Verne’s novel, and those points of interest become mere factoids, just signposts pointing in other directions as Veseth rushes you forward to satisfy the metaphor. The wines in the title are an intriguing assemblage, but few are examined in a satisfying way. It’s a collection of bottles meant to satisfy the title’s conceit and results in a frustrating reading experience. Add to it the narrative voice: that of an almost giddy sommelier expressing himself with too many exclamation points and rhetorical question marks. When Verne published his novel in 1873, 80 days was an impossibly short time to circumnavigate the planet. It turns out that haste isn’t the most gratifying way to explore the complex world of wine that Veseth is so clearly excited about.
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