the Barista Underground: Fifty Coffee Drinks Worth Knowing, and Stories Behind Them

Fifty coffee drinks. Fifty stories. One star ingredient. Every drink in this book is made with coffee. Not espresso, not a particular machine, just coffee, brewed however you already brew it. What changes is everything that happens next. On the left page: where the drink came from, who made it first, and what had gone wrong that morning. A pilot in Ireland warming up diverted transatlantic passengers. A Hanoi bartender working around a milk shortage. A Belgian named George Washington who invented instant coffee and let America assume he was the other one. A Greek trade fair exhibitor with no hot water and a shaker. On the right page: the recipe, in plain measurements, that you can make tonight. INSIDE: The originals. Ethiopian buna, Turkish coffee, Yemeni mocha, and the Vienna melange with its siege story that probably is not true. The world tour. Cuban colada, Vietnamese egg coffee, Senegalese Cafe Touba with black pepper in it, Indonesian kopi joss with a burning ember dropped in the glass, and Nordic coffee with cheese in the cup. The spiked ones. Irish coffee, the carajillo, the espresso martini and the exact request that produced it, and a German drink invented specifically to hide rum from a pastor. The cold ones. Greek frappe, dalgona, Sicilian granita, coffee jelly, and the coffee and lemonade combination nobody believes until they try it. Plus flat white, affogato, cascara, cowboy coffee, Scandinavian egg coffee from Lutheran church basements, and the official state drink of Rhode Island. Del "Beans" Berman has ruined an embarrassing number of cups in the name of science. Here he has stopped ruining them and gone looking for where they came from instead. No pretension. No gatekeeping. Nothing here needs an espresso machine, and most of it does not need anything you do not already own. Fifty drinks. Pick one and brew!