When I was growing up, those who really loved coffee
would wait for that moment when they were opening
the vacuum-sealed can.
My father would call me, a toddler,
into the kitchen and say
"It's time! We're gonna break the seal."
And I would put my nose up to the can
and that was the big coffee moment.
"We Americans know what we like,
and we really do like coffee."
And that was coffee that we wanted and needed and loved.
But it was just coffee.
You have to give Starbucks credit for talking about Tararua--making a geography of coffee
available to people.
Coffee is a cherry. It actually is a beautiful, red, sweet cherry.
That cherry has fruit-ish flavors, of course, it's a fruit.
And inside is the thing they call the coffee bean.
And so much is added to it--the cream, the sugars, the flavoring--it sort of masks the
coffee flavor.
And now what people are drinking is almost like a sweetened, creamy beverage
with a coffee flavoring to it.
People drink coffee because it's a stimulant.
I mean, that's why when they wake up, they wake up to a pot of coffee not a pot of apple juice.
As you know, when you suddenly become excited a material called cyclic amp is released
and the cyclic amp tells all sorts of machinery in the cell to get moving.
On the other hand, there is also a natural mechanism
which comes in and says "Okay, you've made enough cyclic amp, enough."
Now the caffeine molecule--I give you a picture of it here--what caffeine does is it inhibits
this reaction.
It allows cyclic amp to continue to be made.
That is why it's a stimulant.
There probably have been waves in coffee drinking in America.
Post-war coffee in America, for most people, was instant coffee at home.
The second wave might've begun with Starbucks.
The third wave is a kind of refinement of what Starbucks gave us--really paying attention
to the sources of the beans,
really paying special attention to the roast.
And it is a craft.
Hi, my name's Ryan.
Welcome to my coffee shop.
I'm the manager here.
I'm gonna make a cup of coffee right now using something called a v60.
Making a v60 is really pretty simple.
It requires a paper filter, a glass cone, some coffee and some hot water.
Some people refer to it as the coffee ceremony, a ritualized making of coffee.
You will see the person grinding the coffee right before it's served and you start pouring.
In a spiral in and a spiral out and a spiral in and a spiral out.
It bells up and then settles. It's beautiful.
So what I made for you today is called an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe.
It's one of the earliest known coffee growing regions in the world.
Coffee expertise is growing among young people.
There's definitely a strong lemon scent to it, even maybe a mire lemon.
It's kind of a cheap luxury, coffee.
Almost like a training ground for young people to learn connoisseurship of anything.
I'm a gastronomy student and we certainly talk about tasting a lot.
What you taste in a cup of coffee is culturally defined and it's defined by what you've experienced
in your life and tasted before.
So everyone is gonna see different things in it, and that's what makes it interesting.
There's a lot of ways in which coffee has been playing out American themes--class themes,
culture themes.
Everybody's got their coffee.
Nobody has to be better than anybody else, it's yours after all.
It's just your coffee.