The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coffee and Tea

If you've ever wanted to know everything there is to know about coffee and tea, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coffee & Tea is certainly a good resource. From growing locations to harvesting methods, processing to transport, home-roasting to blending, and even the best way to pull a shot of espresso, Travis Arndorfer and Kristine Hansen explore the world of these gourmet beverages from start to finish.

For sheer volume and completeness of information this book is a winner; I learned an incredible amount of wonderful history and useful information from it. For liveliness of writing--an important consideration in the long-running "Complete Idiot's Guides" line, which strives to make often-complex subjects accessible to the general public--it does a solid job, although it's hard to go step-by-step through the complexities of pulling espresso, properly tamping grounds, and cleaning an espresso machine without things getting a tad boring.

I have only one major reservation regarding this book, and it was enough to bring my rating down a bit. The authors manage to convey the impression through all of their detailed information that unless you're buying incredibly fresh beans, grinding them with an expensive grinder, brewing them with an expensive brewer, and preferably roasting green beans yourself in small batches with your own roaster, then you're simply not drinking good coffee. I honestly couldn't look through their recommendations and find a middle ground that I'd consider affordable that they'd consider drinking good coffee.

Given the typical market of the CIG books, this seems incongruous. It's one thing to tell you how to spend incrementally more depending on your budget and time available to get the most out of your coffee experience, but this book makes it seem like no one except wealthy, semi-retired folks or professionals who do this for a living can make "good" coffee. That's a shame, because I think it's likely to make a good handful of readers throw up their hands and say "well, if I can't do it right, why bother to go beyond my normal cheap cup and explore any of this at all?"

If you have an interest in the details of coffee and tea I do recommend that you pick up this book. Just make sure you're willing to be a little stubborn in putting aside the authors' overly-restrictive definitions of good coffee, and go with what you feel up to.Get more detail about The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coffee and Tea.