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The pages of All About Coffee are filled with examples that give credence to the cliché, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Ukers also demonstrates that some ideas around what constitutes quality coffee and solid business practices have not evolved over the last 100 years so much as they temporarily devolved in the middle of the 20th century.

In the same way that an increase in consumption of instant coffee coincided with a decrease in the quality and consumption of coffee overall, the subsequent decrease in consumption of instant coffee coincides with the emergence of the specialty coffee industry. One could find some correlation between stabilization and even slight rises in instant coffee consumption and Starbuck’s introducing instant coffee to their product mix in 2009. The company said it had been developing an instant coffee for 20 years. Daily consumption of instant coffee had been nearly cut in half over those 20 years, which could have been interpreted either as an opportunity lost or gained.

Coffee has its share of stories. The prompts in the previous paragraph, some general and some very specific relative to the history of coffee, all mean something to someone. Some of them are more personal than others, meaning something to perhaps only a handful of people or different things to different people.  Some of them mean something to everyone in coffee. And it is only a tiny, tiny sample. The point, and I do have one, is that the facts of the matter are not the thing – the play is the thing, the story.  Even though it is terribly trite, I want to tell you to let it go. Look for the story and not the accuracy because the story will always teach you more than the facts. Don’t Joe Friday the tales you read here. The story is more than a sum of its perceived “facts,” ma’am.

C-Market: The global exchange and price discovery marketplace where coffee is traded daily as a commodity. 54 years ago a new coffee trading contract that used the futures market for Central American coffees (thus the “C” in C-Market) to establish floor prices began to replace the “U-Contract” (Universal Contract). This contract and the exchange system in which it operates is not only a price discovery mechanism but also serves a stabilization function and seeks to standardize trading practices. Sometimes referred to simply as “the market.” One can be forgiven for thinking the “C” actually stands for “complicated.”

Trees were brought from Guatemala to be planted in the southern state of Chiapas in 1847, which would quickly grow to become the second largest producing state behind Veracruz. The state of Oaxaca turned to coffee when the advent of synthetic dyes devastated their cochineal dye industry.  Oaxaca would become the third largest producer of Mexican coffee by 1889.