Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation Read Online Free Page A

and BB-pellet clang of his coffee roasting and packing plant. “Entire generations grew up drinking an absolutely terrible product you could only tolerate by masking the taste with lots of milk and sugar.”
    Isais is showing off his caffeinated domain as he speaks, a business launched back in 1963 on the then-novel notion that java could and should be better than the traditional big cans of brown grounds on the supermarket shelves. As he watches, the latest batch of Costa Rican Tarrazu tumbles out of one of the giant Probat roasting machines with a sound like pounding rain, 600 pounds of beans cooked to 400 degrees for 13 minutes, give or take a few very critical seconds. The roast time varies from one coffee variety to the next, and it doesn’t take too many seconds over the limit to ruin a batch.
    Not today, though: a lovely hot, sweetish, overpowering aroma of coffee wafts from the stainless steel cooling platform where the beans just landed, its rotating arms sweeping them around and around as if panning for gold, lowering the coffee temperature enough to be moved to either the grinder or the automated packing station for whole bean customers. At the same time, a technician grinds and scans a sample of this batch withan ultraviolet sensor. He must make sure the beans have achieved the right color of a proper medium roast, not too light and not too dark, cast-iron low tech meeting computer-age refinement in the quest for a truly good cup of java.
    Jay Isais is nodding and smiling as the readout comes within a percentage point of the target. He is an unabashed coffee nerd who also happens to run sourcing and manufacturing for the biggest coffee house chain in the U.S. not named Starbucks. He’s the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s senior director of coffee, roasting, and manufacturing—or, in lay terms, the company coffee guy. He literally lives, breathes, and slurps coffee for a living: the company has nearly a thousand stores in thirty countries, and every one of the 8 million pounds a year the company buys is personally chosen by Isais. He oversees the whole convoluted supply chain from field to ship to roasting to store, all centered in the company’s single roasting plant in little Camarillo, California.
    â€œThis would be a tough job if you didn’t love coffee,” he allows, not that there’s much doubt about where his heart lies when it comes to America’s most frequent daily sip. 1 His office is a monument to coffee. The pictures on display are primarily group shots of Isais with coffee farmers he has visited and worked with in developing countries. His credentials include being a founding member of the Roasters Guild, a volunteer instructor for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a certified judge for various coffee competitions and organizations, a certified supply chain professional specializing in coffee and tea, and a licensed “Q Grader”—the coffee industry’s anointment for experts in the art and science of tasting and judging the qualities of coffee. There are about a thousand Q Graders worldwide. Isais talks about coffee as a spiritual experience as well as a business, and it’s clear he takes bad coffee as a personal affront.
    This is what bugs him about the legacy of the Industrial Revolution.It worked wonders for the advancement of cars, plumbing, and electricity, he says. But it wreaked havoc on our cups of coffee.
    What most consumers don’t realize, Isais says, is that when they buy coffee in a big can at the supermarket, it’s already stale before the first cup is brewed—even before the can is opened with its impressive hiss of a vacuum seal released. This is simple chemistry at work: along with its delicious aromas, coffee gives off copious amounts of carbon dioxide for a day or two after leaving the roaster. Stick the java right in a can, and that can will begin to bulge or even rupture from the pent-up gas pressure.