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

Wait until the outgassing slows before sealing the can, and the problem goes away—but so does freshness. This had been the problem with American coffee since early in the twentieth century, when mass production and canning techniques were first applied to what had previously been a commodity sold fresh or even raw to the public.
    This seems like a packaging problem, but at root, Isais says, it’s a problem of transportation and of a supply chain that, in its own way, is as complex as a smartphone’s. How do you handle a highly prized commodity that grows only in certain tropical locations at very specific altitudes, on millions of mostly small family farms, none of which are near the bulk of the customers who want to buy and drink the stuff? What do you do with a product that is highly perishable when it’s picked, that can be partially processed to a raw, green stable state that will keep for many months, but that becomes highly perishable again once it’s roasted and ready to brew and drink?
    Unless individual consumers can take the time and trouble to roast the green beans themselves and use them right away, or go to a coffee shop and drink brew made from recently roasted beans whenever they want a cup, everything about the taste of coffee is going to be a compromise between convenience, freshness, distance, and time. In other words, it’s about transportation.
    â€œMany people never know what coffee is supposed to taste like,” Isais says. He has a lean, expressive face framed by a closely trimmed beard and mustache that can’t conceal his pity for the 85 percent of Americans who drink at least an occasional cup, and the 63 percent who drink it daily. 2 A majority of these regular coffee drinkers are making stale brew and think it’s supposed to be that way. He vividly recalls the first time he tasted really good coffee. He was a college junior starting what was supposed to be a temporary job at a family friend’s coffee roasting business in the Northern California coastal town of Monterey. “It was a revelation. Coffee wasn’t just that muddy brown stuff that came in cans that you had to dump a ton of milk and sugar in, but something amazing.”
    Before the mass production techniques Henry Ford brought to the automobile were applied to coffee, the product was most often sold in its raw green bean state in the U.S.—the beans having been cleansed of the fruit skin, pulp, and an inner husk called the parchment, but not roasted. Coffee can stay good for up to a year in this state if kept dry and indoors. Consumers would take it home, roast it in a pan or oven, and grind it with a hand-cranked coffee grinder. The drink became somewhat popular in America during the American Revolution. Patriots wanted to supplant their previous favorite, tea, after the Boston Tea Party. Serving coffee represented a statement against British custom and rule. But coffee really took off as an American staple nearly a century later, during the Civil War. It was one of the few luxuries—as well as a welcome stimulant—offered troops on both sides, although only the Union Army had reliable supplies after the first year at war. Hundreds of thousands of men came home from the war hooked on java. Green coffee beans were part of the daily rations given to Union soldiers, who had little roasting kits in their packs or just used cast-iron skillets on the campfires. Some of the government-issue carbines had little grinders cleverly builtinto the rifle butts, but others just used their regular, solid rifle butts to hammer the beans until they broke up enough to brew.
    Isais finds this bit of history fascinating and illuminating, because America fell in love with good coffee in those days. “The irony is those Union soldiers were drinking better coffee out there in the field than any fine diner was served in the best restaurants in America in the 1950s.”
    That difference not only