Coffee

With 21 coffee makers to choose from at the Williams- Sonoma store in Princeton, N.J., Jerry Bagel zeroed in on two Nespresso machines as he contemplated a going-away gift for his son, Rick, who is about to start college. Bagel, a 50-year-old dermatologist, already has a Nespresso maker at his office in nearby West Windsor. Since the black-and-chrome machine marketed by Nestle uses prepackaged capsules of ground coffee, he has time to brew cups of espresso between patients.

The coffee beans roasted, ground, packaged and shipped out of the F. Gaviña & Sons Inc. factory in Vernon are as diverse as the ethnic communities that blanket Southern California. Coffee beans from Ethiopia are ground to make a rich, almost wine-flavored brew. Beans from Guatemala are brewed into a reddish drink that balances acidity and heavy body. There are iced coffees, popular with Asian communities; Turkish-style powdered coffees, a favorite among Middle Easterners; and espressos, long a hit with Latinos and Italians.

In the endless search for the best possible cup, coffee lovers obsess over the provenance of beans, debate optimum roasting time, filter their water, spend big dough on top-of-the-line espresso makers or assiduously research the best drip pot. But what about the grind? True coffee geeks (and yes, there is a website for them: www.coffeegeek.com) know that burr grinders, the commercial type used by better coffeehouses, can make a world of difference in the quality of a cup.

TO connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping. Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh. They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.

In an effort to jump-start its long-struggling commercial coffee operations, Farmer Bros. Co. has agreed to acquire the Superior Coffee brand and sales network, almost doubling the size of its business. Both brands are served throughout Southern California in restaurants, mini-marts, hotels and institutional food establishments such as hospitals. The $45-million purchase from food giant Sara Lee Corp. would give Torrance-based Farmer Bros.

Most companies want to be No. 1. Making it to No. 2 would be good enough for Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a fast-growing Los Angeles-based coffeehouse chain. It's an admission that in the coffee business, there is Starbucks Corp., and then there is everybody else. Coffee Bean, on schedule to have more than 400 stores by the end of this year, is one of at least half a dozen small players vying for the second spot.

On a quick break from his job as a trash hauler, Rob Chapman was in the mood for some coffee. So he pulled his truck into the Sweet Spot Cafe, a drive-through espresso stand on busy Aurora Avenue here in the Seattle suburbs. "Do you want a Wet Dream or the Sexual Mix today, honey?" asked barista Edie Smith, dressed in a tight-fitting yellow blouse that did a less than fully effective job of covering her cleavage. She leaned down in the window, perhaps all the closer to hear his order.

There's no shortage of stories about Starbucks moving into a neighborhood and putting a mom-and-pop shop out of business. What's harder to find is someone like coffee roaster Pedro Gavina, president of Vernon-based F. Gavina & Sons Inc., who thinks the Seattle-based giant has been good for his business. Starbucks Corp.'s rapid expansion in the 1990s, while felling many smaller merchants, stirred a huge appetite for gourmet coffee among middle-class Americans. That has helped F.

The way Jack Shin sees it, he's selling the city's cheapest vacation. Spend $4.95 for a cup of drip coffee and drink it in his 100-foot-long model of the Titanic, which he built on a busy stretch of Western Avenue, and Shin guarantees you'll come away refreshed. "Everyone is working and making money to pay bills and they're very tight. One coffee here and they feel like they've been on a cruise and they're relaxed," Shin said.

One after another, foods that were once cast as dietary bad guys have seen their images rehabilitated. Nuts, eggs, avocados, even chocolate have been welcomed back into the kitchen as new research has dispelled worries and even pointed to potential health benefits. The latest candidate for a makeover is coffee. In the 1970s and 1980s, coffee was blamed for a variety of ills, from high blood pressure to cancer.

The coffee beans roasted, ground, packaged and shipped out of the F. Gaviña & Sons Inc. factory in Vernon are as diverse as the ethnic communities that blanket Southern California. Coffee beans from Ethiopia are ground to make a rich, almost wine-flavored brew. Beans from Guatemala are brewed into a reddish drink that balances acidity and heavy body. There are iced coffees, popular with Asian communities; Turkish-style powdered coffees, a favorite among Middle Easterners; and espressos, long a hit with Latinos and Italians.

To create "Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress," Candacy Taylor's master's thesis-turned-coffee-table book, the writer spent the last decade crisscrossing the United States, interviewing women over age 50 who had spent their working lives in American diners. As a result, "Counter Culture" combines 26,000 miles of chance encounters, heavy research, snippets of oral history and more than 100 new and archival photos to fashion a surprisingly complex portrait of a thoroughly unglamorous occupation.

Six Harvard University medical researchers were poisoned in August after drinking coffee that was laced with a chemical preservative, according to university officials. In an internal memo first reported in the Boston Herald, the school said the coffee came from a machine near their lab that later tested positive for sodium azide, a common preservative used in labs. After drinking the coffee Aug. 26, the six reported symptoms including dizziness and ringing in the ears, and one passed out. They were treated at a hospital and released.

How will we know when the recession is ending? Watch the coffee index, says Steven Burd, chief executive of Safeway Inc., the Pleasanton, Calif., supermarket company that owns Vons here in Southern California. Speaking to investors about Safeway's third-quarter profit, Burd said shoppers were starting to trade up to more expensive items after a long period in which they had gravitated to less costly goods. "When we went into the recession, we saw a change in the mix of lattes versus coffee, and now we've seen -- it's early but we're seeing -- a trend back to lattes," Burd said.

Singer Carly Simon is suing Starbucks Corp., saying the coffee company's now-defunct music venture didn't adequately promote her 2008 album, dooming the record before it was even released. The singer, whose biggest success came during the 1970s and '80s with hits like "You're So Vain" and "Anticipation," is seeking unspecified damages related to the release of the 14-track "This Kind of Love" in April 2008. In a lawsuit filed Friday in L.A. County Superior Court, Simon and her attorneys said the album wasn't available in "a substantial number" of Starbucks stores during the key early months after its release.

Starbucks Corp., the world's largest coffeehouse operator, will expand its Via Ready Brew instant coffees to all stores in the U.S. and Canada starting Sept. 29. The instant blends were introduced in March in Seattle, Chicago and London as part of an effort to get a piece of the $21-billion soluble coffee market, the company said. The coffees are available in two varieties -- bold and medium -- and are sold in packs of three servings for $2.95 or 12 for $9.95. Instant coffee accounts for about 40% of all cups made globally, according to Starbucks.

Re: "Read This Over Coffee" [May 18]: Nowadays we seldom hear about any topics in a positive light, given the fact that anything that could go wrong -- with most everything -- in fact has. Among the most notable are the global credit crunch, which has so many negative offshoots that the list is too long to mention, and the ongoing Mideast wars. So when something positive comes along, we should celebrate the news. Such news entails recent studies on, believe it or not, our cherished cup of coffee.

In the U.S., the true comfort foods are chocolate and coffee -- which may provide relief for investors battered by plummeting prices for oil, gold, wheat and other products. The prices of most commodities have tumbled this year as recession has spread around the globe, hammering consumer demand for the raw materials that go into a loaf of bread, your car's gas tank and much more. But cocoa and, to an extent, coffee have bucked that trend, and some analysts think they can keep doing so.

In an effort to jump-start its long-struggling commercial coffee operations, Farmer Bros. Co. has agreed to acquire the Superior Coffee brand and sales network, almost doubling the size of its business. Both brands are served throughout Southern California in restaurants, mini-marts, hotels and institutional food establishments such as hospitals. The $45-million purchase from food giant Sara Lee Corp. would give Torrance-based Farmer Bros.

A cup of coffee on the house Need a caffeine pit stop while shopping? How about a free one? Today, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores will serve free 12-ounce "holiday drinks" from 5 to 8 p.m. (Think Holiday Blend coffees, Peppermint Ice Blends and Winter Dream Tea.)