Coffee

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.

The price of coffee surged Thursday, hitting its highest level in a decade, as continuing weakness in the dollar kept many commodity markets in rally mode. Coffee futures for May delivery rose 3.4 cents, or 2.1%, to $1.675 a pound in New York. Earlier in the day, the beans traded at $1.68, the highest price for a most actively traded contract since February 1998. Coffee is up 41% in the last year.

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.

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.

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.

IN the \o7breve\f7 new world of coffeehouses, espresso has been getting all the love. Tattooed baristas pull perfect shots from loud machines the size of Fiats. Lattes come crowned with filigreed leaves drawn in foam; \o7macchiati\f7 appear in dainty demitasses of Italian porcelain. The drip coffee drinker, however, is handed a paper cup and directed to a stoic thermos, exiled near the napkins and sugar packets. But a seismic change is on the way in this highly caffeinated world.

Starbucks Corp. said it would replace whole milk with 2% for espresso drinks in all of its U.S. and Canadian stores by the end of the year. Drinks in North America will soon be made by default with the lower-fat milk, but customers can still request whole milk, the company said. Starbucks said it made the switch based on increased requests from customers. A 16-ounce "grande" latte made with reduced-fat milk has 190 calories, compared with 260 calories in one made with whole milk.

A triple nonfat mocha may taste good, but it's likely the jolt that drives millions of people to fork over three bucks or more for the steaming cup of brown liquid. Between 80% and 90% of North Americans consume caffeine regularly, according to a 2004 review, with an average daily consumption equal to about two mugs of coffee or four 16-ounce bottles of soda.

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.

Despite such speedy-sounding names as Full Throttle, Amp and Rush, energy drinks pack a punch that is generally no stronger than coffee, according to Consumer Reports. A comparison of 12 popular energy drinks, published in Consumer Reports' September issue, found that the caffeine in 8 ounces of various brands ranged from 50 to 145 milligrams, though most were in the 75-to-80-milligram range.