30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEManifest för bättre kaffe is the best book in Swedish on why the coffee in your cup tastes the way it does, and what it takes to make it taste better.
Joanna Alm is CEO and co owner of Drop Coffee in Stockholm, one of the few Swedish roasteries with a genuinely international reputation. She is a three time Swedish coffee roasting champion and has placed second, third and fourth in the world championships. That makes her one of the most accomplished people in the country on the subject, and the book is written accordingly.
The manifesto in the title is not there by accident. The book follows coffee all the way from cultivation to cup and covers picking, processing, roasting, grinding and brewing, but it also asks who gets paid and how much. Alm visits her producers every year and Drop openly publishes what it pays, which is still unusual in the industry. This part of the book argues that coffee quality and reasonable conditions for growers are the same issue, not two separate ones.
The practical section is equally useful. Why lightly roasted coffee retains the character of its origin while dark roasted coffee mostly tastes of roasting, how grind size and water temperature affect extraction, what the brewing ratio does and why water quality matters more than most people think.
Sweden is one of the world’s biggest coffee drinking countries and at the same time has a long tradition of drinking it dark roasted and bitter. This book is the clearest Swedish argument that coffee can be made considerably better, and it explains exactly how.
Number of pages: 159
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Natur & Kultur
ISBN: 9789127156234
Language: Swedish
First published: May 2019
