ur-books · 2009-02-24 21:21

I own a few books that can be considered to be the best, tightest concentration of a topic that’s possible. My favourite is Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality by Illy & Vianni (UK, US). It is the Ulysses of coffee, replaying the production of a great cup of coffee from all possible angles: the plant, the bean, the roast, the grind, storage, percolation, the cup of coffee, and the human reaction. It’s a science book – not for general consumption; not even pop science. This is a snapshot of where scientific understanding of coffee was in 2005.

It’s a hard read. I have a good general grounding of science, but this weaves between anthropology, botany, biology, genetics, food technology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, inorganic chemistry, fluid dynamics, maths, mechanics, heat transfer, physiology, perception and culture – and not in a fleeting manner. This is cutting-edge science, revealing as much what we don’t know as what we do.

To show the focus of the book, it does acknowledge that a lot of espresso is consumed with milk. It gives this topic less than 2 pages of the 400-page volume. The coffee plant, on the other hand, gets 66 pages, and the raw bean, 92 pages.

If you’re in a hurry, the main secret of good Italian-style espresso is given on p19. However, even this formula of brewing parameters could be considered old fashioned: shorter brew times are now often used as default when dialing in a coffee than expressed here.

A few examples of (more easily explained (things I learnt: plants signal to predators when they are attacked by enemies, only a few compounds within coffee have been significantly studied (caffeine, chlorogenic acids and trigonelline), the writer Goethe gave coffee beans to chemist Runge, who first isolated caffeine, the crema coats the tongue and holds oil droplets next to the mucous membrane for over 15 minutes.

Would I recommend it? I’m not sure. If you have an intense curiosity about coffee, and what’s really going on, you’ll probably really enjoy the book.

I’m reading another book at the moment – Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art by Robert J. Lang. Lang’s been well known for his models and books, but as he says, there are very few books about the actual process of origami model design. Most designers have created models by modifying existing models, or analysing them for the base configuration, known as a base. This has been reverse engineered, with some maths sprinkled on, into modern folding techniques – pattern grafting, tiling, circle packing and box pleating. What I find amazing is that this is a person’s life work, distilling knowledge for the future, and that it never questions the simple fundamentals of origami: paper folded with no cuts (and more extreme – square paper). This is the one boundary that makes the book’s existence worthwhile; without these there’s no theories, no maths, no elegance, just papercraft.

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