3 responses to “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes”

1. 24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

   
   Awesome Coffee Book!, October 17, 2012

   By 

   Benji W (Bay Area, California) –

   Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes (Hardcover)

   To be honest, I had never actually had Blue Bottle coffee before pre-ordering this book. I just couldn’t stop hearing about how good it is during my galavants around San Francisco and Berkeley.

   This book is packed with great information and tells you how Blue Bottle makes its coffee, pastries, and other fun recipes step by step. There is also a ton of information on coffee growing and roasting, as well as coffee’s history. James covers different brewing methods thoroughly, making it a truly enjoyable read for any coffee fan. You will also get information on coffee equipment, which I found particularly useful because I myself am trying to make the best coffee I can.

   Oh, and I finally got around to trying Blue Bottle Coffee this past weekend in Hayes Valley. I ordered an espresso which was definitely one of the best I’ve ever had. The 81 year old English man next to me was in agreement.

   For those inclined to know everything they could have ever possibly wanted to know about coffee, this book is a great place to start…and finish.

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2. 24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

   
   Formatting Disaster, February 5, 2013

   By 

   A. Kirwin “filmmaker” (Austin, TX) –
   
     

   This review is from: The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes (Kindle Edition)

   I was super excited about reading this book on my Kindle.

   If you buy it, you should know that the formatting is a total mess. Random pages pop up in the wrong section of the book, images that are meant to be associated with certain blocks of text are missing or on the wrong page, and other issues abound.

   It’s so disappointing to see such a sloppy unreadable job for what should have been a great book.

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3. 19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

   
   Unexpectedly terrific, October 26, 2012

   By 

   T. Triche (Altadena, CA) –
   
     

   Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes (Hardcover)

   I bought this for the Kindle and read the whole book shortly after receiving it (minus the recipes, I’m sure they’re swell but I don’t much enjoy baking). The section on roasting is very good and the section on espresso is particularly brutal and to-the-point. In so many words, the former seems like it should be difficult while the latter seems like it should be easier, but reality is the other way round. That said, you can’t have good coffee from bad tasting beans, so knowing how beans ought to be roasted, rested, and ground is quite useful.

   You can find these things elsewhere, of course, but the reason I plowed through the entire thing in the first day is that the Freemans can write, really well, in an engaging and concise style. This is not a huge book, but it is crammed with a great deal of very specific advice and information that I found most helpful. (For example, the advice to either go to a good cafe with a skilled barista, or be prepared to pay a lot of money for a heavy, balky Italian machine and then spend many hours learning to use it, is delivered unvarnished; the undeterred will then find very specific advice on grinding, tamping, pulling, and judging espressi, along with notes from the Blue Bottle locations regarding their strategy for blends of beans and single-origin coffees).

   Considering that I was looking at another book that cost $45 until I flipped through the preview (and immediately bought the Kindle edition), it strikes me as a very good value. Look through the preview and see if you don’t agree. Worst case, you lost a few minutes of your day, but if you are interested in what makes for a good cup of coffee (and what makes for an obsessive coffee purveyor!), I suspect you won’t stop at that.

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