hiimac

Just a few years ago, it was something that cost seventy-five cents a cup, existed primarily as a study aid, and came in two varieties—regular or black.

Today, drinks cost upwards of $4, take three times as long to make, and are half as big. Coffee houses have gone from cozy nooks with beat-up old couches and cheap muffins to industrial-chic laboratories where all the customers look like eighteenth-century dandies or really wealthy lumberjacks.

It’s easy to write it all off as just another hipster fad, like pickling ramps and bar cornhole leagues. But the truth is that the current trends in coffee—from cheap commodity to totem of cool—have been taking place for decades now, and probably won’t be slowing down any time soon. The good news is that most people are just as baffled by the whole thing as you are, so there is still time to get in on the ground floor before all your friends.

Sure, it seems pricey compared to that $1 cup of sludge from your local bodega, but think of it this way: In almost any major city, you can now taste some of the finest coffee in the world, made by top roasters and prepared by award-winning baristas using world-class equipment, without breaking a $10 bill.

And here is the secret: it isn’t all that difficult to become an amateur coffee authority. It will cost you far less time and money than your friends who got really into CrossFit or Candy Crush Saga.

How do I know? I am just like you. I am just a regular person who gets out of bed every morning, goes to the office, turns on my computer, goes into the kitchenette and hand-grinds precisely twenty grams of freshly roasted, whole-bean, single-origin coffee and steeps it for four minutes in a full-immersion brewer before going about the rest of my day. I am not a coffee industry professional. I have never been a barista.I learned about coffee by tasting, testing, experimenting and failing, reading, and talking to people. And you can, too.

Once you’ve nailed it, your newfound knowledge will spill over into other areas of your life, making you an all-around better and more interesting person.Picture this: That impossibly hip lady or gent from the bookstore you hang around pretending to browse literary journals in the hope they will be impressed by your apparent knowledge of contemporary Czech short fiction somehow agrees to go on a date with you. You have a couple of hours, $15.25 (there was a quarter under the couch), and a handful of talking points gleaned from half the courses needed for a film studies degree to impress them with. How do you do it? With the greatest coffee date of their life is how.

You start by taking them to a tiny café that is so new and unknown it doesn’t even have a Yelp page or a cash register yet. You offer to pay, because you know even the most expensive drink is in your budget. Your knowledge of exotic growing regions (Cariamanga, Sulawesi, Gakenke—where are these places? Don’t worry, your date won’t know either) will make you sound well-traveled and open up opportunities for casual commentary on current geopolitical issues (“Timor-Leste’s coffee industry has really improved in quality since the country gained independence from Indonesia . . .”). Your refined palate (“I’m getting caramel, clove, and a hint of pink gummy bear”) suggests you have class and good taste, while your patronage of a local business and friendly repartee with the barista paints you as an engaged citizen and community member.

Most books about coffee are written by industry insiders. This is not one of them. Normal consumers like us neither need nor want to know about the molecular structure of espresso (which is just as well, because I can’t explain it)—we just want to know what tastes good.

So consider this book the outsider’s guide to becoming a coffee geek. From finding a café to brewing your own drinks, I’ve filtered out the bullshit and boiled it down to the stuff you actually need to know to get the most out of your cup and not look like a total moron when ordering at coffee shops.

Because now that coffee is cool, there is no reason you can’t be, too.