The World Atlas of Coffee by James Hoffman - Book Review

I’ve seen this book about for quite some time now and it never really had the pull on me like others had. What am I going to do with an atlas of coffee?

​Perhaps it’s the title that didn’t really do it for me, not truly explaining what the book contains or how useful it can be but, for whatever reason, I’ve never had the desire to pick it up.

However, when it was featured as a reward on the Coffee Filtered app, where you get points for checking into coffee shops around Hertfordshire that can be cashed in for free coffee, beans or even things like books and equipment, I thought I’d use a small portion of my fairly impressive horde to give it a go.

The plain brown cover sort of misleads you from how elegant this book is. Straight away, the binding has a sort of hessian texture, like a coffee sack, that brings a tactile pleasure just to picking it up and opening it, already setting it’s stall out as an intriguing and delightful coffee table book that’s just fantastic to handle. 

Open it up and it’s a treasure trove of illustrations and colour photos that create a full-blown love story to the origin of coffee and how to brew it to perfection. Of course, there are hundreds of brewing guides and histories of coffee out there and these just make up a tiny portion of this collection of information so how it sets itself apart is the atlas itself.

An exhaustive list of coffee growing countries, it dedicates whole sections to each one, explaining how the crop arrived in the country, the cultivation and roasting processes that make each region unique, and the flavour profiles that emerge from each nation’s distinct types of coffee. It delves into the culture of how coffee is grown and treated showing those that handle and harvest them with beautiful vistas of the plant flourishing in each place.

Written by James Hoffman, many UK coffee enthusiasts will know him as a former World Championship winning barista who now has a very successful YouTube channel, and he clearly has laboured over this piece with great time and knowledge, providing a rich and intricate look at coffee growing as best he can whilst still covering as much ground as possible. 

So rarely do we get to see the nuances of harvesting, and the artistry that goes into the bean long before the brew, and this book offers insight into the diversity of coffee landscapes from across the globe.

It pays a quiet respect to those communities that grow and nurture, and it has a lot to say about each in their own individual way. An intriguing and illuminating book that’s well worth the read for enthusiasts and the curious alike.