A solid, commonsense guide to the world of coffee and coffee-making (focusing mainly on pour-over devices, french press, and espresso machines). Provides a lot of background about coffee roasting practices, brewing considerations and the like. However, Hoffman recognizes that there is a lot of pretentious bullshit surrounding the world of coffee-based drinks and so he repeatedly offers useful base-line approaches with an emphasis, ultimately, on making the kind of coffee that will satisfy you personally--but being able to do that consistently. Even as someone who is relatively experienced in making different types of coffee drinks over the years I still learned some valuable lessons. He also busts a lot of myths (the origin of the Americano, for example). The illustrations could be a little better and many of the images are not captioned, so it often isn't clear what exactly you are looking at. A solid intro text, but of limited repeat use, I would suspect. ( )