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The big commercial brands often mix robusta along with arabica in their canned coffee blends (the precise blend ratios are kept secret). Again, this is a cost savings that keeps the price of canned coffee down. According to Isais, the flavor suffers from another cost savings as well: the practice of roasting commercial coffee at a lower temperature in order to avoid losing as little weight as possible as the beans cook and dry out. A pound of under-roasted coffee takes fewer beans than a pound of fully roasted. All this makes for far more affordable coffee, but it’s also part of the reason why specialty coffees seem to taste so much better than the old-school canned varieties.
    The coffee supply in America is a broad mix. If all coffee, robusta and arabica alike, from the top ten coffee-growing nations that supply the U.S. market were made into one big blend—call it the American House Blend—this would be the recipe:
Brazil:
29 percent
Columbia:
18 percent
Guatemala:
  8 percent
Vietnam:
  8 percent
Mexico:
  7 percent
Indonesia:
  6 percent
Peru:
  5 percent
Costa Rica:
  4 percent
Nicaragua:
  3 percent
El Salvador:
  2 percent
    That adds up to 90 percent; the rest of the blend would consist of 5 percent coffee from nongrowing broker nation Germany, and fractions of a percent from other producing countries. 11
    How would such a well-traveled global blend taste if pulled from our shelves and shops and concocted together? It would be like throwing every sort of wine, cheap and expensive, red and white, sweet and dry, together in one glass, or like mixing all the colors in a watercolor set together on your palette. The result for wine, paint, and coffee would all be remarkably similar: an awful, muddy brown mess.
    J ay Isais’s day begins at 6:15 a.m. with—no surprise here—a pot of coffee to share with his wife, Connie. They live near the roasting plant in Camarillo, a town about seventy-five miles north of the Port of Los Angeles. It’s a location chosen less out of strategic need and more out of convenience for the founder of the business, who decided to move his home to the picturesque coastal farming area back in the eighties. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s headquarters and distribution center are still in the City of Los Angeles.
    Isais’s home coffeemaker is an ordinary drip model, his main requirement being a thermal carafe that keeps the brew warm without a heating element underneath. Prolonged heat burns the coffee and ruins the taste, he advises. He is most fond of the African coffees and the Yirgacheffe in particular, but he’ll save those for later in the day at work. His wife takes cream, which clashes with the higher acidity of many African coffees, leaving a sour aftertaste. So at home he sticks mostly with dairy-friendly Latin American beans.
    At the plant, after his routine housekeeping tasks of reading e-mails and checking the coffee market prices, Isais joins master roaster Jesse Martinez in the cupping lab. Samples of new lots of coffee are air-shipped to the plant on a daily basis, flown in by UPS or FedEx from agents, brokers, and growers all over the world. Martinez has already used a tabletop roaster to prepare today’s samples and brewed them up, and an array of small coffee cups are laid out in a circle on the high, round tasting table. Each sample—today they’re from Costa Rica, Colombia, and Malaysia—is represented by five cups brewed separately, the better to detect inconsistencies in the sample. Small trays of the beans from each lot are on the table, labeled and displayed to show the appearance of the beans and the roast. The beans are judged by look as well as taste; if there are too many discolored, damaged, or undersized beans, the lot will be rejected on visual quality alone.
    The two men begin the cupping when the coffee reaches room temperature, the ideal state for judging. Drinking