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coffee too hot or too cold diminishes the ability to taste accurately. The two men move around the table, leaning in, sniffing with noses close to each cup, then scooping a bit with a teaspoon. The sound of slurping fills the room. It’s quite loud, almost comically exaggerated, but for a purpose: a small amount of coffee is sucked in with a large amount of air in order to disperse the drink across the palate. Then the spoon is dipped in a rinse and it’s on to the next cup, the slurps coming in rapid fire, cup to cup, lot to lot, delicate flavors first, then moving to the stronger and more intense brews. The two men move around the table across from one another, circling like prizefighters in the ring.
    Afterward, they sit back and grade the coffees on aroma, flavor, sweetness (coffee beans are packed with sucrose), acidity, body, balance, uniformity, and aftertaste, as well as whether thebrew leaves a clean cup (as opposed to a gritty one). The last score is the taster’s overall impression.
    Each category can score a maximum of 10 points, and a total of 80 points is the least a coffee can receive and still be considered “specialty coffee.” Isais usually looks for higher scores. Naturally, there’s a smartphone app for this: “Cupping Lab,” which Isais uses to record the scores on his Android phone. This day, the coffees are all judged well above 80, and orders are placed for all of them.
    Meanwhile, on the plant floor, where Martinez had fired up the two roasters for preheating at 3:30 a.m., the roasting is well under way. Five- and six-hundred-pound batches are being roasted in the big imported German Probats, each of them bought for a million dollars. The roasters work like big clothes dryers: a baffled cylindrical drum rotating, heated beneath by gas flames, with one end open to suck in air. When the roasting is complete and the heat turned off, the drum continues spinning and three gallons of water are poured in to cool the beans down and prevent overcooking. The water evaporates almost immediately but it knocks the temperature down in the process.
    At the same time, two Italian-made robotic packagers are churning out sealed packages of beans roasted earlier that morning, the machine a hissing whirl of pneumatic moving arms, funnels, and blades. Elsewhere in the plant, two Japanese tea robots are churning out elegant nylon mesh tea bags at a rate of 5,000 an hour in a hypnotic, graceful, and aromatic twirl.
    The fresh coffee is packaged in a layered composite material that has a one-way valve in one side concealed beneath the company logo. The valve allows the carbon dioxide from the fresh beans to escape, thereby overcoming the problem of canning and stale coffee. Various sizes of bags are flowing out of the machines: one-pound bags for retail sales, three-pound bags for sale at big-box stores, five-pounders in plain silver bags for making coffee by the cup in company coffee shops.
    Before each bag is sealed, oxygen is flushed out with pure nitrogen so the coffee cannot oxidize and spoil inside the bag. In this way, roasted coffee can be kept and retain most of its flavor for months. This is a compromise, as coffee is at its flavorful best twenty-four hours after roasting, Isais says. And yes, he admits, he can tell the difference. But it’s still a vast improvement over the old industrial canning process.
    The logistics for the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are complex: shipments take six to eight weeks to arrive via container from Africa, Indonesia, Central and South America, and Mexico. Two-thirds of the coffee shipments enter the country through the Port of Oakland, which has a preferred rate for certain commodities, coffee among them, and one-third arrives through the Port of Los Angeles. A contract trucking and logistics firm brings the raw green beans, bulk teas and botanicals, and other ingredients to the company distribution center in Los Angeles, where the Coffee Bean & Tea