The words “tall,” “grande” and “venti” almost never crossed the lips of Alon Halevy when he was crisscrossing the globe to write a book about coffee. Starbucks, with nearly 17,000 locations around the world, rarely was his destination.
The Israeli native and brilliant Google computer scientist instead was interested in researching coffee at much deeper levels — cultural, sociological, historical and, yes, even emotional. The result of his three-year odyssey is “The Infinite Emotions of Coffee,” a 159-page book about coffee, the worldwide coffee industry and café culture.
Organized into short chapters and illustrated with more than 180 colorful pictures — from an Ethiopian roasting ceremony to modern cafés around the world — the slick production, published in December, could be called a coffee-table book if not for its smallish size (8 by 9 inches).
To write it, the Los Altos resident traveled to more than 30 countries, visiting countless cafés, roasteries and farms. Through interviews, research and thousands of espresso drinks — including his all-time favorite, the macchiatone, a mini-cappuccino found mainly in Italy — he discovered how coffee has shaped different cultures, and how different cultures have shaped coffee.
“I was traveling a lot for my job at Google, and I realized everywhere I was going, I was looking for nice cafés,” Halevy said in a recent interview. “There are books that tell you all kinds of things about coffee, from recipes to roasting, but I didn’t see any resource on the interaction between coffee and culture, and how they both affect each other.”
Halevy, 48, was born and raised in Israel, went to Hebrew University and spent four years in the Israeli army. Though he left 23 years ago for the United States, the soft spot he has in his heart for his homeland comes through in the book.
Among the mostly two- and three-page chapters offering readers a whirlwind tour of coffee cultures around the world, Israel gets a healthy five pages, even though the so-called “third wave” of coffee (e.g., the Bay Area’s Blue Bottle) has yet to take off in the Holy Land.
“It’s a relatively long chapter compared to other countries,” Halevy said. “What’s interesting is that in Israel, you have all the cultures coming together; you can virtually see the history of coffee within a one-hour drive.”
In the Israel chapter, Halevy recaps such a drive: He starts in an Ethiopian neighborhood near his parents’ home in Rehovot, where people buy green coffee beans in the market and roast them at home; goes on to describe a Yemenite area, where locals still practice ancient customs such as drinking a weak brew infused with spices; then moves on to the Old City in Jerusalem, where Arabs sip coffee and smoke hookahs; and to Yafo, where he sees Jews and Arabs bonding over authentic Turkish coffee (“black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love,” he writes).
Finally, in Tel Aviv, he finds baristas and well-crafted Italian espresso drinks at “happening cafés that beckon passersby to stop in and linger,” he writes.
Of course, Halevy can’t escape an examination of Israeli coffee without the admission — offered with an equal mix of disdain and nostalgia — that Israelis are still drawn to instant coffees, such as Elite and “Nes.”
“Personally, I don’t drink the stuff anymore unless I really have to,” he said in the interview. His theory on why most Israelis continue to prefer instant? As kids and teens, they fall in love with it, and the relationship is cemented during military service. “The army coffee was so bad,” Halevy said, “that if you could find Nescafé, you’d be getting something much better.”
After his own military service, Halevy came to the United States at age 25, earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University and went on to become one of the world’s leading experts in data integration, with multiple awards and several patents to his name. His current project at Google is fusion tables, which he explains as “trying to make databases easy to use” and “making it easy to import data” — a system, for example, that could import this article and turn it into a searchable, rankable database.
Prior to joining Google in 2005, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs, founded two high-tech companies and was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
He lives in Los Altos with his wife, Oriana, who edited and helped design the book, and his two elementary school children, whose pictures grace the preface: a smiling Karina holds two bags of award-winning coffee beans while Kasper, in his pajamas and robe, sits on the kitchen counter, tamping down ground coffee into a portafilter for the brewing of an espresso.
The book begins with a succinct, educational look at the world of coffee as it exists today, then goes into a narrative format that is part travelogue, part vignettes. Rather than make simply a guidebook, Halevy delights in finding coffee-related stories.
One of his favorite spots was Bosnia, where he said he was surprised to find “a society more deeply rooted in coffee than anywhere else. They do everything around coffee … even a sign of missing someone in Bosnian culture is to say that you can no longer have coffee with them.”
To illustrate that point, he writes about a commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, in which some 8,000 men and boys were massacred. For a memorial in 2004, a woman collected 939 coffee cups from residents, placed them on a patch of soil shaped like Bosnia and Herzegovina, brewed coffee on-site and slowly poured it into the cups. In some cups she placed only a cube of sugar, in memory of the children who were killed (and were too young to drink coffee).
Halevy has a chapter on the Bay Area coffee scene that delves into Peet’s, Ritual Roasters, Four Barrel and Blue Bottle, among others. Two chapters later, he obligatorily devotes two pages to “Starbucks: The Coffee Giant.”
“Coffee lovers’ reactions to Starbucks span the gamut of coffee emotions,” he writes. “To some, Starbucks is synonymous with coffee culture. To others, the mere mention of the world’s largest coffeehouse chain triggers a tirade of mockery.”
Even without reading the chapter, you probably know on which side Halevy stands. Or in his case, sits — and sips a macchiatone, of course.
“The Infinite Emotions of Coffee” by Alon Halevy (159 pages, Macchiatone Communications, $24.99). Visit www.macchiatone.com for a list of Halevy’s favorite cafés.