But First, Coffee: A Guide To Brewing From The Kitchen To The Bar by Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen from Union Square and Co. is now available at all major booksellers!
If you’re competing in an Instagram giveaway, be sure to send your preorder sales receipt to books@sprudge.com. 💜
About But First, Coffee: A Guide To Brewing From the Kitchen to the Bar
But First, Coffee is quite different from our first book, The New Rules of Coffee, released in 2018 on Ten Speed Press. If our first book was “theory”—a brief history of coffee culture in the early 21st century—then this second book is “practice”, a working pathfinder of a cookbook-y volume built on a simple premise: Say you’ve got in your possession a delicious bag of coffee, perhaps gifted by a friend, or acquired from a great coffee cafe in your neighborhood, or else purchased online from a wonderful coffee roasting company. What are all the delicious things you can do with it?
Well—it turns out, the answer is quite a lot! From brewing guides focused on some of our favorite brewing methods, to the thriving world of home espresso enjoyment, to a delicious vast galaxy of implementations from the fridge to the dessert menu to the home cocktail bar, this book has something for everyone and then some. And we really do mean *everyone*—this is a big tent book, inclusive and frequently mirthful and not even remotely snobbish. Reclaim coffee as an ingredient! Make coffee fun! Brew as part of a daily mindfulness practice, as fuel for your life, or for the sheer love of it, and never stop challenging yourself—but also take nothing too seriously! Serve a second scoop of Hot Sprudge Sundae (yes that’s a real recipe in the book) and settle in.
Photographed in vivid full color by Sprudge co-founder Zachary Carlsen, and accompanied by recipretorial prose by Zachary Carlsen and Sprudge co-founder Jordan Michelman, But First, Coffee is home to dozens of original recipes and adapted favorites, from Chemex to Nel Drip to Affogato, from cold brew tiramisu and coffee spice rubs to zero proof Irish coffees and coffee Negronis, Hot Toddys and Chartreuse cappuccinos and so much more (including not one but three espresso martinis, because of course we had to). Along the way we’ll advise you on developing a mug collection, offer our favorite songs to brew by, talk you through the chemistry lab adventure realness of home siphon brewing, and hopefully inspire a little coffee wonderment in the process.
We couldn’t have done it alone, which is why this book features the expert voices of some of our favorite coffee thinkers, including Freda Yuan (Sip & Slurp), Kyle Glanville (US Barista Champion and Go Get Em Tiger co-founder), Bud Taliaferro (Creature Coffee), Propaganda (@PropHipHop), Daniel Brown (Gilly Brew Bar), Andrea Allen (US Barista Champion and Onyx Coffee Lab co-founder), Karla Boza (Finca San Antonio Amatapec), Matt Rodbard (TASTE), Zac Cadwalader (Sprudge), James Lim (Watson’s Counter), Brent Wolczynski (Stumptown Cold Brew), Paul Einbund (The Morris Restaurant), Jonathan Rubinstein (Joe Coffee) and more.
We were delighted to feature mugs and cups made by talented ceramicists and artists. We’d like to thank Jess Faulk, Ben Mendansky, McKenna Ritter, Ross Martini, Suay Ceramics, and Worn Path for making coffee drinking an elevated experience with their beautiful, hand-crafted vessels.
Find But First, Coffee on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and BAM.