New York Times - Coffee, the new shaky commodity

(Brian Cowan, associate professor of history and classical studies at McGill University. He is the author of "The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse."): I love coffee, and I have gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain good coffee. When I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, I would have Starbucks send me their premium roasted whole beans from Seattle to Princeton, N.J. because I couldn’t find any decent coffee on the east coast at the time. Of course, all of that changed very quickly as the Starbucks empire expanded eastwards. By the late 1990s, I had no trouble finding great coffee even in England."