The timing is right for BLACK AS HELL, STRONG AS DEATH, SWEET AS LOVE: A Coffee Travel Guide, a history of coffee and a travel guide to Coffee Experiences on almost every continent. Plus, there are fourteen recipes, most with coffee.

Among the Coffee Experience destinations are places that almost no one goes to, like Ethiopia's South Omo, and places masses of tourists go to, like Paris. Other Coffee Experiences are closer to home for Americans, as simple as sharing a colada at a ventanilla in Miami's Little Havana; or taking the Canal streetcar to the end of the line, where Morning Call in New Orleans' Spanish moss-shrouded City Park offers chicory coffee, beignets, crawfish bread, gumbo, alligator sausage, and jambalaya just a short walk away from the last remaining section of Bayou Metairie.

These Coffee Experiences are the result of three years of related travel, five years of research, and decades of travel and travel writing. These are the Best of the Best, the Coffee Experiences that surpassed all our expectations. Linking the Coffee Experiences to history provides a unique approach to a city or country's particular relationship to coffee. Coffee Experiences may be in the middle of, or adjacent to heavily touristed areas, but for the most part they are places barely mentioned in guidebooks. They are hidden gems that were always there, waiting to be rediscovered for perhaps the hundredth time.

The Coffee Trail from which these Experiences are born is full of curious twists and turns, spanning millennia and the rise and fall of great civilizations. Surviving bans from religions and regimes, the consumption of coffee has changed its style constantly to adapt to new customs, new physiologies, and new technologies, always with the driving mandates of better taste and more effective delivery systems for the physically and psychologically stimulating effects of caffeine. All along the Coffee Trail, from Africa to Europe and the New World, each culture and country has added its own unique stamp to the passport of Coffee Experiences.

This book is a journey through those countries and cultures along the Coffee Trail, with stopovers that are sometimes a reenactment, and sometimes a re-imagination, of a unique time and place in the human history of coffee consumption.

The Coffee Experiences roughly follow the journey of coffee itself, beginning by joining with tribal villagers in Ethiopia's South Omo and a coffee ceremony at a local jebena buna bet in Addis Ababa. Coffee's transplantation to the Arabian Peninsula is represented by partaking in the jaha, a coffee ceremony in a Bedouin tent in the Jordanian Desert near Petra. Readers are invited to have their fortunes read with coffee grounds in Istanbul; sip café crème in the storied cafés of Paris; and taste bicerin, the perfect fusion of espresso, gianduia chocolate, and fresh cream in Turin. Readers can walk among the centuries-old, jungle-surrounded ruins of a cafetal (coffee plantation) in Cuba; indulge in coffee fresh from the fields of the Kona Living History Coffee Farm in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii; sample chicory coffee, beignets, affogato, and Café Brȗlot Diabolique in New Orleans; hike in high-mountain Costa Rican coffee fields; drink cortado a la crema and Café Calipso in Havana, or cafecitos like Anthony Bourdain had at Miami's Islas Canarias Restaurant; or treat themselves to "upside-down coffee" and pastries at a Viennese café on Jerusalem's Via Dolorosa.

In San Francisco, they can sample a Doppio con Panna at the coffeehouse of choice for Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Francis Ford Coppola, or an Irish Coffee where the drink was born. The Coffee Experiences offer readers adventure, culture shock, the consumption of coffee in ways they never thought possible, and a more intimate approach to the people and the history of their chosen destination, from New Orleans to Istanbul and beyond.

BLACK AS HELL, STRONG AS DEATH, SWEET AS LOVE: A Coffee Travel Guide, is the first and only book to trace coffee consumption from its origins in prehistory to becoming the world's second-most-valuable commodity after oil—and to pair this history with replicable, affordable Coffee Experiences that provide a unique approach and added value to the readers' destinations, no matter how many times they've been there before. BLACK AS HELL, STRONG AS DEATH, SWEET AS LOVE: A Coffee Travel Guide is a multi-genre travel book with unique historical insights that immerse the reader in the culture of a country or city through the lens of the destination's deep relationship with coffee. No other travel book has ever provided the kind of total immersion into a country or city—through histories, travel directions, one-of-a-kind photos, and recipes—that BLACK AS HELL, STRONG AS DEATH, SWEET AS LOVE: A Coffee Travel Guide, delivers in every chapter.