Were you paying attention when CBS broadcast the American Film Institute’s Tenth Annual “100 Years, 100 Movies,” a list of the Top 100 American Movies Ever Made? If you missed it or the ensuing critical flap, the two lists are side by side here at the Wikipedia. Part of the idea was to compare how this year’s list would stack up against the AFI list from ten years ago. You wouldn’t expect Citizen Kane to vanish suddenly from the Top 100, but there have been some pretty good films made in the last ten years, from The Big Lebowski (denied!) to the Lord of the Rings (#50) series. Don’t worry, I’m not writing this to complain about the AFI choices, while clutching my goatee and watching my battered copy of Last Year at Marienbad frame by frame again. Even if AFI did put three Spielberg films ahead of Double Indemnity last time, the world probably won’t end. (How Toy Story got on the new list is a mystery for the ages, but then again how can you complain about the addition of Sullivan’s Travels?) I just want to add a few titles from the last ten years that didn’t appear on the show. These are great movies, most by great living directors. Some of these films get the respect they deserve and some are great or very good films that don’t. I’ve listed nine films here so that you can provide 3QD with the tenth film in the last ten years overlooked by the AFI.

Deconstructing Harry (1997) or Celebrity (1998)
So you don’t like Woody Allen’s late style. I feel sorry for you. Stop confusing the man with the artist. Go back to Allen and appreciate him while he’s still around. In Celebrity, you can watch Kenneth Branagh try to be Woody Allen, and the ever-astounding Charlize Theron puts in an extraordinary performance as a pretty messed up model.

The Game (1997) or, yes, I’m sorry, but Panic Room (2002)
David Fincher’s take on the thriller genre in The Game is a paranoiac’s dream. It’s difficult to describe why this movie is so much fun, but it is. Sean Penn buys his brother, Michael Douglas, a very special “experience” for his birthday. Panic Room inspires nothing like the emotion promised by the title in most people I know, but they’re just wrong. Great performances from already classic Jodie Foster and the soon-to-be classic Forrest Whitaker.

Lost Highway (1997)
David Lynch is so scary. I don’t even ever want to watch this movie again. Considered a dud by many, Lost Highway is actually completely terrifying and weird. It has perhaps the scariest lines of dialog in movie history. Something to the effect of: I’ve been in your house. In fact, I’m there right now. Ugh. My skin is crawling just thinking about this movie, let’s move on.

The Big Lebowski (1998) or The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
At least the AFI put Fargo on their last list, but dropped it this time around. To quote Roger Ebert: “What? No Fargo?” To have Jaws, E.T., Raiders, Private Ryan, Schindler, and so forth all securely fastened to the current list is fine I guess, but if those choices meant excluding the Coens altogether, that is simply “laughable, man, bush league psycho-out stuff,” as Jesus Quintana once put it. Of course, I’m biased: a book I wrote with a friend on Lebowski has just been published by the British Film Institute. (The Barbican in London is showing a wonderful double bill of The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski with our Introduction on July 15). You know what, though? At the risk of blasphemy: The Man Who Wasn’t There might be even better than Lebowski. It’s an extraordinary period piece crime genre bender and philosophical investigation of the basic noir tenets laid down by Double Indemnity. The Coens even filmed the execution scene that Billy Wilder notoriously shot at great expense but left out of the final cut.

Rushmore (1998)
This movie has probably influenced more younger writers than most living novelists and was largely responsible for the much-deserved Bill Murray rennaissance. Don’t mess with the love-life of a high school kid who knows how to train bees, I think that’s the basic message of the film.

Made (2001)
I know few people who have even heard about this hilarious mock-mob movie from Jon Favreau (who wrote Swingers), starring Favreau and Vince Vaughn, with great appearances by Peter Falk and the artist formerly known as P. Diddy. Basically it’s a story of two wanna-be gangers from L.A. who go to New York and get themselves into terrible trouble with real mobsters. If you like to laugh and especially if you love the mob genre this movie is a lesser-known gem.

Donnie Darko (2001)
Probably you are already a rabid fan of Donnie Darko or else you will never care. Supernatural giant bunny rabbits, circular time, Patrick Swayze as a pervert, and terrific scenes from life in an American high school circa 1980s.

Inside Man (2006)
Speaking of late styles, I love the movies Spike Lee is making these days, from subdued and classy thrillers like Clockers and Inside Man to the documentary experience of When the Levees Broke. Inside Man is just a damn-good suspense film with fine performances from Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, about a bank heist in which the money in the vault isn’t actually the main prize.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)
I hear no end of complaints about this fine movie. I can’t imagine why. Richard Linklater gets fabulous performances from the out-of-favor crowd, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Winona Ryder, as well as another terrific strange version of the hardy perennial Woody Harrelson. The special effects thing, developed for Waking Life (also used in those Charles Schawb investment commercials), is a digitized painterly version of reality that is half-human and half-illustration or something like that. But Linklater’s greatest accomplishment is getting the dialog of Philip K. Dick, a great writer who had no idea how humans talk to each other, to sound hyper-realistic.

Michael Blim

There is something odious about privilege. In this case, white privilege.

On June 28, the Supreme Court ruled in Parents Involved in Community Schools versus Seattle School District No.1 that using race as the sole criterion for assigning children to one elementary school or another violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts writing for the plurality of the Court set down their ruling is stark terms:

“Accepting racial balancing as a compelling state interest would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society, contrary to our repeated recognition that ‘at the heart of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection lies the simple command that the government must treat citizens as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual, or national class.’”

The racial classification of students in creating diverse public schools, Roberts argued, violates the landmark Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision to require school districts, as the Court put it, “to achieve a system of determining admission to public schools on a nonracial basis.” (emphasis added by Roberts) Fifty-odd years of race-conscious remedies to provide African-Americans with equal educational opportunity, other than in cases of legislated de jure school segregation, have infringed upon the rights of each child to equal treatment under the law, whether he/she is black or white.

To mark the destruction of precedent, announce the end of an era spent searching for remedies to the historical disadvantages heaped on African-Americans during slavery and after, and perhaps to create himself a memorable, quotable line for the seven o’clock news, Roberts concluded his opinion for the Court with this exhortation: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”

In other words, just say no.

Justice John Paul Stevens, 87 years old, member of the Court for 32 years, and its elder statesman, spotted the slight of hand right away. How could Brown, a decision to remedy state discrimination against African-Americans, now be used against them in their quest for equal educational opportunity?

Justice Stevens put it this way:
“There is a cruel irony in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s reliance on our decision in Brown versus the Board of Education. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: ‘Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.’ This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: ‘The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.’ THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.”

Once more, as in Plessy versus Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court has used the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment against African-Americans for whom it was written and designed to protect.

Privileged people never see the connection between their power and the powerlessness of others. One could say charitably that it is too threatening to their virtue. One could also say less charitably that many just don’t care. It is a liability to care or to assume responsibility. It tarnishes their self-justification. It picks at the myths that they carefully pin like manifestos on the murals of public life.

So, as Justice Stevens noted, Robeerts et.al. traduced Brown to make new law. In fact, this decision is Plessy versus Ferguson in a rather shabby and ignoble Brown versus Board disguise. The only problem they might have with Plessy is that the Court at least recognized the intent of the 14th Amendment as a pledge to blacks as a disadvantaged class and as a guarantee of “absolute equality of the two races before the law,” while ruling that it was never intended to abolish the social distinctions between blacks and whites. If states wanted to create race-segregated public transportations, schools, and other public places, they could do so. The black plaintiffs, the Court argued, were unwarranted in believing that segregation “stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” Moreover, the Plessy Court believed, the plaintiffs assume “that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the races…. Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences…”

The Plessy Court concluded: “If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane…”

Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas do not wish to recognize African-Americans as a class, and do not interpret the 14th Amendment as an explicit guarantee of African-American rights as a class in light of the historic deprival of their rights in slavery. Instead they construe the 14th Amendment solely as a guarantee of each person’s right to equal protection under the law. Thus, in the case before them, if a school district prefers a black child for admission to a public school because it seeks to integrate schools racially by administrative action, or in other instances seeks to re-assign black and white students to prevent their social isolation in all black schools, or seeks to create diverse student bodies under the belief that all students would benefit from the experience, the Court finds these kinds of actions impermissible. They violate the right of a white child to have access to educational resources that she or he seeks to enjoy because he or she is white.

It is a cleaner kill of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection for African-Americans than was Plessy. African-Americans are no longer an historically disadvantaged group who lived almost 350 years as slaves and in renewed bondage under Jim Crow laws. After 388 years in America, only a minority of African-Americans since the mid-1960s have begun to live lives blessed by some measure of equal opportunity. For this Court, they have become individuals who happen to be black, one of a potentially infinite set of characteristics that defines each of them in distinctive ways. As such, their rights are no more important than those of any other persons.

Justice Thomas argues that the Constitution must be color-blind. “We are not social engineers… the Court does not sit to create an ‘inclusive society’ or to solve the problems of ‘troubled inner city schooling.’” Just as the majority in Plessy, he rejects the notion that African-Americans acquire a badge of inferiority when isolated from whites. In words that directly recall Plessy, he concludes that the Court cannot permit “measures to keep the races together and proscribe measures to keep the races apart.” He concludes: “the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.”

Thomas takes Justice Harlan of the Plessy Court as his patron for a color-blind Constitution, quoting from Harlan’s Plessy dissent a rather odd declaration that he evidently finds supportive of his position. Justice Harlan in his peroration for a color-blind society says:

“The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. (words in italics omitted by Thomas)

This is an extraordinary comment to solicit an endorsement from Thomas. Here is Harlan, an apologist for white supremacy, denying disingenuously white dominance. Just as he refuses to recognize organized white rule, he refuses to acknowledge that African-Americans in 1896 were a caste. Color-blindness by Harlan is used here not simply as a dashing defense of individual equality before the law. In the context, it is an explicit rejection of the special status of African-Americans in the law, which even the Plessy majority accepted.

Justice Thomas and his colleagues follow Harlan’s reasoning precisely. Harlan’s white supremacist views are ignored doubtless as a recognition of the ignorance of the time.

Can Thomas and the other three justices be adjudged any less ignorant of their times? Can they be unaware of the desperate status of African-Americans today? Are they aware that as late as 1998, African-American family income was 49% of white income, and their net worth was 18% that of whites? Do they believe that 40 years of limited progress is enough compensation for 388 years of slavery and racism?

White privilege doesn’t allow these facts to come into evidence. After all, isn’t each African-American, and each American family for that matter, happy and healthy, or unhappy and unhealthy in its own way? To be so colorblind is to be so privileged that even facts are no enemy of your theory. You can actually deprive African-Americans of their rights again by ruling out of order any showing of their abundant economic and social inequality, and declare them theoretically equal in the eyes of the law.

This is the rhetorical trick of this insidious ruling.

Moreover, better to do it once and for all with a smashing opinion such as this one. Else, as Justice Roberts warned (and quoted above), people will start demanding racial proportionality throughout American life. That would put a bit of a crimp in the collar of white privilege.

In the case decided last Thursday, precedents didn’t matter. They stood Brown on its head. They converted the equal protection clause into another relatively harmless libertarian individual guarantee.

Characteristic of the far right wing in this period, they fall in with Margaret Thatcher: There is no society; there are only individuals. So use the law to strip out social missions from our institutions. Make the courts and the state simply night watchmen, there to protect property and haul off malefactors. In a game where whites start out more equal than others, if you are white, you have to like your odds.

And there is no telling what more this Court can do to pave your way.

by Beth Ann Bovino

A sailing trip touring the Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea began with a gift from family. The skipper, a Slovenian man, brought out a 2 liter soda bottle to celebrate our sail, saying “it was made by his cousin”. The label and color of the drink seemed like we were being served some Canada Dry. It was wine, and not bad at that. What began the journey lasted through the trip. We finished the wine, and turned to much stronger stuff. (I’m not sure which cousin made this one.) It was a bottle of clear liquid with some kind of twig in it, probably to try and cover the taste. Upon each harbor reached, and we traveled to many, we would take another swig.

The last night culminated with the purchase of some local wine. On the street, a guy was selling glasses of white and red, a 2 kunas each. We asked for a bottle. He gave our group samples, and asked for about 35 kunas or 7 euros, no negotiation. The ‘wine’ tasted like gasoline with a hint of apple. We walked off with our purchase and celebrated the find.

While savoring the wretched drink, the question became ‘what are we drinking?’ The answer, ‘Moonshine, of course.’

What is moonshine? What makes it legal here, if, indeed, it is? How is it made and what can it do besides taste really bad and get you drunk?

Moonshine, also called white lightning, bathtub gin, is homemade fermented alcohol, usually whiskey or rum. Moonshine is a word-wide phenomenon and is made in secret, to avoid high taxes or outright bans on the stuff. In most countries, it’s illegal.

In France, moonshining was tolerated up to the late 50’s, since having an ancestor who fought in Napoleon’s armies gave you the right. The right can no longer be transferred to the descendents.

In the Republic of Macedonia, moonshine is legal, and remains the liquor of choice, at leastaccording to wikipedia. In Russia and Poland it is illegal to manufacture moonshine, but the law against it is rarely enforced. A Polish woman I met told me about helping her granddad siphon off the flow at the age of 10, and recalled how her parents always had the a few bottles around to hand out as gifts or favors. She said back then, under Soviet rule, food rations were used to make the stuff; it was usually overlooked by the state. Home distilling is legal in Slovenia, a rare occurrence.

In the United States, it’s pretty clear-cut. It is illegal to make, sell, distribute, or be in possession of moonshine. However, like baseball and apple pie, most agree that it will always be around. It is tied to U.S. history in many ways. From the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 to the Prohibition Era distillers and, now, the backwoods stills of Appalachia.

Shortly after the Revolution, the United States was struggling to pay for the expense of the long war. The solution was to tax whiskey. The American people, who had just gone to war to fight oppressive British taxes, were angry. The tax on whiskey incited the Whiskey Rebellion among frontier farmers in 1794. The rebellion was crushed, so many just built their own distillers to make their own, ignoring the federal tax.

Later on, states banned alcohol sales and consumption, encouraged moonshine. In 1920, nationwide Prohibition went into effect, to the boon of moonshiners. Suddenly, no legal alcohol was available, and the demand for moonshine shot through the roof. Easily able to increase their profits with losing business, moonshiners switched to cheaper, sugar-based or watered-down moonshine. Organized crime blossomed as speakeasies opened in every city.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the market for moonshine grew thin. Later, cheaper, easily available, legal alcohol cut into business. Although moonshine continued to be a problem for federal authorities into the 1960s and ’70s, today, very few illegal alcohol cases are heard in the courts. In 1970, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms seized 5,228 stills, but from 1990 to 1995, only two stills were seized.

The law also chased down bootleggers, the smugglers who transport it and sell it. The name came from tall riding boots, where they would hide their product. Later, they raced cars packed with moonshine at night to avoid the police. They learned to drastically increase the horsepower of their vehicles to outrun the authorities. This created a culture of car lovers in the southern United States that eventually grew into the popular NASCAR racing series. The winner of the first ever NASCAR race, Glenn Dunnaway, had used the same car to make a bootleg run just a week earlier.

What about homebrewed beer and amateur winemaking? Since these activities are different from distilling alcohol, they were made legal in the 1970s. However, they can only be done in small quantities. So if you’re supplying half the bars in town with your “homebrew,” you might run into a few problems with the Feds. However, home distilling is definitely illegal in any amount. Since it’s too easy to make a mistake and create a harmful product, permits and licenses are required to ensure safety. That and the Feds want to get their tax money.

It’s All in the Mash

Corn is commonly used, though alcohol can actually be distilled from almost any kind of grain. http://www.unm.edu/~skolman/moonshine/history1.html Moonshiners during the Prohibition started using white sugar instead of corn meal to increase their profits, and the earliest makers supposedly used rye or barley.

The recipe for moonshine is simple:

corn meal

sugar

yeast

water

Sometimes, other ingredients are included to add flavor or ‘kick’. Once you make the mixture, called mash, you heat it for a bit of time in a still. The “Alaskan Bootleggers Bible” (Happy Mountain Publications, 2000) shows a number of stills, including the ‘two-dollar” still, using a crock pot and milk bottle.

“Drink Up, Before It Gets Dark”

Besides the several years it could land you in jail, (it could land you 5 years for moonshining, 15 years for money-laundering) what makes moonshine different from the whisky you find on the shelf at a liquor store? Aside from the obvious differences between something made in a sanitized production facility and something made at night in the woods, the primary difference is aging. When whisky comes out of the still, it looks like water. Moonshiners bottle it and sell it just like that (moonshiners’ code “It’s for selling, not drinking”). Commercial alcohols are aged for years in charred oak barrels, which gives them an amber or golden color to them. It also mellows the harsh taste. There’s no such mellowing with moonshine, which is why it has such “kick.”

There are a few other reasons why drinking moonshine can be risky. Since the whole point of making moonshine is to avoid the law, no FDA inspectors will be stopping by the backwoods at night still to check if moonshiners had wash their hands, and no one will be able ensure that all the ingredients are safe. It is not uncommon for insects or small animals to fall into the mash while it’s fermenting.

While a few furry creatures added to the mix wouldn’t likely kill anyone, you might have heard stories about people drinking moonshine and going blind — or even dying. These stories are true. During Prohibition, thousands of people died from drinking bad moonshine. I finished the sailing trip with both eyes intact. Though, one toast was “Drink up, before it gets dark!’

There isn’t anything inherently dangerous about moonshine when made properly. It is very strong alcohol with a very hard taste, or “kick,” because it hasn’t been aged. However, some distillers realized that part of the appeal of moonshine was that “kick” and experimented with different ingredients to add more kick to the drink, many poisonous, including manure, embalming fluid, bleach, rubbing alcohol and even paint thinner. Occasionally moonshine was deliberately mixed with industrial alcohol-containing products, including methanol and other substances to produce denatured alcohol. Results are toxic, with methanol easily capable of causing blindness and death.

Besides poisonous ingredients, there are other manufacturing mistakes can poison moonshine. For example, only one pass through the still may not be enough to remove all the impurities from the alcohol and create a safe batch. If the still is too hot, more than alcohol can boil off and ultimately condense — meaning more than alcohol makes it into the finished product. Either can result in a poisonous drink. While it seems exciting to try (I was fascinated by the booze and I own a crockpot), chances are you end up with pure poison. Moonshiners often die young. If they don’t go blind, or the Feds get them. Better to just walk down to your corner-store for that bottle of Jack Daniels and soda.

by Daniel Humphries

On May 29, at around 6:30 pm Eastern time, the program that runs the Best of Panama auction website stopped functioning unexpectedly. The bid price for this year’s top Panamanian coffee was stuck on $99.99 per pound. The program had not been designed to progress beyond that mark. Fifty dollars a pound was by far the most that had ever been paid for a pound of green coffee — and that price had been achieved or approached just a handful of times. Hacienda la Esmeralda, the prize-winning farm, had been producing astounding coffee for years, using meticulous and innovative growing, harvesting and processing techniques. Their famed gesha varietal, an heirloom plant from Ethiopia, created mind-blowing coffee, incredibly smooth and complex with the sweetness and citrus of an orange right off the tree. I tried the Esmeralda crop in 2005 and again in 2006. I remember remarking in ’05 that not only was it the best coffee I had ever tasted, it might have been the best anything I had ever tasted. Back in May, when the auction finally got up and running again after a three hour delay, the price went all the way to $130 a pound.

Does that sound absurd?

Anyone who tells you they fully understand the coffee trade is lying. Coffee, one of the most ubiquitous products of the modern world, comes from a thousand different places, and ends up in ten thousand more. People drink it as turkish coffee, cowboy coffee, or café crème. There are as many different ways to drink coffee as there are distinct cultures on Earth. This is well known.

What surprises many people is that there is also an incredible variety of different flavors and aromas possible in the bean itself, not just the mode of preparation. The blackened, over-roasted stuff, crying out for cream and sugar, that most people in the West have access to doesn’t suggest that coffee is a delicate agricultural product, sensitive to time and place. But it is, and resoundingly so.

I grew up in a rainy, northern town. The muscle tissue of every good citizen was saturated with coffee, usually from a can, prepared using a plastic-body “Mr. Coffee” (or similar) elecric drip machine. When the Millstone and Seattle’s Best brand coffee bins, with their whole beans bearing exotic names and their grind-on-the-spot machines, began appearing in the local grocery stores, it seemed like a glorious new age of consumer choice. It was a nagging question as to why some of the coffee had European designation (“French” roast, “Vienna” roast) and some Indonesian (“Java,” “Sumatra”), and others were even more inscrutable (“Midnight Blend,” anyone?). What were these designations meant to tell us? Where the coffee was grown, or roasted? Or perhaps something else entirely? These questions one shoved to the back of one’s mind, though.

My family’s choice was “French” roast. We thought it very unique at the time, our own little clan-defining consumer choice. Actually, dark or “French” roasts are exceedingly popular in the United States. There is a reason for this. And that one little fact speaks surprising volumes about the state of the global coffee trade.

In dollar terms, coffee is the second most-actively traded commodity in the world, after petroleum. This tells us it’s hugely popular, obviously. But it also tells us something else: coffee is a commodity. That is, it is traded —bought and sold on the international market— just as if it were gold, or crude oil. On Wall Street, no distinction is made between coffee grown in Honduras and coffee grown in India.

A staggering amount of coffee (and coffee abstracted in the form of capital) is changing hands, but much of it is controlled by just four companies (the “Big Four”: Nestle, Kraft, Sara Lee, and Procter & Gamble). Traditional, mountainside farmers in Kenya or Guatemala are forced to compete with huge conglomerate plantations in Brazil. In the 1990s, the global free trade regime convinced the government of Vietnam to replace enormous stretches of rice paddies with large-scale coffee plantations. Cheap, low-quality coffee flooded the market, driving already dismal prices into a tailspin, literally starving small farmers into switching crops (often to cocaine or khat).

Unfortunately, the process of Fair Trade certification is not the answer. The Fair Trade system quite admirably seeks to raise the prices that farmers get. It is certainly a step above the commodities market and I do not wish to denigrate the work done by TransFair USA. But ironically it ultimately traps farmers into the same system: coffee is treated as an undifferentiated commodity to be exported, like aluminum or diamonds, only with a slightly fairer price. Organic certification is also problematic as an indicator of an ethical product, though again I respect the work done by organic farmers and certifiers. Most people now understand that “organic“ does not necessarily mean small-scale or higher-quality or even fairer labor practices. It would be easier (though less fun and less personally enriching) to simply buy beans with the proper stickers slapped on it. But it takes a bit more thought, and in the end that is a good thing.

It does not have to be like this. The taste of a given coffee is enormously sensitive to how it was grown, when and how selectively it was harvested, how it was washed and processed, how it was stored, how it was shipped. If you want to preserve the incredible beauty of a unique coffee, every step along the way must be undertaken with great care and diligence. For instance, a naturally sweet cup of coffee (no sugar needed) is the hallmark of beans that were harvested selectively, only when each individual cherry was ripe. It’s a mind-changing experience to drink, but until recently, very few people have had the opportunity to try it.

Descriptions of the flavors of beans from various parts of the world can raise a few skeptical eyebrows from people accustomed to bad coffee (that is, most people) or elicit snide comments about dainty epicureanism. But once one tastes the coffee in question, especially side-by-side with something radically different, all suspicions are allayed. Did you know that the volcanic soil of El Salvador gives the coffee there the sharp and pleasing tang of iron? Or that the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia produces delicate, lemony coffees while the Harrar region is famed for pungent berry flavors? And among those that care about such things, there is a spirited, friendly debate about whether the unmistakeable wet-earth taste of Sumatran coffee, a byproduct of peculiar local processing, is a flaw that masks the beans true taste or a delightful, unique trait to be preserved.

Commodities markets are indifferent to all this. Coffee is coffee, whether it tastes like liquid mold or liquid gold. So the quality of beans that end up in, for example, the United States, is highly variable. This is where dark roasting comes into play. Dark-roasting coffee is like stewing meat. If you have a prime cut of free-range, grass-fed beef, you can pan-sear it for a few minutes and end up with a divine steak dinner. If all you have is gristle and it’s starting to go bad, you can just stew it for hours to make it palatable. Both are technically the same thing (cow meat), but, of course, there’s really no comparison.

Similarly, over-roasting coffee is a way of hiding the flaws in your coffee. If it was carelessly harvested, processed sloppily, and sat in a steamy tropical port city for way too long before being shipped, it’s going to taste bad: sour, musty, and literally like dirt. But if you then roast that coffee black as coal smoke, it will taste sort-of adequate in a smeared-palate way: smoky, bitter and maybe, if you are lucky, a bit caramelly. (I have simplified the case here a bit. A skilled artisan roaster can actually produce a lovely, controlled dark roast using high-quality beans. You may rest assured, however, that this is the exception to the rule.)

The taste of coffee is also highly dependent on how it’s prepared. So even a very fine coffee, properly roasted, can taste terrible if someone pulls a 60-second shot of espresso with it (as opposed to a more skillful 28-second shot, for example). With all these variables, it’s no wonder many people prefer the darkest possible roast then combined with the most possible milk and sugar (or Splenda, or cream, or creamer, or soy, or vanilla syrup, or frappuccino powder or anything to mask the fundamental nastiness of the beans).

The great news is that truly good coffee is eminently accessible to people living in the West today. For the end consumer, it doesn’t cost appreciably more than the low-grade stuff, and it’s often considerably cheaper than the medium-grade stuff passed off as “gourmet” at the chain stores (or in those supermarket bins). Because the phalanx of faceless commodities-market middlemen are cut out of the equation, the farmers receive a much greater portion of the final sale price, and the whole thing, from field to cup, is done on a more human scale.

More and more coffee in this mode — carefully produced, ethically sourced, fresh, and delicious — is reaching our shores every year, and more baristas and roasters are learning how to skillfully prepare it. It can be hard to imagine that this movement will become more than a footnote to the monstrous global coffee trade. Especially as the big companies begin to take notice and start to parrot the language of artisinal coffee without changing what they do, people are understandably very confused about what they are buying. But we have yet to even approach anything like a ceiling for how far we can take it. Perhaps skepticism about how big a difference it makes is rooted more in a failure of the imagination than in the supposedly ironclad laws of capital. And if you pay more attention to taste than to packaging or verbiage or stickers, you are off on the right foot. Ultimately, it is still only a consumer choice, if we choose to treat ourselves to better coffee. I can’t pretend it’s anything else. Of course, it’s also a consumer choice to drink bad, commodity-style coffee, or to remain in the dark about the difference.

La Esmeraldas jaw-dropping $130/pound is clearly an anomaly. Certainly the name cachet (and quite possibly the sheer, giddy lunacy of the moment) drove up the price. I dont think anyone believes it is literally dozens of times more delicious than, for instance, Panamas second-place coffee. But it was a watershed moment for growers around the world: a recognition of the worth of skill and dedication. A price that high is not sustainable, even for the wealthy West. But it is a beacon of what is possible. Coffee farmers deserve far more than they have received in the past, and they are beginning to get it. To continue this promising trend though, people must come to view their coffee in a new light, not as undifferentiated rocket fuel, but as what it is: a unique and ever-changing product of specific places, specific plants, and specific hands that work the soil.

For a good primer on how to find, purchase and prepare great coffee, try this series by tonx on dethroner. People in the New York region may be interested in the New York Coffee Society.

Daniel Humphries is a professional barista trainer and coffee sommelier living in New York City. His homepage is here.