This image is the cover for the book New York City Coffee

New York City Coffee

This colorful history explores New York’s coffee culture from the brew’s initial arrival in the 1600s to today’s artisanal connoisseurs.

The coffee industry was made for New York: complex, diverse, fascinating and full of attitude. Since arriving in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, coffee held patriotic significance during wartime, fueled industrial revolution and transformed the city's foodways. The New York Coffee Exchange opened tumultuously in the Gilded Age. Alice Foote MacDougall founded a 1920s coffeehouse empire. In the same decade, Brooklyn teenager William Black started Chock Full o’Nuts with $250 and a dream.

Today, third wave coffeeshops like Joe and Ninth Street Espresso offer single origin pour overs and push the limits of latte art. Through stories, interviews and photographs, author and coffee professional Erin Meister shares Gotham’s caffeinated past and explores the coffee-related reasons why the city never sleeps.

Erin Meister

After a dozen years in New York City and a lifetime in the tristate area, Meister now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A coffee professional since 2000, Meister has worked as a barista, store manager, barista trainer and educator, wholesale account representative and salesperson. In her other life, she is also a professional journalist, writing about coffee (of course) but also music, film, art, food, culture and travel. She loves a good interview and would almost always rather talk about anyone but herself.

The History Press