Home Coffee Roasting — Romance and Revival (Davids, 2003)

Kenneth Davids · 2003 · St. Martin's Griffin (presumed; verify in-hand — common Davids publisher)

Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival by Kenneth Davids, 2003

Bibliographic detail

Title: Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival
Author: Kenneth Davids
Edition held: 2003 (likely a revised edition; first edition published 1996)
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (presumed — Davids’s standard publisher; verify on title page)
ISBN: TBD — verify in-hand
Pagination: TBD — verify in-hand
Format: Paperback (presumed; verify in-hand)

Physical description

Standard trade paperback in the coffee-enthusiast genre. Cover style, dust jacket, and binding to be confirmed in-hand. Condition recorded as good in the accession register.

Provenance

Physically in-hand prior to formal library accessioning; registered to the library 2026-05-24 under the TODO-26 buildout. Accessioned as HH-BOOK-2026-0010. The book had been carried as a resources/ entry prior to this consolidation.

Why it matters

Davids’s Home Coffee Roasting is the modern craft-side reference for understanding roast level, freshness, and roaster-equipment variables — the same variables that historic H&H labels and tins make claims about (“freshly roasted,” roast level callouts on Master Chef and H&H Blend, etc.).

For H&H research, the book is the interpretive layer for evaluating period roast claims:

Roast-level vocabulary calibration — when H&H ad copy says “rich” or “full-bodied” or specifies a particular roast color, Davids’s terminology helps map that period language onto modern roast-level conventions.
Roaster-equipment context — Davids covers small drums and popcorn-popper roasting, but his explanations of how roasters work (heat transfer, drum vs. air, profiling) ground the equipment-attribution research on the H&H factory roaster (see TODO-12 / Huntley Monitor catalog (HH-LIB-2014-0008)).
Freshness-and-storage discussions — directly relevant to the H&H Crystalvac jar story (the H&H jar’s selling point was vacuum-preserved freshness; Davids explains why that mattered then and matters now).

Pairs in the library with The Art and Craft of Coffee (Sinnott, 2010), The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee (Freeman, 2012), The Coffeeist Manifesto (Ward, 2015), and Uncommon Grounds (Pendergrast) as the modern coffee-enthusiast shelf — distinct from the early-twentieth-century trade-reference shelf (Ukers) and the regional/SA shelf.

Notable contents

Roaster-equipment taxonomy (small drums, air roasters, popcorn-popper hacks).
Roast-profile theory: time-temperature curves, first-and-second crack.
Origin and varietal primer.
Tasting / cupping basics.
Discussion of why freshness matters and how to preserve it.