Marielle Songy Wrote the Book on New Orleans Coffee. Then She Came By for a Cup.

By Kevin Pedeaux

Marielle Songy is a New Orleans writer, and her new book, Coffee Culture New Orleans, came out from LSU Press on August 20. While she was researching it she interviewed a lot of coffee people around town, and I was one of them. When my copy showed up I did what anybody would do and flipped to the part with my name in it. She calls me "one of the city's most knowledgeable coffee experts." That is high praise from the person who literally wrote the book on the subject, and I plan on repeating it for a long time.

So I asked her to come sit down for a cup, and on a rainy morning she did. The whole conversation is up on Coffee With Kevin. Here's some of what we got into.

This is her second beverage book for LSU Press. The first was The Absinthe Frappé, part of the press's Iconic New Orleans Cocktails series, about the drink invented at the Old Absinthe House. She told me she went into the coffee book "only knowing that I liked coffee." What pulled her in was how much of the city's early economy ran through coffee, the port and the river and the warehouses, and how much of the coffee the rest of the country drinks still traces back to New Orleans. That's the part of the story most people miss, and she gives it real room.

We can't talk about coffee in New Orleans without Café du Monde and chicory, and I'm not knocking either one. I brew coffee and chicory every single day. But Folgers is the elephant in the room. All of Folgers' roasting happens here. Flip over a can of Café Bustelo in a grocery store two states away and it says New Orleans, Louisiana. Smucker, which owns both brands, calls its New Orleans plants the largest bulk coffee facility in the world. That's roasting, warehousing, and shipping, a jobs engine that tourists never hear about. Folgers is proud of it, too. A few years back they put Trombone Shorty and a brass band in a commercial that ends with "proudly roasted in our hometown of New Orleans." I run a coffee company, so I'm not in the habit of promoting the big guys. But I wouldn't have what I have if it weren't for Folgers being here, and I want people to know that whole ecosystem exists.

The other thing I always come back to is how many layers there are between a farm and a cup. I did an episode once with a coffee farmer, and he assumed I knew all about growing and I assumed he knew all about roasting, and we were both wrong. Growers know growing. Importers know importing. Roasters know airflow in the drum. Marielle said she had no idea how many moving parts the industry had until she started interviewing people, and you can feel that discovery on the page. A cup of coffee is human cooperation across the whole planet in a way I don't think anything else matches.

She also picked up on something I love, which is that every roaster in town has their own touch. Give the same green coffee to me and to another roaster and you'll get two different cups, because how you develop the sugars, and why, is personal. Espresso is the easy way to see it. Over-extract a shot and you get one flavor. Under-extract it and you get another. "Properly extracted" is where the art lives, and it's a little different for everybody. That's why you can go all over New Orleans right now and drink phenomenal coffee that tastes nothing alike from shop to shop. It's not just café au lait anymore, and the book gets that.

There's a chapter on brewing at home that she clearly earned by asking people like me a hundred questions. Grind fresh. Lose the whirly-blade grinder. It's the same advice I gave the Fox 8 crew, and I was glad to see it in print. And there's a lot of New Orleans history in here that has nothing to do with whether you drink coffee. The port, the exchange, the people who built businesses out of a cup. I kept running into friends and colleagues in the pages, which is its own kind of fun.

Coffee Culture New Orleans is 240 pages, hardcover, $29.95, from LSU Press and anywhere books are sold. Marielle is doing talks and signings around town this fall, including a Louisiana State Museum lecture on September 10, Norman Mayer Library on September 26, Barnes & Noble Metairie on September 29, BK House and Garden on October 7, and Hubbell Library on November 17. Dates and times are on her site.

Watch the episode, pick up the book, then come get a cup and tell me what you think. I'll be the knowledgeable one behind the counter.

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