Black Coffee.

These three Canadian videos (not PBS, as suggested) have absolutely nothing to do with beer, although if you're a devotee of beers brewed with coffee, then the three-hour history lesson about coffee will be appropriate.

Of course, quite a few beer drinkers begin their days with coffee. If you're fortunate to be near a shop of the caliber of Quills, the opportunities to learn are immeasurably enhanced.

Having devoted the past 25 years to denouncing American mass-market swill culture, the take-way for me is the astonishing extent to which mass-market coffee of the Folgers and Maxwell House ilk has bastardized the planet. From reliance on mundane Robusto beans to Cold War anti-revolutionary politics -- not excluding slavery and the despoiling of the environment in places like Central and South America -- the modern history of coffee makes Budweiser look benign by comparison.

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