Java Man

The Vietnamese example is only one in a lengthy list of ways coffee has changed in the past few years. Perhaps the biggest shift, says Mike Cahill, an importer in New Jersey who has known Faubert for 30 years, is the emergence of the specialty coffee market, headlined by Starbucks. "The coffee industry has just gotten a lot more difficult," says Cahill, the owner of Cahill Associates LLC. "It's much more diverse and therefore a lot more competitive." He adds that it's Faubert's three-tiered business approach, with grading as the fulcrum, that has given him such leverage: "Cupping is very, very important in both the industrial and the specialty businesses. It's how Ed stays in the flow."

"I can tell from blindly tasting a cup of coffee not just that it is from Guatemala," says Faubert, "but from what state it comes, at what altitude it was grown, and on what mountain."

Much of that flow these days comes from Latin America, which produces roughly 70% of the world's coffee (Brazil alone accounts for one-third). "If there's a poor growing season in Brazil, then there's a real market famine," Faubert says. "In that case, I might have people--Maxwell House, for instance, which is owned by Kraft--who will call me and say, 'I need X number of batches of coffee with 27 defects, and another X with 9.' They'll blend those coffees to get the taste they want. I'll go around to the growers I represent in Guatemala or Mexico and find coffees with exactly the cumulative characteristics Kraft needs."

When Faubert isn't performing superhuman olfactory feats or brokering deals between growers and Kraft, he's working as a freelance quality-control agent. Once importers have actually taken delivery of their coffee--and in the United States alone, an average of 20 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee, or one-sixth of the world's supply, are imported each year--someone has to make sure that the buyers actually got what they paid for. Having a NYBOT cupping certificate puts him somewhere near the head of that line.

Faubert admits to the enormous pressure of reducing one of the world's biggest businesses to a simple question: Is it good? "To be a success," he says, "you need to combine a refined palate with the nerves of a hedge-fund trader and the social skills of a globe-trotting diplomat." Then, with a smile, he adds: "There's a reason I drink 10 cups of coffee a day."

Nick Reding is an author in New York. His second book, MethLand (Houghton Mifflin Company), about the U.S. methamphetamine epidemic, will appear in 2007.