Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen.In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation's most heralded coffee business hotshots—Counter Culture's Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia's Geoff Watts, and Stump-town's Duane Sorenson.Weissman tells the absorbing tale of an odyssey she shares with these and other brash visionaries who devote themselves to coffee with near-religious fervor, unquenchable energy, and geek-like attention to detail. This journey through the rituals and rivalries of today's ultra-premium coffee business begins in a sweltering Central American hotel, where "cupping" competition judges sniff and spit their way through hundreds of cups, detecting tobacco, chocolate, and blueberry in the brews.Then, visiting remote farms in Nicaragua, Panama, and Burundi, the buyers encourage growers to improve coffee quality, offering fabulous prices for exquisite beans, and in so doing, they unwittingly upend existing markets. Dealing directly with farmers, the buyers sometimes run afoul of governments, the Fair Trade movement, cooperatives, and the farmers themselves. In Ethiopia—the mother ship of the coffee universe—the young coffee guys search for the birthplace of the legendary Geisha coffee, presumed genetic parent of the coveted, prize-winning Hacienda La Esmeralda Special. Instead, they discover a world of coffee not yet