DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK — PBS presents Black Coffee: Coffee fuels Enterprise. From the necessary morning pick-me-up to the afterwork social gathering, the rich, dark drink is one of the significant cultural unifiers of our time. But unlike many goods, which have come to dominate our diets only during the age of globalization, coffee-drinking infected nearly every continent some 400 years ago, transforming history, politics, and economics. PBS Black Coffee — one of the best docu-series we’ve reviewed — tells this story..

Through it all, one theme dominates: The story of coffee is the story of globalization. Part 1 of the series (watch, runtime 57:44) takes us through how this bean followed trade, geopolitics and war from Ethiopia to Arabia to Europe and the Americas, becoming the beverage of choice for all social classes. Global addiction to it fueled the slave trade, while the coffee houses became the forums of their times, helping develop early finance and being places where revolutionary ideas gestated. The politics of coffee, the impact of its cultivation on the environment and its transformation into the most important commodity after oil in the 20th century is explored in Part 2 (watch, runtime 57:44). It looks at how macroeconomic forces and the emergence of cheap, instant coffee played a hand in the poverty of developing nations and helped fuel revolutions. Part 3 (watch, runtime 57:41) sees the coffee houses and specialty coffee roasters emerge as the kings of the industry, bringing us the Starbucks and Costas we know and love.