Good to the last pebble.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Here's something to ponder as the water trickles through the grounds on a cold November morning: The Wall Street Journal reports that the purity of coffee is measured by the number of "defects" found among the beans. A small stick counts as one defect; a medium-sized pebble is two. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows up to 495 "defects" in a three-quarter-pound bag of coffee. Unprocessed coffee may contain up to 30 percent gravel, moldy beans and other detritus.

Processing gets rid of much of the debris, and consumers can ensure even higher quality by buying whole-bean coffee from supermarkets or the specialty coffee shops that have sprung up on every street corner. But poor quality standards have led the International Coffee Organization, representing producers worldwide, to adopt new standards that are stricter than the U.S. government's. The mass-market coffee that still accounts for 85 percent of the coffee sold in the United States has become so poor that the producers are worried that people might stop drinking it.

One cause of the problem is that Vietnam has emerged as a large-volume producer of cheap, low-quality coffee. Vietnam has vaulted into third place among the world's coffee exporters, trailing only Brazil and Colombia, but has no quality-control standards. The big marketers of instant or ground coffee mix in the cheap Vietnamese beans, hoping that consumers don't notice that whatever savings are passed on to them come as a result of an adulterated product. Vietnam's willingness to produce low-quality coffee, and the coffee marketers' willingness to buy it, has also hurt higher-quality producers by creating a glut and forcing prices down.

It's time for a coffee drinkers' revolt. People should insist on coffee that smells and tastes as it should - it's available, and the price of growing the beans is such a small component of the price paid by consumers that it doesn't cost much more to insist on the good stuff. The phrase "a cup of mud" shouldn't be taken literally.