Why does so much coffee in the US taste so bad? Watch Coffee: Beans to Buzz, a short documentary by the National Geographic Channel, and you’ll get a sense of it via Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World:

The big roasters got into these price wars with each other and they would cheapen the blend to offer the cheapest possible canned coffee in the store…. As a result, what was happening is people were drinking less and less coffee. They were literally drinking less cups, but in the cups, they were making more and more dilute coffee because it tasted so bad!

Originally aired on Jan. 4, Coffee: Beans to Buzz takes both a historical and contemporary look at the business and consumption of coffee. And the docu talks about Starbucks — a lot — from discussing delocator to quoting Deborah James of Global Exchange saying that Starbucks makes more money per pound than any other coffee company in the world.

Deborah goes on to say that Starbucks is “far and away better than Folgers and Maxwell House. I think that that’s really not where the competition is for them though. They’re competing with all of the other specialy coffee importers. So their leadership really needs to come in terms of the specialty industry, and what we’ve seen is that they are a follower not a leader.”

One current example of how Starbucks is dragging its heels can be seen in the mermaid’s effort to stymie Ethiopia’s efforts to trademark its coffee names. Coffee: Beans to Buzz doesn’t mention this debate, but it DOES mention that “Many coffee connoiseurs searching for the perfect cup of coffee agree that the finest coffee is Ethiopia’s Yirgacheffe.” And in fact, Yirgacheffe is the one coffee that Ethiopia’s managed to trademark in the US; the struggle continues over trademarks for Harrar and Sidamo.

All in all, Coffee: Beans to Buzz is a quick introduction to the coffee world. The docu’s not as informative as reading The Coffee Book. but still a fairly informative and interesting watch for the time-pressed or book-unfriendly.

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