Please Don't Quote Me By Caralee Aschenbrenner It was because taxes were being raised that Americans became coffee drinkers. You remember your history lesson the Boston Tea Party, 1773. The British government of which we were colonists wanted more money, so they put more taxes on imported tea and because a warm cuppa had become a necessity here, too, as well as in Mother England, it was believed we'd pay more for it. By the late eighteenth century Americans had learned that they could be independent. In protest they threw boatloands of tea into the harbor.

No tea to be had, Bostonians and ultimately other colonists also found substitute beverages in herbals, plants and then coffee which did take some getting used to. But, oh my, it was energizing!

Coffee beans, still green, was how the product was marketed. The consumer first roasted them at home, perhaps in an iron skillet. Skill with the skillet, of course, did much towards making the mug of joe turn out satisfactory. That status continued for almost a century because tea had semi-returned to the marketplace and coffee was expensive for most of the population. As early as 1816, for instance, coffee cost on average 44¢ a pound, an exhorbitant price at a time when a month's wage's barely exceeded two or three dollars. A merchant might sell only two or three pounds in that amount of time.

The Civil War was another impetus for the United States becoming coffee drinkers. It had come to notice in the Revolutionary War and now the Civil War that what we drank coincidentally had an effect on us.

Most young men serving in the War Between the States had never tasted coffee so when it turned up in daily rations it was a turning point. Why there was so much coffee suddenly available as it was to be given out for the mess, reference doesn't say. But because soldiers then cooked their own meals, it was a welcome beverage which could be boiled up as soon as the campfire flared. Every man was issued a portion of pork, bacon or beef, bread and hard tack (cracker-like biscuit). Or the flour and cornmeal to make them. So much in the way of peas, beans, potatoes was divided daily between a hundred men, ten companies. How did they divide one pound pepper and a quart of molasses apportioned for that many? It took some juggling.

Coffee and sugar was easier; pour them into a blanket to be scooped up into a cloth bag every soldier carried for that issue. It could be of any material and in any condition of cleanliness. sometimes they were merely mixed together so as not to lose out. And if by chance some canned condensed milk would be on hand, a hearty tin cup of coffee couldn't be beat. Tea might be issued but usually it was coffee as months dragged on ... To the company, ten pounds of green coffee beans, eight, if roasted.

Coffee drinking caught on for its energizing effects and for warmth in the starving gut. When the boys, both of the Blue and the Gray, went home following the armistice, by 1865 they'd been "hooked" on what to most was a new drink.

Hometown merchants, however, weren't prepared for this new fad. But they tried to meet the demand with the product and the implements to process it, grind beans and the roasting in the store. "Coffee Wars" began immediately just in the hyperbole alone in the advertising and the adulteration of coffee.

In about 1868 the Oriental Tea Co., Boston, hit the advertising jackpot with their theme ... "Male Berry Java Coffee. To quote their campaign, " ... Stands at the head of all known varieties for powerful strength, richness of aroma and healthy drinking properties ... Round or fully developed bean, picked from the ordinary flat coffee by hand, in Java ..." They claimed it to be the very best in the world.

the "American Grocer," the foremost trade magazine at the time, in 1869, milkly rebuked them by saying that if the berry had any sex at all they were certain it was not male ... They were found in many other varieities, too, particularly Mocha and although "Male Berry" was very good they hinted that others were just as good.

"Male Berry Java Coffee" was still into their subtle campaign in 1873 and the public was taken by the innuendo, "powerful strength!"

During this highly suggestive advertising campaign the anti-coffee drinkers, a very vocal segment which believed drinking coffee was sinful, enjoyed the debate. In England, too, the "new" beverage, there since the seventeenth century was thought to cause leprosy and other terrible diseases. In the 1870s into the twentieth American preachers, reformers, faddists, extremists of all sorts added to the already distorted debate. Those who made "manufactured" coffee adulterated that and "real" coffee with everything from roasted peas, beans, rye, wheat, oats, brown bread, slate, charcoal, bark, date pits or chicory, an age-old coffee alternative (See PDQ Me - 12/15/04).

Chicory, in fact, was a big component in the fooling of the public. the root was dried, powdered and then shaped into coffee bean-like ovals in machines especially made for the job, showing the length to which some would go to make a buck.

The adulterators became known even to the by-now rapidly increasing coffee drinking public which was growing more and more discriminating. The negativity eventually turned the coffee traders to improving quality and building new processes not much touched upon ... Blending. The pettiness slowly faded.

Blending of various coffees become the correct route in improving taste. While all the arguments and adulterations were going on a young Kentuckian, James Cheek, rafted down the Cumberland River to Nashville, Tennessee where he got a job as traveling salesman for a wholesale grocer. He handled all sorts of products but fell in love with coffee. He spent all his spare time trying different blends but there was little time until he was offered a partnership. He spent more time blending, roasting, experimenting until in the early 1880's he took a sample to the most famous, elite hotel in the south in Nashville, the Maxwell House. the hotel's exclusive clientele deemed the coffee "superb."

Years later Teddy Roosevelt was asked if he wanted another cup and he enthusiastically replied, "Delighted. It's good to the last drop" and so was born a product name its slogan which is still a seller today.

Meanwhile another coffee company familiar today was getting its start. A couple decades before, the 1850's, in Maine, a young man, James Sanborn, was peddling garden seeds by horse cart. As cash grew he added spices and coffee which increased the business until he decided to open a branch in Boston where he became acquainted with Caleb Chase, son of a sea captain, who'd opened a coffee business in 1864. They formed a partnership to sell and promote coffee. Chase and Sanborn became the first to seal the product in a metal can. From 1878 when one and two pound cans went on the shelves of country stores everywhere, it too, became a familiar name.

A foil paper of one pound wrapping in cases of thirty or fifty with the wholesale price of 18 cents per was average in 1869 for the first "branded" coffee on the market "Osborn's Celebrated Prepared Coffee." It advertised "No Prizes, No Orders for Spoons or Dolls but Coffee worth its price..."

The coffee bean was often still roasted at home and home-size roasters came on the market instead of the faithful iron skillet. Grocers, too, were seeing many "efficient" new implements come in to help sell coffee ... Roasters, large countertop-size grinders which caught the eye and were among the last to go when the packaged coffee eventually came on the market. It was a sentimental appliance for storekeeper and customer alike ... The last link to the past when the "chain" stores, self-serve markets outnumbered the neighborhood general, the big red coffee grinder became a thing of the past, too.

The A&P, however, stayed with grinding their house brands well into the mid-twentieth century ... Remember Bokar, Ann Page and Eight O'Clock coffees and having them ground as you waited? The aroma was delightful. That aroma quelled many an odor in the general store ... A bad batch of potatoes in the bin, cheese "turned" too soon under the wire fly protector, the aftermath of the farm boots sitting around the checkerboard by the pot-bellied wood stove ... Many a coffee bean was thrown on top of the stove to rid the store of bad smells, a deodorant before Oust.

Coffee finally has become the drink of Americans, the tie that binds. It took nearly three hundred years but now we gather around the coffee machine, meet a friend for a cup or join the "regulars" at the cafe for a social time, "news dissemination" and friendship, especially now when "cabin fever" is so infectious. A good cuppa is American tradition ... Is it Arabica or Robusta?

We've come to know lots about coffee the last couple decades althought there's argument over the origins of it. It is recorded as early as the fifteenth century in Abyssinia where it was said to have been known "since time immemorial." The name could have derived from the Arabic, "K'hawah." Some scholars, however, say it came from the Abyssinian province of Kaffa where the coffee tree grows wild and where legend has it shepherds noted that their flocks of sheep ate the coffee beans from the shrub and became so stimulated they couldn't sleep. When the shepherds tried brewing the beans they too were wide awake. The reputation of coffee evolved as an energizer. And since then coffee drinkers have counted sheep for centuries!!!

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