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We have joined in many a march in old Virginia, when the days were long and hot, and the power of the soldiers to endure the fatigue of the march and keep their places in the ranks was greatly enhanced by an opportunity to brew a cup of coffee by the wayside.
—Captain R. K. Beecham, Gettysburg: The Pivotal Battle of the Civil War
The American thirst for coffee was slow to develop in a young country whose rambunctious citizens preferred booze. “Most colonial drinking was utilitarian, with high alcohol consumption a normal part of personal and community habits,” observe the authors of Drinking in America. “In colonial homes, beer and cider were the usual beverages at mealtime. . . . Even children shared the dinner beer.” Many colonists considered coffee and tea poor substitutes for strong alcoholic brews. Thus the first Continental Army ration, established by Congress in 1775, contained no coffee, only a daily allowance for spruce beer or cider.
Still, coffee was popular enough to cause over a hundred angry Boston women to raid a food warehouse in 1777. During the Revolutionary War, dealers took advantage of scarce supplies to hoard coffee beans and jack up prices. As Abigail Adams described to her husband, John, “There is a great scarcity of sugar and coffee, articles which the female part of the state is very loath to give up, especially whilst they consider the great scarcity occasioned by the merchants having secreted a large quantity.” She then described how the women raided the warehouse, while “a large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators.”
Throughout the first half of the 1800s the American taste for coffee swelled, particularly after the War of 1812, which temporarily shut off access to tea just when all things French, including coffee drinking, were stylish. By that time Brazilian coffee was closer and cheaper anyway—and perhaps price counted even more than political ideology or fashion statements when Americans came to choose their favorite caffeinated beverage. Per-capita consumption grew to three pounds a year in 1830, five and a half pounds by 1850, and eight pounds by 1859. Although there were urban coffeehouses, most Americans drank coffee at home or brewed it over campfires while headed west. By 1849 coffee had become the “great essential in a prairie bill of fare,” according to one surveyor of the time. “Give [the frontiersman] coffee and tobacco, and he will endure any privation, suffer any hardship, but let him be without these two necessaries of the woods, and he becomes irresolute and murmuring.”
Once introduced to the black brew, Native Americans adopted it as well. The Sioux called it kazuta sapa, or “black medicine.” Indeed, the Indians attacked many wagon trains specifically to get coffee—along with sugar, tobacco, and whiskey. On the other hand, white traders took advantage of the Indians, trading one cup of coffee for a buffalo robe.
Home Roasting, Brewing, and Ruination
In the predominantly rural United States of the mid-nineteenth century, people bought green coffee beans (primarily from the West or East Indies) in bulk at the local general store, then roasted and ground them at home. Roasting the beans in a frying pan on the wood stove required twenty minutes of constant stirring and often produced uneven roasts. For the affluent there were a variety of home roasters that turned by crank or steam, but none worked very well. The beans were ground in a manufactured coffee mill or a mortar and pestle.
Housewives usually brewed coffee just by boiling the grounds in water. To clarify the drink, or “settle” the grounds to the bottom, brewers employed various questionable additives, including eggs, fish, and eel skins. One popular cookbook contained the following recipe: “To prepared coffee, put two great spoonfuls to each pint of water; mix it with the white, yolk and shell of an egg, pour on hot, but not boiling water, and boil it not over ten minutes.” If eggs were not available, creative coffee brewers could use cod. The consequent brew must have possessed a fishy off taste— yet it still gained in popularity from year to year, and coffee “experts” repeated the same advice.16
During the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a veritable explosion of European coffee-making patents and ingenious devices for combining hot water and ground coffee, including a popular two-tier drip pot invented around the time of the French Revolution by Jean Baptiste de Belloy, the Archbishop of Paris.
In 1809 a brilliant, eccentric expatriate American named Benjamin Thompson—who preferred to be known as Count Rumford—modified the de Belloy pot to create his own drip version. Rumford also made a correct brewing pronouncement: Water for coffee should be fresh and near boiling, but coffee and water should never be boiled together, and brewed coffee should never be reheated. Unfortunately for American consumers, however, Rumford’s pot and opinions did not travel back across the Atlantic. Nor did the numerous brewers from France and England that relied on a partial vacuum to draw hot water through ground coffee.
The Antebellum Coffee Industry
After the coffee crisis and glut of 1823,17 prices tumbled to around 11 cents a pound in 1825 from a high of 21 cents in 1821. For the next thirty years prices remained low (usually below 10 cents), as increasing production continued to overtop burgeoning consumption. Java and Ceylon pumped out more and more coffee, as did Brazil. Costa Rica had begun to export as well. At the same time, coffee harvests from the islands of the West Indies, so important until the late eighteenth century, tailed off due to low prices, political disturbances, and labor scarcity. Many neglected plantations became overgrown, while in the lowlands, sugarcane, now far more lucrative, dominated.
The low prices that were hurting the coffee growers contributed to the growing popularity of the drink among the lower classes, particularly in continental Europe and the United States. In 1833 James Wilde imported the first commercial coffee roaster to New York from England. By the middle of the 1840s, at least in urban areas, a coffee-roasting industry had developed. In Germany, England, and the United States, multiple patents for large-scale roasters were taken out. The most popular roaster in the United States was the Carter Pull-Out, invented by James W. Carter of Boston in 1846, which featured huge perforated cylinders that turned inside brick ovens. Once the coffee was roasted, workers had to haul the gigantic cylinder out horizontally, accompanied by suffocating smoke, and dump the beans into wooden trays, where laborers stirred them with shovels. By 1845 there were sufficient facilities around New York City to roast as much coffee as was then consumed in the entirety of Great Britain.
The Union (and Coffee) Forever
The Civil War (1861-1865) reduced coffee consumption in America, as the Union government levied a 4-cent duty on imported beans and blockaded Southern ports, preventing the rebels from receiving any coffee. Until the war, production had dwindled, discouraged by years of low prices, while consumer demand gradually grew. Now producers, encouraged by huge price hikes caused by the war, redoubled their efforts. In 1861 the price for Brazilian coffee increased to 14 cents a pound. In the ensuing war years it rose to 23 cents, then 32 cents, and finally 42 cents a pound before falling back to 18 cents after the war. Since the U.S. Army was a major purchaser, each Union victory spurred active trading and price hikes. By 1864 the government was buying 40 million pounds of green coffee beans.
The Civil War gave soldiers a permanent taste for the drink. Each Union soldier’s daily allotment included one-tenth of a pound of green coffee beans that, translated into annual consumption, was a whopping thirty-six pounds per capita. “Coffee was one of the most cherished items in the ration,” wrote one historian. “If it cannot be said that coffee helped Billy Yank win the war, it at least made his participation in the conflict more tolerable.” The book Hardtack and Coffee, written in 1887 by former Massachusetts artilleryman John Billings, described the overwhelming importance of the coffee ration:
Little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains and, as if by magic, acres of territory would be luminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an almost invariable rule to cook their coffee first, after which a large number, tired out with the toils of the day, would make their supper of hardtack and coffee, and roll up in their blankets for the night. If a march was ordered at midnight, unless a surprise was intended it must be preceded by a pot of coffee. . . . It was coffee at meals and between meals; and men going on guard or coming off guard drank it at all hours of the night.
Because coffee was such an important ration constituent, the method of dividing it fairly (after the coffee had been pooled for grinding) developed into quite a ritual. “The lieutenant’s rubber blanket lay on the ground,” Stephen Crane wrote in one of his Civil War short stories, “and upon it he had poured the company’s supply of coffee. . . . He drew with his sword various crevices in the heap, until brown squares of coffee, astoundingly equal in size, appeared on the blanket.” To ensure fairness, the officer in charge of dividing the coffee then would turn his back while one of the men called out, “Who shall have this pile?” and the officer would read a name from his roster.
Since ground coffee stales quickly, soldiers preferred to carry whole beans and grind them as needed. Each company cook carried a portable grinder. A few Sharps carbines were designed to hold a coffee mill in the butt stock of the gun, so that the soldier could always carry his grinder with him.
One of Sherman’s veterans described the coffee as “strong enough to float an iron wedge and innocent of lacteal adulteration.” Coffee was more than a pick-me-up; it also proved useful in other ways. Each box of hardtack biscuits carried a label suggesting the soldier boil his coffee, crumble the biscuits into it, and skim off the weevils.
Confederates meanwhile had to drink coffee substitutes made from acorns, dandelion roots, okra, or chicory. Real coffee was so scarce in the war-torn South that it cost $5 a pound in Richmond, Virginia, while one Atlanta jeweler set coffee beans in breast pins in lieu of diamonds.
Jabez Burns, Inventor
During the Civil War two inventions revolutionized the nascent coffee industry, both developed to take advantage of the war economy. The first, created for peanuts in 1862, was the inexpensive, lightweight, and durable paper bag—an unheralded event at the time. The second, invented in 1864 by Jabez Burns, was the self-emptying roaster. Burns, who emigrated from England to the United States in his teens, was the nephew of his namesake, a famed British Baptist preacher. From the evangelist he inherited a revulsion for hard liquor, boundless self-assurance and self-righteousness, and a devotion to coffee, the temperance beverage.
The industrious younger Jabez Burns created a string of inventions. Seeing an opportunity during the war, he quit his job as bookkeeper for a coffee mill to pursue an improved roaster. He now called himself Jabez Burns, Inventor. Using a clever double-screw arrangement, Burns’s invention pushed the beans uniformly up and down a chamber as the cylinder turned. Best of all, when the operator opened the door of the roaster, the beans neatly tumbled out into a cooling tray.
Over the next fifteen years Burns sold hundreds of his roasters as the United States, with amazing rapidity, developed into a consumer society that relied on convenient, mass-produced products. Every town of any size had its own roaster, which introduced a measure of uniformity to coffee roasting that was a sign of things to come. Soon after, a Pittsburgh grocer named John Arbuckle would revolutionize the nascent coffee industry by showing how standardization, branding, and marketing could sell cheap goods.
Arbuckles’ Ariosa: The People’s Coffee
In 1860 two young brothers, John and Charles Arbuckle, joined Duncan McDonald—their uncle on their mother’s side—and another friend named William Roseburg to form the wholesale Pittsburgh grocery business of McDonald & Arbuckle. Though they dealt in most foods, twenty-one-year-old John Arbuckle decided to specialize in coffee, which he correctly perceived as a commodity with a future. Four years later, when Jabez Burns invented his roaster, Arbuckle bought one for his Pittsburgh plant, where he began selling preroasted coffee in one-pound packages. Others in the trade mocked him at first for selling coffee “in little paper bags like peanuts,” but Arbuckle’s product was an immediate success.18 He employed fifty girls to pack and label, then later secured the rights to an automated packaging machine that performed the work of five hundred human packers. Arbuckle also applied an egg-and-sugar glaze, purportedly to prevent his roasted beans from staling and to help in “clarifying” the coffee.
John Arbuckle proved to be a marketing genius. He knew that in addition to his innovative concept of providing conveniently preroasted coffee, the most important selling point would be a distinctive brand name and label. He tried out various names, including Arbuckles, Fragar, and Compono, before hitting on Ariosa, which became his flagship brand. (“A” probably stood for Arbuckle, “Rio” for coffee coming from Rio de Janeiro, and “Sa” for Santos, another Brazilian port, or South America, or Sociedade Anonima, the Brazilian equivalent of “incorporated.”) Much Rio coffee was (and still is) noted for its distinctively moldy off taste and, though it had its adherents, was one of the least acceptable beans in the trade. Santos had a better reputation.
Arbuckle enjoyed a good scrape with competitors. He started immediately by issuing a handbill with a woodcut illustration of Dilworth Brothers’ coffee establishment. Various bugs and filth appeared in the coffee barrels. “No wonder I have been sick,” a man observed. “I see what killed my children,” a nearby woman cried. A bitter feud ensued, though no legal action resulted.
In 1871, with sales exploding in Pittsburgh, John Arbuckle left his brother Charles to open a factory in New York. Before the Civil War, New Orleans had been the major point of entry for coffee in the United States. A war blockade had closed the port, however, and New York had become the hub of the American coffee trade. By this time the uncle had departed, and they renamed the firm Arbuckle Brothers.
The following year Arbuckle printed a brightly colored handbill showing a disheveled housewife at her wood stove lamenting, “Oh, I have Burnt my Coffee, again.” Her well-dressed, seated guest advises her: “Buy Arbuckles’ Roasted, as I do, and you will have no trouble.” The text continued with the claim that “every grain is evenly roasted,” flatly asserting, “You cannot roast Coffee properly yourself.”
The names Arbuckle and Ariosa soon became household words throughout the East Coast and the frontier, while John and Charles Arbuckle became multimillionaires. Already demonstrating a desire to enter all aspects of the business, the Arbuckles had purchased a printer to make their own labels and were also doing job printing for others.
In the 1880s John Arbuckle established branches in Kansas City and Chicago, with over a hundred additional stock depots across the country. He ventured to Brazil to establish green bean exporting offices in Rio de Janeiro, Santos, and Victoria, the three main Brazilian ports, as well as several branches in Mexico. Arbuckle even owned his own shipping fleet. The Arbuckle plant along the Brooklyn waterfront occupied a dozen city blocks and stabled two hundred draft horses. Arbuckle started his own barrel factory after he got into the sugar business. The barrels were made from Arbuckle-owned timber stands in Virginia and North Carolina. The Brooklyn plant had its own hospital and dining room for employees. In the days before “vertical integration” became a buzzword, Arbuckle had mastered the concept.
Out in the American West, strong, boiled Ariosa became the cowboy’s coffee of choice. “Cookie, pour me a cup o’ that condensed panther y’u call coffee,” a macho cowpoke would say. “This is the way I like it, plum bare-footed [black]. None o’ that dehorned stuff y’u get in town cafes for me.”
The son of a Scottish immigrant, Arbuckle combined a pragmatic gruff-ness with a more tender side. Stubborn and independent, he also maintained a firm notion of right and wrong. Yet Arbuckle did not brook opposition if he felt he was in the right. In years to come he would become embroiled in a titanic, prolonged battle for control of the coffee industry.
In his latter years he spent a great deal of money on philanthropic ventures—enterprises such as his “poor man’s yachts,” three ships Arbuckle had fitted up to haul impoverished New Yorkers out to sea for a night. At one point he said that his “life had been saved” by a sea voyage. “I realized what a boon the cool, salt air of the ocean is to the sweltering, overworked people of the crowded cities.” He converted another boat to the Riverside Home for Crippled Children, and he founded an eight hundred-acre farm at New Paltz, New York, as a fresh-air getaway for city children. Later he funded a home for the aged.
Mr. Chase Meets Mr. Sanborn
Farther north, in Boston, another coffee dynasty took shape. Growing up on Cape Cod, Caleb Chase worked in his father’s grocery store until he was twenty-four, then moved to Boston to work for a leading dry goods house. In 1864 Chase, then thirty-two, went into business for himself as a coffee roaster with two partners. In 1867 James Sanborn, four years younger than Chase, moved to Boston from his native Maine. Having worked in a machine shop, then sold garden seeds, he now set up as a coffee and spice man. In 1878 the two men joined forces under the name of Chase & Sanborn, specializing in coffee and tea.
They established a reputation for their high-grade Standard Java brand, shipped in sealed tin cans of their own manufacture. In 1880 Chase & Sanborn expanded to Chicago, and two years later they opened a Canadian branch in Montreal. By 1882 they were selling over 100,000 pounds of coffee a month from their seven-story factory on Boston’s Broad Street. They hired some 25,000 local selling agents in nearly every city and town in the South, West, and Canada, giving each exclusive sales privileges in his defined market area. With such aggressive expansion, profits grew quickly, never falling below $1 million a year after 1880.
Chase, Sanborn, and their junior partner, Charles Sias, were master marketers as well as expert coffee men. The first to use sealed cans in a vain effort to avoid staling from oxygen (the air was sealed in too), they made much of their Seal Brand Java & Mocha, trademarking it with the Chase family seal (a lion rampant over four crosses) along with the Latin inscription “Ne cede malis,” meaning roughly, “Yield not to evil.”
They did, however, yield somewhat, as one of their longtime employees revealed years later. Their Java & Mocha brand contained very little coffee from either origin. When Swift & Company, charged with misrepresentation for using the term Pure Leaf Lard, lost their case, the Boston coffee roasters dropped the geographical terms and simply called their coffee Chase & Sanborn Seal Brand. At the same time, the firm put out a variety of second- and third-tier coffees with appealing if nondescriptive names: Sanrika, Crusade, Esplanade, Golden Glow, Good Fellow, Buffalo Brand, Bonita, and Dining Car Special. All of these were packed in parchment-lined paper bags.
Chase & Sanborn were among the first to use premiums to market their coffee. They spent $20,000 a year on advertising, much of it in the form of educational color booklets such as The History of the American Flag, North American Birds, or The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers. Other giveaways included blotters, novelty cards, and store displays. At one point they mounted giant coffeepots on fifty of their horse-and-wagon delivery teams, complete with steam pouring out of the spout.
Realizing the importance of establishing rapport with their customers, the owners sought salesmen who had the “personal touch.” If a customer fell ill, the Chase & Sanborn man would call on him. In hard times, such as the Vermont flood of 1927, all debts owed to the company were canceled entirely. In the cash-strapped South, cotton was sometimes accepted in payment. The firm invariably sent holiday greeting cards to every customer.
One Chase & Sanborn advertisement from 1892 showed a sweet grandmother peering into the bottom of a coffee cup, with her daughter and granddaughter looking over her shoulder. “What vision, dear Mother, in your cup do you see?” asked the caption. “The whole world drinking Chase & Sanborn Coffee and Tea.” An accompanying card explained how to tell fortunes from coffee or tea grounds in the bottom of a cup. The same year, Chase & Sanborn issued Chunks of Gold, an amplified booklet of endorsements accompanied by the explanation that such customers “buy our Teas and Coffees EXCLUSIVELY, simply because they are proven THE BEST.” They boasted that their buying agents, located at strategic points in the producing countries, bought mostly from private plantations, securing the “choicest selections.”
It is likely that this hyperbolic advertising came from Charles Sias, a younger and more flamboyant partner who had joined the firm in 1882. Caleb Chase and James Sanborn exemplified the old-line Yankee aristocracy, with a dignified pragmatism and dry sense of humor. Chase invariably asked an associate how business was going each day, because, he explained, it would help him decide whether to order steak or beans for lunch. Sanborn displayed his diplomacy one day when a woman asked him for his advice on the best way to make coffee. He asked her how she brewed it, then said, “My word, madam, I don’t know any better way to make coffee.”
Despite such deference to customers’ taste, the two senior partners did indeed know their coffee. And they took pains to make sure they bought the best for the price they paid. They always roasted a sample by hand, then ground it fine, weighed it carefully, and compared it in the cup to another coffee with a fine reputation, known to give “complete satisfaction.” While the tea buyers had “cup tested” in this fashion for many years, Chase & Sanborn were coffee pioneers in the early 1880s, though they noted that “this process is pursued by comparatively few,” indicating that others had also adopted the practice. They added that “it takes years of careful application and general adaptability to succeed as a coffee expert.”
Jim Folger and Gold Rush Coffee
In the meantime another coffee dynasty, founded by James Folger, had begun in San Francisco, though the path to it wound from the faraway island of Nantucket, where the Folgers were a whaling clan. In Moby-Dick, Melville referred to “a long line of Folgers and harpooneers.”19 But by 1842 the sperm whale had been hunted almost to extinction. In 1849, when word of California gold reached Nantucket, fourteen ships of hopeful young men sailed away in search of the glittering metal rather than whale blubber. Among them were three of the Folger boys—Edward, twenty, Henry, sixteen, and James, fourteen—on a ship bound for Panama.
After a harrowing trip they made it to the chaotic boomtown of San Francisco in May 1850. Only two years earlier the town had held 800 people. Now 40,000 would-be millionaires tramped through the mudslides that passed for streets. The city’s principal businesses were saloons, gambling establishments, and whorehouses, where bags of gold dust bought women’s favors. While his brothers ventured into mining country, young Jim joined twenty-seven-year-old William Bovee in the Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills—named somewhat wishfully, since there was no steam engine to run anything yet. The roaster had to be turned by hand, probably by the fourteen-year-old Folger.
Though undoubtedly stale by the time it was brewed, the coffee proved an instant success among the miners, too frantic searching for gold to waste time stirring their green beans over a campfire. In 1851 Bovee bought a steam engine and moved to larger quarters. Meanwhile Jim Folger’s older brothers returned from their not terribly successful mining venture. Henry, the middle brother, booked passage for the East, but Edward set up a whale oil business next door to his brother’s coffee roasting establishment.
For a time Jim Folger, by now eighteen, left to open a store to service gold miners at a spot called “Yankee Jim.” One miner’s 1852 diary from the area noted, “The young man from Nantucket, Jim Folger, is most courageous—at his tender age he has more sense than most of us.” Soon, however, Folger sold out and rejoined Bovee, now as a clerk and traveling salesman. The same miner’s 1858 diary entry noted that Folger was “in business for himself down in Frisco and selling coffee to every damned diggings in California.”
By the time he was twenty-four, Folger was married and a full partner in the firm, along with Ira Marden, who had bought out Bovee. For a time the business flourished, then foundered in the general economic collapse following the Civil War. The firm went bankrupt in 1865, and Jim Folger bought out his partner, determined to revive the business and pay off his debts, which took him nearly a decade. “This payment being unexpected, I hereby gratefully acknowledge the honorable transaction of a noble merchant,” one grateful creditor wrote on an 1872 receipt to Folger. It helped when he found a wealthy German partner, Otto Schoemann, who brought $10,000 to the partnership.
Renamed J. A. Folger & Co., the firm thrived during the 1870s. In 1875 the Dun credit agent reported that Folger had paid off half of his debt and intended to pay the rest. “They are doing an excellent business and gaining right along.” In 1877 August Schilling, age twenty-seven, who had been clerking with the business, bought Schoemann’s share. He was later to branch off with his own coffee enterprise. At decade’s end Folger was sending his salesmen as far afield as Montana, Oregon, and Washington.
By the late 1870s there were similar success stories in most major cities of the United States, as well as throughout Europe. Most roasters grew out of wholesale grocery businesses whose owners had the foresight to see that specializing in coffee could make their fortune. The time was ripe for a trade publication to admonish, titillate, lecture, and instruct this growing industry.
Jabez Burns, Editor: Keeping Coffee and Women in Their Place
In 1878 Jabez Burns commenced publication of the Spice Mill—the first trade journal to cover coffee, tea, and spices—though the majority of its pages were devoted to coffee. It was a quirky publication given over entirely to the opinions of its editor. “We call our paper the Spice Mill,” he wrote in the first issue, “because we intend to deal in a spicy way with the spice of active manufacturing business life.” He added that he wanted to deal not only with facts and figures but also to reduce “habits, tricks—and frauds—to powder.”
Jabez Burns loved the art of roasting. “Coffee,” he wrote, “you develop, and by skill and judgment change from caterpillar to a butterfly, as it were—you bring out a hidden treasure.” He recommended sample roasting small batches of beans before buying them (a recent innovation at the time), rather than judging them solely on their looks. He endorsed a swift, hot roast rather than a slow bake, warning that “the very best coffee in the market may be made insipid trash for the want of sufficient roasting.” When coffee is roasted it doubles in size, but it loses anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of its weight as the water is driven off. To reduce this weight loss, many roasters resorted to extremely light roasts that produced bitter, undeveloped cups of coffee.
Burns denounced “the abuse of water [and] the plastering on of compounds of every variety in the shape of glaze.” When the beans were dumped out to cool, many roasters sprayed the beans to “quench” them quickly—still a common practice. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as the quick spray simply halts the roasting process, the water hissing off as steam. Some roasters (then and now) applied an overabundance of water, however, adding weight and waterlogging the beans. Others put on glazes made with egg, sugar, butter, or other compounds, purportedly to preserve freshness. This may well have been the case, but others abused the practice simply to add weight or to hide defective beans from view.
When he strayed from coffee, Jabez Burns revealed a less appealing side, spicing his Spice Mill with racist jokes and slurs. He also disapproved of the fight for women’s rights. He lamented “our agitating women of the present day,” urging businessmen never to employ women because “it pains us to see a woman out of her sphere.” Burns emphasized that he was only trying to protect the ladies from “the insult of the rude strange youth, the cunning of unprincipled employers, and the immorality of the vicious men she must meet in nearly every department of manufactory or shop work.”
In other words, coffee men were all right, but not coffee women. Burns’s attitude was not unusual. Front Street, the New York bastion of the green coffee importers, was for years an all-male enclave. Women who entered the business had to claw their way through the prejudice of the industry.
On another trade issue, however, Burns disagreed with other coffee men who descried any adulteration of coffee with other substances. Burns preferred his coffee mixed with chicory. “There are a number of prepared coffees, well-understood mixtures of course, that are really superior in flavor and appearance to the bean itself.” As long as the public knew that it was not buying pure coffee, and that the price was consequently lower, he saw no problem. “The competitive spirit of the age” would ensure quality, since “every grocer is aware that the goods he sells are compared with those of his neighbor.”
Unfortunately, this competitive spirit did not always work to the benefit of the public. Some U.S. manufacturers produced fake whole coffee beans made from rye flour, glucose, and water. “Sometimes the retailer is deceived,” a contemporary Scientific American article noted, “but nine times out of ten he is the one who introduced adulteration. The ground article is very easily produced in the proper color, and an aroma is infused by using strong decoctions of coffee essence.” The sale of coffee essence itself was usually a con job, made with blackstrap molasses, chicory, and perhaps a dash of genuine coffee extract.
“The adulterations of coffee are so great,” groused one 1872 consumer, “that pure coffee is rarely to be had except in private families where the head of the house attends in person to the preparation of the precious cup.” Three years later a letter in the New York Times complained, “In this City, veritable coffee has become almost extinct.” In his classic Coffee: From Plantation to Cup, Francis Thurber observed, “The adulteration of coffee and the vast scale on which it is practiced, are well-known facts,” which is one reason he suggested each family grind its own beans. Unlike Burns, Thurber despised chicory and repeated with relish the story of a coffee lover who asked at a restaurant, “Have you any chicory?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring me some.” After the waiter brought a small can of chicory the guest asked, “Is that all you have?”
“We have a little more.”
“Bring me the rest.” The waiter brought another can.
“You have no more?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well. Now go and make me a cup of coffee.”20
Chicory was not the only coffee additive. The list of coffee adulterants indeed is amazing: almonds, arrowhead, asparagus seeds and stalks, baked horse liver, barberries, barley, beechmast, beetroot, box seeds, bracken, bran, bread crusts, brewery waste, brick dust, burnt rags, burrs, carob beans, carrot, chickpeas, chicory, chrysanthemum seeds, coal ashes, cocoa shells, comfrey roots, cranberries, currants, dahlia tubers, dandelion roots, date seeds, dirt, dog biscuits, elderberries, figs, gherkins, gooseberries, haws, hips, holly berries, horse chestnuts, Jerusalem artichokes, juniper berries, kola nuts, lentils, linseed, lupine, malt, mesquite, monkey nuts, mulberries, parsnips, pea hulls, pumpkin seeds, quaker-grass roots, rice, rowan berries, rutabaga, sand, sassafras, sawdust, sloes, sunflower seeds, turnips, vetch, wheat, whey, wood chips—and more. Even used coffee grounds were employed to adulterate coffee.
At least none of those myriad items would kill anyone, unlike some of the coloring agents applied to beans. “Very dangerous powders or mixtures are used to color the beans,” Thurber noted, “the practice being resorted to in order to meet the prejudices of consumers in certain sections for a bright yellow, black, or olive-green colored bean.” An 1884 headline in the New York Times blared, “POISON IN EVERY CUP OF COFFEE.” An investigation revealed that Guatemalan and Venezuelan coffee had been “taken to two mills in Brooklyn, and had there been treated with coloring matter, so as to make them resemble Government Java. This deception has been going on for years.” The coloring matter contained arsenic and lead. “A careful analysis led to the conclusion that every cup of coffee made from the colored beans, which are put upon the market as Java, contains one-sixtieth of a grain of arsenious acid, which is a virulent poison.” Rio coffee was also polished and colored to produce a handsome green rather than a dull gray. Chemists asserted that “it requires an almost white heat to destroy the arsenic, but even then the lead will still remain.”
John Arbuckle, always ready to take advantage of a competitor, printed an Ariosa ad in which the text read: “Help us drive out of the market the poisonous Coffees that are now being so largely sold; 3,000,000 pounds of Coffee have been colored during the past year with Arsenic, Venetian-Blue, Chrome-Yellow and other ingredients.”
The swift rise of Brazilian coffee explains the popularity of the poisonous coloring. Owing to Brazil’s climate and soil conditions, its beans produced inferior coffee to the traditional Java and Mocha, and sold at a considerable discount. Consequently many retailers passed off beans from Brazil or other parts of Latin America as coming from Yemen or Indonesia, particularly Old Government Java, which referred to coffee held in go-downs, or storehouses, by the Dutch government for seven years or longer. During this process coffee beans age, mellow, and turn a shade of brown. This coffee, like fine old wine, commanded a premium price and was worth imitating.21
The Indispensable Beverage
By the 1870s, according to Robert Hewitt Jr., coffee had become “an indispensable beverage” to citizens of the Western world—especially to Americans, who consumed six times as much as most Europeans. In his 1872 book Coffee: Its History, Cultivation, and Uses, Hewitt added that “there is scarcely any other item of commerce that has made more rapid progress in the world, or gained for itself more general acceptation with all classes.” As a Harper’s commentator put it in the same year, “The proud son of the highest civilization can no longer live happily without coffee. . . . The whole social life of many nations is based upon the insignificant bean; it is an essential element in the vast commerce of great nations.” The coffee industry had become Big Business, as Thurber observed in 1881:
After leaving the plantation and before reaching the consumer, it has paid tribute to the transporter, to the shipping bankers of that country; to the ships which carry it abroad; the custom-houses of importing countries, to their stevedores, storage warehouses, insurance companies, and bankers; to the brokers who sample and sell it, the weighers who weigh it, and the wholesale merchants who buy it. Then comes its cartage or lighterage, its roasting and sale to retail merchants, and its transportation to the point where it is finally distributed and consumed. Twelve hundred millions of pounds of coffee annually pass through this routine, and probably a hundred millions of people, besides the consumers, are directly or indirectly benefited. Factories have been brought into existence to manufacture the machinery required in the cultivation and preparation of this staple; great mills work throughout the whole year on the bagging required for the packages; warehouses worth millions have been provided for its storage; mighty fleets of vessels are created and maintained for its carriage on the sea, and railroads for its transportation on land.
By 1876 the United States was importing 340 million pounds of coffee annually, accounting for nearly a third of all coffee exported from producing countries. Of all the coffee consumed in the United States, nearly three-quarters came from Brazil, where coffee had not even been a meaningful export crop two generations earlier. As the steady flow of Brazilian beans became a flood, three powerful American coffee barons—known as the Trinity—struggled to maintain their lucrative domination of the market.