As clanging factories gave birth to the industrial age, coffee came to represent labor as well as leisure. North. American thirst was instrumental in making coffee a mass consumer product, a drug to prop up the drooping eyelids and awaken the flagging consciousness of an army of laborers. But this could occur only after they had abandoned tea. The citizens of the original 13 British colonies were tea drinkers, in part at least because British taxation and transport policies had made the arabica inaccessible to all but the rich. There were a few coffeehouses, such as Boston’s Green Dragon, which Daniel Webster called the “headquarters of the revolution,” and The Merchant’s Coffeehouse in New York, also associated with the independence movement. But the taverns - which doubled as courtrooms and public meeting halls - were by far the favorite drinking spots in colonial times, although even those were little frequented because of the rural (and in places puritanical) nature of settlements.
United States coffee consumption in 1783 was only one-eighteenth of a pound per capita a year. By the 1830s, however, North Americans had cast aside tea for coffee, and by midcentury they were each drinking more than five pounds a year. Although the 1765 Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party certainly dampened enthusiasm for tea, commerce and demography were probably more responsible for transforming the United States into the world’s greatest coffee market. Resistance to the British East India Company was bolstered by the proximity of the French coffee-producing colonies of St. Domingue (Haiti) and Martinique and, later, Portuguese Brazil.
After independence, Americans were free to trade with these colonies, supplying them with slaves and naval stores in exchange for coffee. Thus, New England merchants introduced coffee into North America in relatively large volume. The price of coffee fell from 18 shillings per pound in 1683 to 9 shillings in 1774 to just 1 shilling in 1783. Such lower prices naturally expanded demand, and government policy further aided the transformation as import taxes on the beans were first lowered and then abolished in 1832. Resumed during the Civil War, they were definitively abolished in 1872.
The absence of a coffeehouse culture in the United States meant that the beverage’s popularity was not associated with political subversion as it was in the Middle East and Europe, and its consumption could be encouraged with no political danger. The flood of northern European immigrants from coffeedrinking countries probably also contributed to the shift from tea. Soon coffee drinking became entrenched as a social institution, and annual per capita consumption ballooned from under one pound at independence to nine pounds by 1882.
Nonetheless, it took time for the coffee trade in the United States to become institutionalized. It was originally specialized and artisanal; U. S. importers became involved only after the green beans reached New York. There, they sold them to wholesalers who, in turn, peddled them to thousands of retailers. As in Europe, there was no brand identity early on, with each grocer selling his own blends. But to a much greater extent than Europeans with their cafes, nineteenth-century North Americans bought beans in bulk at the grocers and roasted them at home.
This habit gave the housewife discretion over coffee purchases. Unlike her British sisters, who denounced coffee because of coffeehouses, the North American wife was the one who bought coffee; and brewing a good cup of coffee was often a measure of wifely abilities as a “homemaker. ” Consequently, in contrast to the customs in the Middle East or Europe, coffee merchandising in the United States became much more oriented to women than men. Arbuckle’s 1872 advertisement, the first handbill in color for coffee, shows two women by the kitchen stove, the first complaining “Oh, I have burnt my coffee again,’ and the second counseling “Buy. Arbuckle’s Roasted, as I do, and you will have no trouble” (Ukers 1935:451).
In fact, because so much coffee was purchased at the grocery store, where product differentiation was accentuated (rather than at the cafe where there was much less variety and brand was not displayed), coffee brand identification first arose in the United States. This was achieved through great efforts to create brand loyalty, although instead of market segmentation and differentiation, there was a tendency toward homogenization.
Today, to attract women to its brands, General Foods, one of the largest coffee merchandisers in the world, brings together hundreds of women in focus groups each year and sends out thousands of ques-tionnaires. The coffee market is still female-oriented in the United States, as is demonstrated by the tendency to employ women in televised coffee advertisements.
Before brand loyalty, however, there came new technology to improve the quality and marketing of coffee. In the nineteenth century, because of fairly primitive transportation and packaging techniques, the quality of coffee once it reached a Cincinnati or an Omaha was fairly poor. Consequently, consumers in such areas had a different idea of how coffee should taste than consumers do today. Some brewed it with an egg to give the drink a rich yellow color. It was also popular to add the uncooked skin of a mild codfish to the pot. In the western states, coffee was put in a saucepan and simmered for two to three hours and reheated as necessary. Mass-consumed coffee was not necessarily good coffee, but the cowboy huddled around the campfire was not a demanding gourmet. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that importers were slow to improve the quality of the coffee they sold. Roasted coffee could not be widely marketed because it lost its taste, and ground roasted beans lost flavor much more quickly. The green bean, on the other hand, could be stored for months or years without harm.
The demand for improved and standardized coffee probably derived in large part from improved transportation, roasting, grinding, and brewing technologies. Although green beans traveled well, they were frequently damaged during long sea voyages aboard sailing ships. Merchant efforts to dye damaged beans with rust, or indigo, or beef blood, or to glaze them with eggs improved their appearance, but not their flavor. Nor did the practice of roasting impaired beans with cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, and onions help much. In addition, coffee grinders did not have sufficiently sharp blades to grind the beans finely, and using mortar and pestle was a laborious business. Consequently, grinds had to remain in contact with water longer to impart their flavor, which had the drawback of creating a bitter brew: Tannin, which causes the bitter taste, begins to be extracted from the grinds about 45 seconds after contact with hot water. And finally, coffeepots were primitive. Before the invention in 1800 of a kind of percolator with a built-in filter, most people simply threw grounds into water, much as with tea.
Many of these difficulties in brewing good coffee were resolved somewhat in the nineteenth century. Railroads sped coffee from the fields to ports where the rapid and relatively large steamships that replaced sailing ships spared the green beans ocean damage. Improved control was achieved over oven temperatures, allowing for more regular roasting by, for example, the spherical roaster invented by an Austrian, Max Bode, in 1851, and the pull-out roaster produced by a New Yorker, Jabez Burns, in 1864. Better grinders, producing finer and more even grounds, were also invented, and a welter of coffeepots were mass-produced. The first predictable pumping percolator, patented in France in 1827, became the most popular North American pot in the first half of the twentieth century. Drip pots were improved with the invention of the disposable filter in 1907 (the prototype, which was cut from an ink blotter, was a considerable improvement over the previous horsehair filters). These pots were more popular in Europe, as was the espresso pot, first designed in 1837. Such pots were true monuments to the industrial age with its drawbacks and its charms. Espresso pots sometimes exploded. But if they did not, they could do a host of other things (Bersten 1993). One pressure pot also boiled eggs. The Armstong Perc-O-Toaster toasted bread and baked waffles while it perked coffee (Panati 1987).
Improvements in technology led to standardization, and eventually, to a wholesaling oligopoly in the United States. Whereas the French concentrated on devising new pots to improve the quality of brewing for the refined palate, North Americans focused on roasting, packaging, and marketing to reach the mass market. The first packaged roasted coffee was “Osborn’s Celebrated Prepared Java Coffee,” which appeared in 1860. The first brand to enjoy a national market was “.Arbuckle’s. Ariosa,” beginning in 1873. Sales of packaged coffees, however, were slow to replace those of green coffee beans until 1900, when Edwin Norton invented vacuum packing, which allowed roasted, ground coffee to retain its flavor. In 1903, Hills Brothers was the first company to commercially employ the process (Ukers 1935; Uribe 1954).
The ability to preserve roasted coffee in vacuum packages allowed a few national brands to dominate the trade in the United States. (Europeans were much slower to buy canned coffee, preferring beans and cafes). North. American firms began to integrate vertically, with the A & P grocery chain in the forefront, even to the extent of stationing buying agents in the interior of Brazil, as well as importing, roasting, packing, and retailing its own brand. Still, many smaller brands and wholesale grocers persisted. In 1923 there were 1,500 roasters and 4,000 wholesale coffee grocers in the United States (Ukers 1930).
The market power of a relatively small number of powerful wholesalers combined with U. S. government policy to create standardization. Since its inception, the wholesale market had been completely unregulated and subject to rampant speculation and fraud. Many traders mixed together a number of coffee qualities, adulterated the mix with chicory and grains, and then called it “Mocca” or “Java.’’ (The name “mocca” derived from Yemen’s main port and stood for authentic coffee, not a combination of chocolate and coffee as it does today.) In the 1860s, a typical 122-pound bag of “Java” coffee arrived from Jamaica with about 5 pounds of sticks and stones added to it.
The freewheeling coffee market began to change in 1874 when a submarine cable tied South America to New York and London by telegraph. Information about prices and demand and supply became internationally homogeneous. The establishment, in 1882, of the New York Coffee Exchange, which was instituted to prevent commercial corners from driving up prices (as had happened in 1880), institutionalized access to information, and Le Havre, Hamburg, and London followed with their own major coffee exchanges. Prices and grades thereby became more generalized, and coffee became more purely a commodity as well, in the sense that coffee shipments were now bought and sold on the market floor without the buyer actually seeing the lot in question.
Until the early twentieth century, professionals would judge a sample bean’s quality on its color, size, shape, and shine. Later, taste tests were instituted to check aroma, body, bitterness, and richness. Coffees became commodities possessing a bundle of specific, graded attributes. Indeed, with the advent of futures, buyers purchased coffee not yet blossoming on distant trees. By 1880, merchants were already buying an idea, rather than palpable beans: In that year there were 61 million bags bought and sold on the Hamburg futures market when the entire world harvest was less than 7 million bags!
Grinding did not become standardized until 1948 when the National Bureau of Standards of the Department of Commerce issued guidelines for three categories of grind - regular, drip, and fine - which most U. S. producers still follow. Much earlier, however, the Pure Food and Drug Act had decreed in 1907 that imported coffee be marked according to its port of exit. Thus “Santos” became a specific type of coffee, as did “Java” or “Mocca.” There were more than a hundred different types of coffee imported into the United States, representing the greatest variety in the world. Importers were now less able to adulterate and defraud buyers.
The buyers, in turn, became more conscious of the quality of their coffee as they were able to buy professionally and uniformly roasted beans. The almost 4 million pamphlets issued by the National Coffee Roasters’ Association at the beginning of the twentieth century in a campaign to educate housewives in proper brewing techniques apparently paid dividends. North American per capita consumption almost doubled between 1880 and 1920 to 16 pounds per capita. The growth of cities and factories accelerated the trend. No longer primarily the beverage of spiritual contemplation, commerce, or leisure, coffee became the alarm clock that marked industrial time. North. American coffee imports swelled almost ninetyfold in the nineteenth century.
Temperance societies in the United States and Europe began to promote coffee and coffeehouses as the antidote to the alcoholism of the saloon, which was quite an ironic shift from the Islamic mullahs’ fear of the brew’s intoxicating effects. A sign in one Christian cafe read: “Coffee-house - God’s house; Brandy shop - Devil’s drop” (Heise 1987: 227). But there seems to have been no close relationship between coffee and alcohol. Coffee consumption did not suddenly increase in the United States with the onset of Prohibition, nor did consumption sharply drop with the relegalization of alcohol.
In another ironic twist, at the same time that the prohibitionists were singing coffee’s praises, makers of cereal-based beverages launched an expensive attack on coffee’s harmful properties. Coffee producers responded with an even more expensive defense of their drink. These mass-media campaigns encouraged the oligopolization of the market, and in 1933 just two companies, Standard Brands and General Foods, accounted for half of coffee’s $6 million outlay to advertise coffee on the radio.
Despite the “many bugaboos raised by the cereal sinners,” coffee became increasingly linked to sociability as ever more was drunk in public places (Ukers 1935: 477).The twentieth century saw the rise of the coffee shop and the cafeteria. Workers, especially white-collar workers needing to pause from their labor and socialize with their colleagues, took coffee breaks. Indeed, the beverage became embedded in popular speech. “Let’s have a cup of coffee” came to mean “let’s have a conversation.’’
Restaurants began using coffee to attract customers by keeping the price low and offering unlimited refills. (Iced tea was the only other beverage to be given this privileged status until the recent inclusion of soft drinks). Grocery stores often employed coffee as a loss leader to bring in shoppers, and when in the middle 1970s prices rose steeply, many grocers absorbed the higher price rather than alienate their customers. Because of its strong connection with sociability, its tendency to addict consumers, the medicinal effect of its caffeine, and the small number of substitutes, coffee has come to be viewed as a necessity more than almost any other food or beverage (Lucier 1988; Oldenburg 1989).
The growth of the vast U. S. market for coffee and the beverage’s privileged social function led to the expansion both vertically and horizontally of a few companies creating an oligopoly. Today three companies - General Foods, Proctor and Gamble, and Nestle (which also dominates much of the international market) - are responsible for 80 percent of the U. S. coffee market. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to promote their brands, yet paradoxically, the price and profit levels of coffee remain low, despite the drink’s status as a necessity, even a drug, for which the taste is perhaps less important than the effect it produces and the price it commands.
In recent years, however, specialty coffee beans, sold mostly by small companies and cafes, have challenged the conventional wisdom that North American consumers are unwilling to pay a high price for good coffee. Gourmet coffees, offered by creators who stress their national origins, the roast employed, and sometimes the flavorings added, have collectively become the only sector of the U. S. coffee market that is growing. They tend to appeal to younger, more affluent buyers for whom gourmet coffee is more a status symbol or a declaration of one’s lifestyle than it is a necessity.
Yet even before the rise in the popularity of gourmet coffee, roasters had sought ways of expanding the mass market. After many attempts, the first commercially successful dried coffee was produced in 1906 by a North. American chemist residing in Guatemala. But it attracted few drinkers until World War II when it was included in soldiers’ rations, and since that time the market for instant coffee has grown substantially. By the 1960s, as much as one-third of home-prepared coffee was instant soluble. Its ease of preparation helped expand consumption but undermined quality because instant coffee utilizes mostly robusta coffee, which is a faster-growing but more bitter species than the arabica. As with gourmet beans, since the 1980s there has been a trend toward adding other flavorings to soluble coffee to produce specialty drinks that resemble, to name a few, Irish coffee or cappuccino.
Another major innovation has been decaffeinated coffee. It was developed in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century by Ludwig Roselius, a sworn enemy of caffeine, which he blamed for his father’s death. In Roselius’s original process, green coffee was steamed and then soaked in a chlorinated organic solvent. Other processes have subsequently been developed, some involving the breeding of coffee trees with low caffeine yields. As coffee has come under attack for contributing to cardiac problems, decaffeinated consumption has soared.
The medical community is divided on the effects of coffee drinking. There are certainly beneficial effects, and the brew is sometimes prescribed in the treatment of barbiturate poisoning, migraines, chronic asthma, and autism in children. That heart ailments may be a negative effect is strongly debated, with each side marshaling impressive evidence. It seems clear that coffee’s physical effects vary greatly, depending on the consumer. One study has concluded that for about 14 percent of the population, caffeine dependence produces a physical addiction similar to an addiction to alcohol or cocaine.
Such controversy over the ill effects of coffee helped drive down per capita consumption in the United States from its peak of 3.2 cups per day in the 1960s to 1.8 cups in 1993. Still, health concerns alone cannot explain this retreat because consumption of two other beverages with caffeine - soft drinks and tea - has grown since 1970, with soft drinks more than doubling in per capita consumption to reach almost 40 percent of all beverages consumed. By contrast, milk consumption has declined and that of juices has remained flat (United States Department of Agriculture 1993). No doubt advertising and packaging have had a substantial impact, and it is the case that soft drinks and bottled water (another rapidly growing beverage) require no preparation.
Numerous coffee companies rose to the challenge to compete directly with soft drinks by creating new products, such as prebrewed coffee, bottled iced coffee, and iced cappuccino. This seemed to be the logical terminus of a century-long process in which the activities of roasting, grinding, and brewing, formerly done in the home, became industrialized.
Yet there is a countertrend as well in the growing gourmet market. The swelling army of connoisseurs who want to make American coffee “a national honor,” to borrow the words of coffee expert W Ukers written decades ago (1935; 570), rather than a “national disgrace” are buying a great variety of specialty roasted beans and grinding them at home. Specialty coffeepots and espresso makers also constitute a booming market.
World History
