Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  The British initially dominated foreign trade with Costa Rica, but Germans quickly moved in as well, so that by the early twentieth century they owned many of the beneficios and larger coffee farms in the country. Still, unlike Guatemala, Costa Rica offered opportunities for the hardworking native poor to join the coffee social elite. For example, Julio Sanches Lepiz began with a small farm, and through accrued investments in coffee farms he became the largest coffee exporter in the country. Though his success was extraordinary, other relatively poor Costa Rican farmers also built impressive holdings.

  Indonesians, Coolies, and Other Coffee Laborers

  Java and Sumatra, like many other coffee-growing regions, possess astonishing natural beauty. This scenery, however, directly contrasted with the “contempt and want of consideration with which the natives are treated,” as Francis Thurber observed in his 1881 work Coffee: Plantation to Cup. Each family of natives had to raise and care for 650 coffee trees and to harvest and process them for the Dutch government. “The price received by the natives from the government is placed at a figure low enough to leave an enormous margin of profit to the government,” Thurber noted. The Dutch thereby “have maintained a most grinding despotism over their miserable subjects, levying forced loans and otherwise despoiling those who . . . have accumulated anything beyond their daily subsistence.”

  The situation in India was no better. In 1886 Edwin Lester Arnold, an Englishman who owned coffee plantations there, described how to secure laborers in his book Coffee: Its Cultivation and Profit. A planter would journey to the country’s lowlands and hire maistries, or head men, who in turn would bribe coolies (peasant laborers) with advances. The head men then would arrive in the jungle, “each at the head of his gang of coolies, all heavily loaded with earthen ‘chatties’ or cooking pans, native shawls, supplies of dried fish, curry stuffs, etc.; and ‘salaaming’ to the European.” They would build huts and begin to work off their advances. It was best not to treat them too harshly, Thurber observed, “for in that case they would bolt.”

  The workday for the coolies described by Thurber began at 5:00 A.M., with men sent with axes and crowbars to cut and move logs for a new road, while women and children were dispatched to weed the coffee. “No sooner are they clear of the settlement, and winding along the narrow jungle paths, than they make all sorts of attempts to escape.” Men were paid five annas a day—a pathetic amount—while women received only three. “Even the little children came up, ducked their small shaven heads in comical homage to the great white sahib, and held out very small brown hands for the price those hands were supposed to have earned at the rate of a penny a-day.”

  At the same time, Arnold observed with satisfaction, “the profits derived from healthy Coffee are so large, that were it not for many enemies which hamper the planter’s struggles and stultify his best efforts, his occupation would be one of the most profitable in the world.” The author then listed various coffee pests, ranging from elephants, hill buffaloes, cattle, and deer to jackals, monkeys, and the coffee rat. (Fortunately the coolies enjoyed coffee rat fried in coconut oil, considered a delicacy.) Also there were grubs, mealy bugs, scaley bugs, borers, and weevils to contend with.

  “All these drags on the planter’s prosperity, however, sink into insignificance by the side of a minute and consequently intangible fungus.” Arnold was referring to hemileia vastatrix, the dreaded coffee leaf rust that first appeared in Ceylon in 1869 and virtually wiped out the coffee industry of the East Indies within a few years—ironically, just as Latin America was flooding the market with beans.

  Vastatrix Attacks

  Hemileia vastatrix, called rust because of its initial yellow-brown stain on the underside of the coffee leaf, eventually turns black, producing spores of pale orange powder that rub off and spread. The blotches gradually enlarge until they cover the entire leaf, which then falls off. Finally, the entire tree is denuded and dies. The first year it appeared, the rust did substantial damage in Ceylon, but then it seemed to go into remission, alternating between good and bad years. Scientists from all over the world advised the beleaguered coffee growers. The planters tried chemicals. They tried stripping the diseased leaves. Nothing worked.

  Various theories held that the rust was caused by the shade trees (dadap) commonly in use, or that too much dampness encouraged the disease. It does appear in fact that the fungus thrives in moist environments. The real villain, however, is monoculture. Whenever man intervenes and creates an artificial wealth of a particular plant, nature eventually finds a way to take advantage of this abundant food supply. The coffee tree is otherwise rather hardy. Plants containing mind-altering alkaloids such as caffeine and cocaine almost all grow in the tropics. Indeed, one of the reasons the tropical rain forest provides so many unique drugs is that the competition for existence is so fierce, there being no winter to provide a respite from the battle for survival. The plants developed the drugs as protective mechanisms. The caffeine content of coffee probably evolved as a natural pesticide to discourage predators. Nonetheless, with acres and acres of coffee trees growing, it was inevitable that some nasty little bug or fungus would specialize in the bonanza.

  “Now it seems but a question of time for Coffee to be as great a failure in Java as it has turned out to be in Ceylon,” wrote Edwin Arnold in 1886. “In many estates the trees display nothing else but branches full of berries, which are still fresh-looking and green, but have become partially black and have dropped off.” Arnold was correct. That bastion of traditional coffee soon switched primarily to tea.

  One effect of the coffee rust epidemic was a frantic search for more resistant coffee species than the prevalent arabica strain. Coffea liberica, found native in the African country of Liberia, seemed promising at first, but it too succumbed to the rust, yielded less than Coffea arabica, and never gained in popularity, despite producing an acceptable cup. Coffea canephora, chewed by Ugandan natives, “discovered” by whites in the Belgian Congo and named robusta by an early promoter, turned out to be resistant and prolific, and it grew at lower altitudes in moister, warmer conditions. Unfortunately, this hardy strain of coffee tasted harsh in the cup and contained twice the caffeine of arabica. Nonetheless, it was destined to play an important role in the future.

  The American Thirst

  Despite the devastating effects of hemileia vastatrix, the world coffee supply would continue to grow, stimulated in large part by the seemingly bottomless American coffee cup. While the British sipped tea, their rebellious colonies gulped a stronger black brew, destined to fuel the remarkable American entrepreneurial spirit. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States would consume nearly half of the world’s coffee.

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  The American Drink

  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 pa
rt 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 wi
th 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.