America’s love affair with coffee

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan, hot question for you. Which is your favorite character in Friends?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Oh, it's gotta be Ross, I guess.

JAMES HARPER: Why him?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Because I identify with his ability to extract the worst out of a situation.

JAMES HARPER: So Friends, to me as a Non-American, it feels uniquely American because you have these, what, six odd people and they're running around trying to, you know, do well in their respective fields all striving for their little slice of the American dream. And the thing that gets me every time is of course, Central Perk, the cafe where everything happens.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: With, of course, the classic sofa.

JAMES HARPER: I mean, to me, coffee is a very strong through line in something as quintessentially American as Friends. But coffee is a through line in so many American shows.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, listen, Seinfeld. He's always in the coffee shop with his bunch of guys. And of course, Seinfeld went on to make the great series of comedians in their cars getting coffee.

JAMES HARPER: Which I'm very proud to say I've never ever seen.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, which I can only say to you, James is, well, you're missing out on contemporary coffee history there.

JAMES HARPER: Jesus, OK, we put it that way.

JAMES HARPER: That's it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: All right. So James, there's a figure that I've always wanted to investigate and that figure is £19.1 per capita. That's the coffee consumption per capita per year of the United States in 1949.

JAMES HARPER: Wow, £19. Can we just visualize that in just raw coffee beans form?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So James, you see the cat sat next to me and you know, I have two of them. Imagine that I took both my cats and turned them into coffee beans, which is, which is a really frightening concept. So two cats worth of coffee per person, per person, per every American.

JAMES HARPER: So how did America become so coffee obsessed?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, James, I mean, the standard story is fairly simple, isn't it? You know, it's the Boston Tea Party, overthrow the British, no more tea. Everyone's going to start drinking coffee. Civil War, everyone's getting coffee. Coffee becomes an American right. The gold miners drink it, the cowboys drink it. The masses come to America to drink coffee. You know, so it's always a highly caffeinated place according to legend, right?

JAMES HARPER: I mean, so we can finish the episode here, right? I mean, that's our answer.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Legend is not reality.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The thing is James, actually, there's a lens of reading American history through beverages that is a lot more interesting and complicated than just a coffee drinking nation.

JAMES HARPER: So this is going to be a story of America and its key historical moments through the lens of coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think this is going to be a story of America through the lens of competing beverages.

JAMES HARPER: And I'd like to say that this free educational content was brought to you today by Rancilio, the manufacturers of Italian espresso machines and we'll hear a little bit more about them towards the end.

JAMES HARPER: I'm James Harper, documentary maker and the creator of Filter Stories, a coffee podcast.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And I'm Jonathan Morris, professional historian and author of Coffee: A Global History.

JAMES HARPER: And this is the final episode in the second series of A History Of Coffee, where we explore how a tiny psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

JAMES HARPER: So, Jonathan, the first question in the story of coffee in America is well, obviously, when did coffee first arrive in America?

JAMES HARPER: And I actually googled this. So, are you ready to hear what the internet has to tell me?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, you've made me redundant. Go for it.

JAMES HARPER: Brilliant.

JAMES HARPER: In 1607, Captain John Smith, a British adventurer brought his love and enthusiasm of coffee to the newly discovered Americas.

JAMES HARPER: Smith was a bit of a rabble rouser and legend has it that while Smith and his men were out foraging for food and hunting deer, he was captured by the Powhatan tribe who had just about had enough of his antics and just before getting his head thumped in by a club wielding executioner, the Powhatan's chief's beautiful 14 year old daughter intervene.

JAMES HARPER: She is now known by her nickname Pocahontas, but her real name was Mataoka. To spare Smith, Pocahontas threw herself between the cocky captain and the wavering club. The chief relented to his daughter's compassion and Smith was spared afterwards, the captain offered the chief some coffee as a "peace offering."

JAMES HARPER: That is quite a story.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, that is quite a story. This is a story you'll find all over the internet in many different places and there's just one thing about it that really doesn't work for me.

JAMES HARPER: What is that?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The date.

JAMES HARPER: 1607.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: 1607 is the foundation of Jamestown. So 1607 is 30 years before the first recorded instance of anyone drinking or having coffee in Britain, which kind of is getting a little bit problematic. 30 years is a long time. Well, it's a long time and also it's not like the day after this happens that coffee is widespread and you can go and get it and other people are habituated to it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So I believe Smith might have had a little bit of coffee for personal use, as they say, right? But there's no way that this sort of started active coffee consumption amongst settlers in America because there were no merchant ships delivering coffee into Jamestown. And I don't believe that he would have put sacks of coffee on the ship.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Doesn't make any sense. But there is another way of making sense of this story. And that is to think, maybe rather than Smith introducing coffee to the indigenous peoples, maybe they introduced Smith and the settlers to something similar to coffee. All right. Something that was caffeinated. It was dark.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That was even known as the black drink. Wow. And which came from the one plant in North America known to have caffeine within it.

JAMES HARPER: That's what I call turning the tables.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That is turning the tables. But suddenly things make a lot more sense. If you do that round, we know that there is a plant in the Southern, particularly southeastern United States that naturally produces caffeine. There's only one really and it goes by the name of Yaupon Holly. Look it up.

JAMES HARPER: Y'all p Holly and look it up now. Yeah. Oh, wow. That looks very coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Like, doesn't it? Isn't it amazing? You know, if I sort of slipped that in your eyes and you hadn't looked at it hard, you'd say that it was a coffee plant.

JAMES HARPER: Wouldn't be a million miles away from the variety or species of coffee. Sure.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now, tell the listeners what you're looking at James. Well, it's like.

JAMES HARPER: A green bush. Has these somewhat spiky green leaves and is surrounded with these bundles of red looking cherries. I guess they're not cherries. I guess they're berries. We'll put a link in the show notes.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That is it? My mind was blown away by this. I should say by the way that I got an invitation to appear in a historical podcast, a podcast called All Things Tudor produced by a lovely lady called Deb Hunter and I wrote back to Deb and said, well, but there isn't really any coffee in Tudor Times.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now, it turns out that Deb is also an expert in the first tribes of the United States and their history. So the original indigenous Americans and she said, you need to know about what the indigenous tribes prepared.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The indigenous tribes made a drink using Yaupon Holly. And that drink is known as the black drink.

JAMES HARPER: Are you saying? So you know, Smith comes along, you're drinking this black drink people today assume it's coffee, but it's actually what the, you know, indigenous native Americans were drinking all along, which is Yapan Holly.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That is exactly what I'm saying because we know that there were people using the black drink from the colonists as early as 1615ish. So we know there was this interchange. So I would posit that actually this is a story that goes the other way around indigenous Americans showed the colonists the black drink, the colonists may have been aware of the notion of coffee as a black drink and believe they are having coffee.

JAMES HARPER: Yeah, I'm just dying to try some of this myself. Do we have any idea what it's like to drink?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It is said to be by a Professor Of Food Chemistry at Texas A And M that actually Yao Pan is like coffee and tea. It's rich in antioxidants, the polyphenols. He says that the caffeine levels in Yao Pan vary, but they're roughly equivalent to green or black tea. And indeed, we know that there's a whole ceremony or the whole sort of set of rituals around the consumption of the black drink.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The black drink is kind of brewed in a fairly big pot and then it's ladled out quite often into shells. So kind of like conch shells because we're down near the Southern coast of the US or in Florida, Carolinas, et cetera. There's a very much a sort of a ritual to this.

JAMES HARPER: Well, I think in many ways, when you think about, you know, what's the beverage that powers America, right? And many would say coffee. But I mean, what's indigenous actually to the land of North America? Well, y up and Holly, I mean, if we were to rewrite history, wouldn't that be a more appropriate drink for America to fall in love with?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Wouldn't it just, and it seems like there was quite a lot of consumption until quite late. I mean, it's supposed to have been common up until the 18 nineties, mostly used in the Carolinas, particularly North Carolina.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And it kind of becomes stigmatized because it becomes associated with the rural poor. Oh, really? So. Right. So this is a poor man's beverage, poor man's coffee, et cetera.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. So Jonathan Yarp and Holly aside, back to my original question, when did people in North America drink actual coffee?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We know that the colonists were drinking coffee by the 17 hundreds? We know in fact that there were coffee houses founded in the settlements, some very famous coffee houses in which actually some of the planning for what became the American revolution took place.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But there is another great event, James that I'm sure you're aware of. That is supposed to be the moment when Americans adopted coffee as their patriotic duty to drink. Do you know that moment?

JAMES HARPER: I believe so it happens in Boston, right? And involves a lot of tea.

JAMES HARPER: But I really don't know that much about it. So, can you give me a bigger picture of what's going on at this time? I know in the early 1700s, the British were in control of Boston and beyond.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes, they're basically occupying most of the North eastern seaboard of the US.

JAMES HARPER: Who else is in North America? At this point?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We have a bit of French down in Louisiana, right? We have some Spanish, notably over on the far coasts in the Pacific and also in Florida. But what we have mostly is these 13 colonies, the famous 13 colonies belonging to the Brits.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now, a dispute is growing up and it is basically about the trade rules and economic rules under which the colonies are run. So if the colonists are forced to buy tea from Britain and pay tax on that tea, then they feel affronted by the duties that they're basically seeing levied upon them.

JAMES HARPER: So let me be clear, you have at least in the 13 states all the way on the east coast.

JAMES HARPER: You have the British having these colonies and I'm assuming there's agriculture, there's a bit of trade going on, but they're basically still under the King, the British Crown and they're growing prosperous enough where they're like, hold on, like Britain's all the way over there and they're taxing us and you know, why should we give our hard earned money to them for what exactly we can run our own business?

JAMES HARPER: Thank you very much.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: You're getting it. Exactly right. So, if you want tea, you're going to have to get it through, as it were, the British Colonial supply line. And if you do that, by the way, you're also gonna pay this import duty on your tea. And no, you don't get any choice about that and you certainly don't get any chance to put yourself into the British Parliament to suggest that this isn't a good idea. Of course not.

JAMES HARPER: Oh, and that's the point because the people in these British colonies in North America, they're getting taxed but they have no political say very good.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: We'll make a rebel of you yet. Yeah, exactly.

JAMES HARPER: So, so I'm assuming the Boston Tea Party is where it all goes down. What happened?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The Boston Tea Party is a famous moment when a bunch of rebels go on to British ships in Boston Harbor and throw out the tea chests that they were bringing in. Got it. And the colonists object to taxation without representation. And it's supposedly said that this is the moment when Americans say, ok, we're not going to have tea, we're not going to deal with the Brits. We're going to have our own drink. It's going to be coffee.

JAMES HARPER: It's, it's a good story. If you're an American, it's your patriotic duty to drink coffee.

JAMES HARPER: So, Boston's Harbor, I can imagine is full of these chests of tea, bobbing up and down, brewing the salty water, creating some kind of horrendous mixture for the fishes to drink. America has thrown off the British. We are now independent.

JAMES HARPER: We're going to run our own country. Thank you very much. And we're gonna hammer the point home by not drinking tea anymore. So I'm assuming from this point onwards, tea wasn't being drunk at all. And everyone just switched the coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, that's a nice assumption, James. And of course, it's our role to destroy nice assumptions. It's true that America started importing more coffee. But of course, once America became independent, actually, what they really did within a few years was just start importing tea from China.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Oh yeah. So what we actually know in truth is that Americans in this period went back to drinking primarily tea, but they were also drinking some coffee.

JAMES HARPER: But I mean, the American War Of Independence from Britain was like 17 seventies, 17 eighties. I mean, did they start drinking coffee in a big way from the 18 hundreds.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Onwards for sure. During the 18 hundreds, consultants of coffee increases quite significantly by 18 30 they're consuming about £3 per capita in 18 £55 per capita. So coffee per capita is rising and to prove the point here, 18 81 America is importing about £80 million of tea and £450 million of coffee. Interesting. So which is the more popular drink?

JAMES HARPER: Well, granted, of course, coffee is heavier than tea per brew. So hard to say in terms of actual cups, but nevertheless, tea is very popular as well.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That was one of the best pieces of hedging by a man who does coffee science and brewing for a living. So we're talking about five times as much and roughly speaking that five times as much by weight would give you equal in terms of brewing. Ok. So roughly speaking, pretty much in 18 80 you're talking about America having still been at a half tea, half coffee point.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And that's sort of shown to us by some of the great companies that are founded at this stage. So there's a very famous company called A And P which becomes a chain store and a grocery. I remember using it when I used to visit my in-laws in America, the original name for A MP, the Great American and Pacific Tea Company.

JAMES HARPER: So, so where's coffee in the name though?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Coffee is not in the name didn't have as much coffee. Tea was what they sold. I mean, they had a coffee and they had a coffee brand, but it just was not as popular. You know, they thought tea was the thing to sell on.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: In other words, what I'm trying to say to you is we make a mistake in assuming that Americans were patriotically only drinking coffee after the Boston Tea Party.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: No Americans were drinking things that they weren't drinking for at least some period was anything that had come from Britain.

JAMES HARPER: Ok. So we've had the American War Of Independence in the later 17 hundreds. We're now in the early 1800s. Tea is very popular and coffee is getting slowly more popular as well. And I want to make a linkage back to our episode on Haiti where we have the formerly enslaved Haitians and their descendants.

JAMES HARPER: After a horrendously bloody conflict, they now run the country, but they discovered that nobody wanted to buy their coffee except the French on extremely punitive terms. And this includes, of course, I'm guessing America, right? Americans weren't buying Haitian coffee. Why not?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, there are a few reasons but the first and most obvious reason is America like everywhere else was very suspicious of Haiti. After all, America is a society where particularly in the South slave plantations are the norm. So the idea of trading with a nation in which there has been a revolution to overthrow a slave based society is not something that's going to be particularly welcomed and there are clear alternatives.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So by the time that hating coffee production is back on its feet, America actually is taking most of its coffee from Cuba up until the 18 forties. And Cuba is where many of those coffee producers who were able to escape from Haiti reestablished themselves in Cuba using enslaved labor.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: A period that's almost known as the second slavery.

JAMES HARPER: Wow. So let me just be clear about this America, a slave owning society which use has enslaved black Africans to work agriculture in horrendous conditions also drank coffee and didn't want to purchase coffee from, you know, a society of formerly enslaved who are now free and chose to buy their coffee from a neighboring island which was run by Europeans and used in slave labor.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, that's about the size of it. So you've got a more complex situation because what we need to take into account, what becomes the biggest event in us history, of course, in the 19th century is the American Civil War.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So just to, to remind you after the war of Independence from Britain in the 17 eighties, there are basically 13 original founder states and then other states start to be admitted into the Union, the United States as we go through the 18 hundreds, some of those states have outlawed slavery, some particularly those that more recently come into the Union haven't.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So as the Union grows, there's a real question, are we gonna have enslaved societies? Are we gonna have societies that are based on slavery or are we gonna have societies that are not? But this becomes more and more tense.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So what ends up happening in 18 60 is the election of a President Abraham Lincoln who is committed to the abolition of slavery at a federal level because this is also a big dispute about what is for states to decide and what is for the Federal United States government to decide? Right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So Lincoln wants to abolish slave holding and plantation agriculture, using enslaved labor across the United States. He wants to abolish slavery across the United States that leads the Southern States to secede from the United States to declare independence of the United States. And the war breaks out between the Union ie the Union of the United States and this so called confederacy of secessionist states in the South.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And at the heart of this is the issue of slavery. But that issue of slavery is understood in terms not just of the moral aspects of slavery, but also as it were two different sets of economic societies, two different underlying versions of economies because really those northern states are moving to more industrialized societies, whereas the Southern remain more agricultural.

JAMES HARPER: So I recall in the last series, they're all coffee played in that Civil War. So remind me which side had the coffee.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The Union had the coffee and they had the coffee because they blockaded the Southern ports. So the southerners couldn't get coffee. Ok?

JAMES HARPER: Even though they were closer to the coffee growing islands of the Caribbean.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Hey, he who controls the seas, my friend basically.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So the consequence is that Union soldiers, the antislavery North are fighting but being given as part of their rations every day, a large amount of coffee. So you put coffee on first thing in the morning and you put it on last thing at night and you eat it with your heart attack with this kind of, you know, biscuit hard attack bread and this becomes a standard sort of meal, really coffee intact.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But of course, the coffee also keeps troops alert. It keeps them warm, keeps them awake. It has those psychoactive things. Generals become quite aware of those effects actually.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So they want to keep their troops with coffee. There are famous things about the coffee ration. You gotta make sure that everyone gets an equal amount of coffee, right? So they put the coffee right on like a bed sheet and a sergeant is charged with dividing it into, you know, roughly equal piles.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But of course, just to make sure that then everyone gets a fair crack, right? One officer stands facing away from the coffee pile so he can't see it. Ok? Another walks along, pointing at a pile and says, who shall have this coffee? And the guy who can't see, shouts out the name of who will get that coffee from the roll, ok?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So this is the importance of making sure your coffee is divided fairly. Now, that's a coffee ritual. Now that is a coffee ritual. Absolutely a coffee ritual and absolutely critical because this is all about morale. Yeah.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Think how important coffee must be to morale if you have to do this for it, how are they making the coffee? Well, actually you make coffee on a battlefield. The same way you make coffee out in the open as a cowboy, et cetera, you'd literally crush the grounds, throw it in a pot, boil up the grounds and the water together for 2025 minutes actually.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And pour your coffee. That's a very, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is the same technique, you know, would be being used in the home quite often. What's interesting is what do you add to the coffee to get the grounds to go down at the end?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Cos you wanna keep it relatively clean and they would add things like egg whites. Ok? If you're crude, you can add fish skin. If you're more refined, you take the refined fish skin product, which is a gelatine called isn't glass. And this is basically introduced to settle the coffee grounds at the end of the brew. I, wow.

JAMES HARPER: There's a science there that needs to be explored. I need to explore this.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah, I, I think there's some practical experiments coming on quite disgusting experiments, but experiments nonetheless.

JAMES HARPER: So this is what I find somewhat ironic. It's the 18 sixties. Where is most of the coffee that is in the Union, the North? Where are they getting their coffee from? At this point, Brazil is importing a huge number of enslaved people.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yes, it's certainly still an economy with enslaved people working in it, including on coffee plantations.

JAMES HARPER: It gets you wondering right, because here's Haiti, a country which is formerly enslaved, now free growing coffee. Heaven forbid they need the business of America. But the North, which slavery is something they're fighting against in their own country, is happily buying coffee from places where it has grown, using slave labor.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I think that is not uncommon after all. By that 0.18 60 most European countries have abolished slavery or in their colonies. Most would be nonetheless importing coffee from countries such as Brazil where certain slavery still existed.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Brazil is one of the very last countries to abolish slavery and the reasons for that were partly because coffee producers amongst others in Brazil were advocating that they couldn't work without enslaving labor. So yeah, I see the moral dilemma that you are putting in. I fear that not many people are making their consumption decisions in those ways.

JAMES HARPER: So here we have the North, the Union, they are wired on coffee, but they blockaded the South, the Southern ports so they can't get coffee. So what are they doing? Are they just walking around blistering? You know, headaches deprived of energy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, they adopt some of the usual surrogates for coffee. Go looking for acorns, go looking for grains that they can roast. But you know what James? There's something very interesting here.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: These are the guys who need caffeine and they find their caffeine from the black drink, the Yan Holly drink that we talked about. So we know they, because we're in the right area, the Yan Holly, they are foraging yen Holly to make their black drink, the black drink that has been learned from the native Americans.

JAMES HARPER: God, that's too much irony for me. I can't take it, I can't take it.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan.

JAMES HARPER: But now towards the end of the 1800s, you know, there's the myth that America is fueled by coffee not really borne out in reality, like tea is still extremely popular around this time. But then again, we know that today tea has really fallen by the wayside compared to coffee. So what are the things that get Americans to start drinking a lot more coffee from the end of the 19th century?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The first thing I think is that from the end of the 19th century is really the big boom in migration from Europe and elsewhere into America. It's when the population of America really grows. And most of those people are people who are desirous of drinking coffee and have coffee as their cultural reference point rather than tea. Let me give you an example.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The Italians, the Italians who go to New York become big coffee drinkers, they can afford coffee. Coffee becomes something by which they measure their status. The social workers in New York by the way, are terrified by this because they see the Italians giving coffee to their kids. And so they actually try to urge them to drink milk because milk is good for you. And they should be drinking milk in the morning.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But of course, the Italians want their kids to drink the same as them. They're not gonna go through extra activity to get the milk, which they don't like. And so their kids are gonna damn well drink coffee alongside them for breakfast. Now, repeated across the various different sort of migration groups into the states that I think is a big driver for why coffee grows in terms of relative proportion of consumption.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But there are three other key reasons I think that apply across the whole of us society. Ok. Ok. Coffee gets cheaper. Coffee becomes a kind of a well marketed consumer good in what is becoming the first mass consumer society. And towards the end of this period, coffee actually becomes in effect promoted by some government practices.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So should we start with price? Let's do it. So if we look from 18 21 to 19 02, the price of coffee in 19 02 is one third. So that's one, one third of the level that it was in 18 21. Wow. And that is almost entirely attributable to the massive growth in output in Brazil, which becomes overwhelmingly the largest coffee producer in the world pumping out cheap coffee.

JAMES HARPER: And you're listening, if you want more details as to how Brazil was able to produce cheaper and cheaper coffee, we cover that in depth in the third episode of our first series, coffee catches fire.

JAMES HARPER: Anyway, so cheaper coffee means more Americans can now drink coffee. Let's touch on your second point. Coffee is a consumer good. So tell me about the time where coffee was not sitting in a beautifully packaged bag in a supermarket shop.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: What you begin to see is the rise of businesses purely roasting and selling coffee. So the first big one, as we say, is Arbuckles. Its first innovation is basically about selling coffee in pre-wrapped paper. That's an innovation. That's an innovation. It's an innovation.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: When you consider that up until the end of the 18 hundreds, coffee is basically being brought like the way you would buy dried beans in a market hall today. Yeah, you scoop it out of the barrel, you weigh it, you plonk it into your bag. The key here is you see the rise of packaging, the rise of other preservation techniques and vacuuming.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So the coffee tin towards the end of the 19th century, an absolutely critical thing. And then through things as we move into the early 20th century, through particularly the quite innovative use of advertising and sponsorship right through to the rise of radio. And then you'd be hearing coffee out ads on the radio and coffee sponsored radio broadcasts.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: The Maxwell House Showboat is a very, very popular show with you. So coffee is at the forefront of those things and it's right across the technical, the industrial, the distribution and the marketing. Interesting.

JAMES HARPER: And what about that third reason? You know, the government actively promoting coffee consumption.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: In the Second World War, you've got to build a lot of arms, you've got to build a lot of armaments, you've got to build a lot of ammunitions and the government did many studies about its munitions workers to work out what would make them more and more efficient.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And it came to the conclusion that the answer was coffee breaks, allowing them to go off and have a coffee and then get back on the job. Wow. Was actually fairly critical to keeping them focused and keeping them high performing.

JAMES HARPER: Are you meaning to tell me that those poor sods making all these munitions were working hour after hour with no coffee break? Oh my God.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, I mean to tell you that once they got a coffee break, they were a lot more productive. Ok. So this became part of the whole principle of so scientific management.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So by really the mid 19 fifties, they reckon about 60% of factories in America had coffee breaks. Wow.

JAMES HARPER: If you're an American, there is no escaping coffee.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, we're taking a small little detour from our story and, you are here next to me remarkably in Berlin at Rancilio's new flagship store, the BER station.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: That's right, James. And, that enables us to say again to thank Rancilio for enabling us to make this free educational content for the entire coffee. And if you.

JAMES HARPER: Don't know, Rancilio have been producing espresso machines for almost 100 years. That's about as old as you, right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Nowhere near. And however, just to say, you know, remember in the episode on Italy, we talked about how Italian espresso machine manufacturers these days are primarily export orientated to huge markets such as us. And what I found interesting was this morning talking with the team Rancilio, are explained to us how they've developed a machine that responds to feedback from their American specialty customers.

JAMES HARPER: And the aim of that is a machine called the Invicta. So a few innovations include pre-infusion which enables baristas to brew consistent coffees despite having quite different roast dates and also new boiler technology which has very low energy consumption and thermal stability. So you can just like crank out the shots over and over again.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. So if you're interested in that machine, there'll be a link in the show notes.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Now time to go back to America and finish off our story about its love affair with coffee.

JAMES HARPER: So Jonathan, you've taken me on this wonderful journey looking at America's infatuation with coffee. And you know, when I went into this episode, I had the impression that America's love affair with coffee. It's kind of like Phoebe and Mike Hannigan's in friends.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Go on James.

JAMES HARPER: So basically what happens is that, you know, it's love at first sight. They have a, you know, short kind of messy beginning, like, like they always do.

SPEAKER 10: I'm sorry? Really? I'm so embarrassed. I'm a pretty nice guy. Just ask my parole officer.

JAMES HARPER: But they get married like, before, you know it.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok.

JAMES HARPER: And so America sees coffee, falls in love with it. And Kaboom American Coffee are together for Evermore. Right.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And we've busted that one, haven't we?

JAMES HARPER: Thing, Like in reality, it's not like Phoebe and Mike Hannigan's at all. It's probably more like Monica and Chandler's.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Ok, allow me to explain.

JAMES HARPER: Please do so. I mean, obviously they were friends for like the longest time and Monica had, you know, her fair share of love interests, Richard Burke, you know, started very strong but fell apart when the guy didn't want to commit to kids. Ok. Then there was fun, Bobby. You remember him? Fun Bobby.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm way out of my depth.

JAMES HARPER: There was fun, Bobby and it became actually a lot less fun once he stopped drinking. And then the millionaire Pete Becker, the problem there of course was that she didn't share his passion for crazy extreme sports.

JAMES HARPER: But this entire time, you know, Monica and Chandler friends for the longest time, they started seeing each other romantically in secret, took a long time, but it grew slowly slowly. And then finally in the final season of the show, they get married in this beautiful ceremony, James.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: I'm flabbergasted. So I take your Monica and Chandler and I'm gonna up it and confuse it, but come back to you and show you that you're all right. Ok. Like a good historian, like a good historian. I'm gonna embellish for you because I like the analogy.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It's a real ongoing deep friendship where it comes up and then goes away and comes back because for example, we've talked in this episode, we hit that post war period with the introduction of the coffee breaks and the motorized society in America and so forth. And we reached peak coffee consumption per capita in 1949 £19.1 James.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But by 1995 actually, which is around the time I think that friends started, that has fallen to a mere £6 per capita. So actually, America was falling out of love with coffee or to be more accurate, I'll tell you what it was doing. It was falling in love with a new pretender and that was a new source of caffeine cola, right?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Really soft drinks driven by our friends. You know, they'd made the world a place you'd like to sing or whatever it was. They were the guys who've been hoovering up, but from the start of friends ish in 1995 if we go back now to today and hey, the start of specialty and more accurately, the start of some of those international coffee chain formats of which one we know I'm, you said it for me.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: And where do we end up? We're back up now to I think about £9.7 per capita. So actually America once again is discovering that its friend coffee is something that it values.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: So, thanks for listening to this episode four of the History Of Coffee series two.

JAMES HARPER: Pray tell, Jonathan, what should our dear listener expect for? Episode five?

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Numero Chin, Numara Chin? No, because we're at the end of the series James, I'm afraid the answer is nothing.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: But I would say, you know, it's been great fun. And I think we're still just about enough friends that we'd be interested to hear if people would like to have any more of this type of content. And if you do go to our social media and drop us a line. Absolutely.

JAMES HARPER: If you want to hear series three of a history coffee, we're happy to make it, but you tell us whether you want to hear.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: It also on social media, we will put up some illustrations pertaining to American coffee history over the ages. So the coffee brands the Boston Tea Party drinking stats. Maybe James. What are you going to put up?

JAMES HARPER: I will put up some images of yap and honey.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: If you would still like to learn more about the History Of Coffee, then of course, I recommend Coffee: A Global History by me, Jonathan Morris.

JAMES HARPER: Great read. I highly recommend it. And if you want to help others find the show, one thing you can do is write a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also go on Spotify and give the show a five star rating that would really help the algorithms. You can also say this is kind of cool.

JAMES HARPER: Take a screen grab of you listening to it on your podcast and then post that screen grab on Instagram, tag me at @FilterStories podcast and you Jonathan at @Coffee HistoryJM and we will repost it. Thank you a million times for shouting about the show and thank you very much in advance.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Yeah. And James important to say once again, thanks to Rancilio for enabling us to create this free educational content about the history of coffee.

JAMES HARPER: Absolutely. If you are in the market for a home espresso machine or indeed for a coffee machine on your bar, I've put a link in the show notes.

JAMES HARPER: A History of Coffee was produced by myself, James Harper and you, Jonathan Morris. I edited it all together and I write and play the piano music.

PROF. JONATHAN MORRIS: Well, I hope we'll be speaking again, James, and I hope we'll be talking to listeners and that those listeners will maybe have a cup of joe in their hands.