Folger's Coffee TV Commercial

A vintage P&G ad for Folger's coffee, with Mrs. Olsen budding in just in time to save another couple's relationship! Enjoy.

Instructions for Making French Coffee, 1836

From "Domestic French Cookery", 4th ed., 1836. This is an interesting description of making boiled coffee, and includes the admonition to "grind the coffee while warm"!

Let the coffee be roasted immediately before you want to use it, as it loses much of its strength by keeping.

Its color, when done, should be a fine bright brown; but by no means allow it to scorch. A cylindrical coffee-roaster that can be turned by a handle, and sets before the fire, is far preferable to a pot or a pan. Grind the coffee while warm.

If you intend to make half a dozen cups of coffee for drinking, measure six cups of water of the same size, and put the water into the coffee-pot. Set it on hot coals, and when the water boils, put in two or three chips of isinglass, or the white of an egg. Then throw in six large tea-spoonfuls of ground coffee. Stir it several times while boiling, and set it several times back from the fire to diminish the boiling gradually.

When it has boiled sufficiently, remove it entirely from the coals, pour in a cup of cold water, and then put it in a corner and let it settle for half an hour. Afterwards pour it off from the grounds into another pot (which must first be scalded), and set it close to the fire, but do not let it boil again.

If you intend to serve it up with hot cream, you must make the coffee stronger. While the coffee is clearing, boil your cream or milk, and pour some of it hot into each cup of coffee.

Instructions for Home-Roasting Coffee, 1884

From the "Hand-Book of Practical Cookery for Ladies and Professional Cooks", by Pierre Blot, 1884.

In roasting, good coffee swells about thirty-three per cent., and loses about sixteen per cent. in weight.

Roast once a week or oftener.

Put coffee in the apparatus (cylinder, or drum, or roaster), the quantity to be according to the size of the roaster, or according to how much is needed. Have a rather slow fire at first; when the coffee has swollen, augment the fire, turning, shaking, tossing the roaster, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, and take from the fire a little before it is roasted enough; the roasting will be finished before the coffee gets cold and before taking it from the roaster, which you continue turning and shaking as if it were yet on the fire.

A charcoal fire is the handiest, and more easily regulated.

It is well roasted when it evaporates a pleasing odor and when of a brownish color.

Then take it from the roaster, spread it on a matting or on a piece of cloth, and put it in a tin-box as soon as cold.

It is exceedingly difficult, if not utterly impossible, to roast coffee properly by machinery, and for two reasons: in the first place, there is too much of it in the cylinder to roast evenly, some berries are burned, others not roasted enough; the other is, that being turned by machinery, the cylinder is turned regularly and is neither shaken nor tossed; and even if there were not too much coffee in it, some berries would be much more roasted than others.

The Price of Coffee in 1910

Advertisement for Coffee in 1910

From the "Alexandria Gazette" in Alexandria, VA, November 9, 1910.

Here is a very interesting price list that is a snapshot of the times. With sugar at 5 cents a pound and beef anywhere from a couple cents to 15 cents, "good" coffee from "Rio" was 16 cents a pound, and "Chase and Sanborn's Best Coffee" was 22 cents!

In inflation-adjusted terms, this is $3.52/pound for the Rio coffee and $4.84/pound for the Chase and Sanborn.

People liked their coffee then almost as much as today...

Coffee is the New Wine: Story on NPR

Editor's note: here's an interesting and fun story on NPR that deals with the increasing interest in quality coffee. Discusses specialty roasters, baristas, how to taste. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/08/16/158932704/coffee-is-the-new-wine-heres-how-you-taste-it

Early French and English Coffee Makers

About 1760, French inventors began to devote themselves to improvements in coffee-making devices. Donmartin, a Paris tinsmith, in 1763, invented an urn pot that employed a flannel sack for infusing. Another infusion device, produced the same year by L'Ainé, also a tinsmith of Paris, was known as a diligence.

In 1779, Richard Dearman was granted an English patent on a new method of making mills for grinding coffee. In 1798, the first American patent on an improved coffee grinding mill was granted to Thomas Bruff, Sr. It was a wall mill, fitted with iron plates, in which the coffee was ground between two circular nuts, three inches broad and having coarse teeth around their centers and fine shallow teeth at the edges.

De Belloy's (or Du Belloy's) coffee pot appeared in Paris about 1800. It was first made of tin; but later, of porcelain and silver—the original French drip pot. This device was never patented; but it appears to have furnished the inspiration for many inventors in France, England, and the United States. The first French patent on a coffee maker was granted to Denobe, Henrion, and Rouch in 1802. It was for a "pharmacological-chemical coffee-making device by infusion." Charles Wyatt obtained a patent the same year in London on an apparatus for distilling coffee.

In 1806, Hadrot was granted a French patent on a device "for filtering coffee without boiling and bathed in air." This use of the word filtering was misleading, as it was many times after in French, English, and American patent nomenclature, where it often meant percolation or something quite different from filtration. True percolation means to drip through fine interstices of china or metal. Filtration means to drip through a porous substance, usually cloth or paper. De Belloy's pot was a percolator. So was Hadrot's. The improvement on which Hadrot got his patent was to "replace the white iron filter (sic) used in ordinary filtering pots by a filter composed of hard tin and bismuth" and to use "a rammer of the same metal, pierced with holes." The rammer was designed to press down and to smooth out the powdered coffee in an even and uniform fashion. "It also," says Hadrot in his specification, "stops the derangement which boiling water poured from a height can produce. It is held by its stem a half inch from the surface of the powder so that it receives only the action of the water which it divides and facilitates thus the extraction which it must produce in each of the particles."

A coffee percolator was invented in Paris about 1806 by Benjamin Thompson, F.R.S., an American-British scientist, philanthropist, and administrator. He was known as Count Rumford, a title bestowed on him by the Pope. Rumford's invention was first given to the public in London in 1812. He has gained great credit for his device, because of an elaborate essay that he wrote on it in Paris under the title of "The excellent qualities of coffee and the art of making it in the highest perfection", and that he caused to be published in London in 1812. It was a simple percolator pot provided with a hot-water jacket, and was a real improvement on the French drip or percolator coffee pot invented by De Belloy, but not at all unlike Hadrot's patented device. Count Rumford, however, was a picturesque character, and a good advertiser. He is generally credited with the invention of the coffee percolator; but examination of his device shows that, strictly speaking, the De Belloy pot was just as much a percolator, and apparently antedated it by about six years.

De Belloy employed the principle of having the boiling water drip through the ground coffee when held in suspension by a perforated metal or porcelain grid. This is true percolation. Hadrot did the same thing with the improvements noted above. Count Rumford in his essay admits that this method of making coffee was not new, but claims his improvement was. This was to provide a rammer for compressing the ground coffee in the upper or percolating device into a definite thickness, this being accomplished by providing the perforated circular tin disk water-spreader that rested on the ground coffee with four projections, or feet, that kept the spreader within half an inch of the grid holding the powder in suspension and free from "agitation."

His argument was that two-thirds of an inch of ground coffee should be leveled and compressed into a half-inch thickness before the boiling water was introduced. Practically the same result was achieved in the De Belloy and Hadrot pots, also provided with water-spreaders and pluggers, but the same mathematical exactitude in the matter of the depth of the ground coffee before the percolation started was not assured. De Belloy's spreader did not have the projections on the under side upon which Count Rumford laid such stress. Then there was the hot-water jacket, which was an improvement on Hadrot's hot air bath. Inventors that followed Rumford have made light of the importance that he attached to scientific accuracy in coffee-making; but it is interesting to note how many of the features of the De Belloy, Hadrot, and Rumford pots have been retained in the modern complex coffee machines, and in most of the filtration devices.

The Discovery of Coffee

These legends about the early discovery of coffee are excerpted from "Coffee; its history and also its remarkable growth in the world of commerce (1898)"

In the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris is an old manuscript which contains the statement, that the use of coffee was known as early as 875 A. D., over a thousand years ago. But this manuscript is not explicit, and throws very little light into the haze of romance that surrounds the birth of coffee.

One legend says that when the pious dervish Hadji Omar fell under the ban of the people of Mocha, and was driven forth in the year 1285, A. D., to perish in the wilderness, he roasted some of the berries that grew wild in the thickets, and some of them accidentally fell into the water which he had collected for coffee drinking. He failed to notice it for some time, and when he did, lo! coffee was discovered. He stole back into Mocha, proclaimed his discovery, and the Mochans, who knew a good thing, took him back into favor, and made a saint of him on the spot.

Another story gives credit to the friar of a monastery for the first use of coffee. The friar had great difficulty in keeping his monks awake during devotions, and on being told by a goatherd of the exciting effect, produced on his goats by eating coffee berries, he decided to try them on his charge. He did so with admirable results and thus was discovered the great stimulating effects of coffee, which prepared the way for its world-wide popularity.

A more authentic account is given in a manuscript published in 1566 by an Arab sheik, which states that the learned sheik Djemal-eddin-Ebn-Abou-Alfagger brought coffee from Abyssinia to Arabia, in the neighborbood of 1400 A. D., and still another treatise places the date at which the Arabians found out its good qualities, about a century after. Some accounts say that it came direct from Abyssinia or Ethiopia to Arabia, and others give the Persians credit for having had the first taste of our familiar beverage, though I believe it was first used by them for medicinal purposes. Certain it is, however, that the introduction of coffee into the Mohammedan countries met with a great deal of opposition. One party contended that the roasted berry was a kind of coal, and the Prophet had very sensibly made it a law that coal should not be be eaten by his people. Another party maintained that it was an intoxicant, and as the Koran prohibits the use of intoxicants, it could not be partaken of by the faithful.

However, it was soon discovered that coffee was neither a fuel nor an intoxicating beverage, and so it came into general use. It began to be cultivated in Yemen, in southern Arabia, and for two centuries the entire supply of ihe world came from there. Even today the celebrated Mocha, or Mukha, comes from Yemen.