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

by Mark Pendergrast

  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 thi
rd-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 bit
ter, 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.”