Written by Aaron-Michael Fox
With National Coffee Day 2024 on September 29th, here’s a look at the history and cultural impact of coffee.
There are few pleasures in life that rival sipping a perfectly roasted cup of coffee to start the day, after a big meal, or to rejuvenate your mind and body later in the day. For those who indulge, a good cigar goes well. Add in a hearty laugh with a friend, and you’ve got it made.
Two-thirds of modern-day Americans drink coffee every day, making it the most popular beverage in the nation after plain water. This makes the United States currently the largest coffee market on the planet. On average, American coffee drinkers consume three cups per person totaling 400 million cups of coffee a day.
Extrapolating from those national figures, more than 60,000 cups of coffee are consumed in the city of Huntington every day. That is nearly two tons of roasted coffee beans per day. A very productive, mature coffee plant yields about one pound of roasted coffee beans annually.
There is perhaps nothing that is more synonymous with the modern progressive American city than the coffee shop, and Huntington has its fair share, but coffee houses go back to almost the very discovery of the roasted “bean wine.”
According to legend, coffee was first discovered in the 9th Century in Ethiopia when a goatherder named Kaldi noticed that his goats were unusually energic after eating the berries of the coffee bush. Kaldi took the berries back to the abbot at his local monastery, who made a drink with the berries and found that it kept him alert through the long hours of evening prayer.
Coffee as a brewed beverage from roasted beans first left Africa for Yemen in the 1500s by way of Mecca, then moved on to the entire Islamic World on the Arabian Peninsula. Tourists to cities in that region soon took it with them to Europe; first to Hungary, then Austria, and Italy.
The first license to import coffee to America came in Boston in 1720. However, tea was already the established stimulating beverage and it remained popular.
So how did America become the biggest coffee market on the planet when we started out drinking tea like our British cousins? For that, we can thank those cousins in the United Kingdom.
As you may recall from your high school American history class, the Tea Act of 1773 imposed a British tax on a variety of imported goods shipped to the colonies, specifically tea. At the time, tea was the most-consumed beverage in the New World, and as one can imagine, that newly imposed tax greatly angered the general public. As an early form of American “cancel culture,” people dumped tons of tea into the Boston harbor and took to drinking coffee instead.
Starting in New England and then spreading throughout the United States, coffee houses were centers of democratic-republican thought circles leading up to and through the American Revolution. Coffee’s status as the signature drink of American patriots was cemented when it became known that it was the preferred drink of our first First Couple, George and Martha Washington (Mrs. Washington even established her own guidelines for the perfect roast). Coffee quickly became the drink of choice in the new nation.
In modern times in Huntington, it is quite common to see college students carrying iced coffee. This is an increasingly popular way to drink coffee, even in cold weather.
Iced coffee was first invented by French soldiers in Algeria in 1840 due to a combination of a lack of cream supplies and the hot African summer. When they returned to Europe, they took the concept of iced coffee with them.
But the global popularity of iced coffee really began in the United States in 1920 through a Prohibition-era promotional campaign by the Joint Coffee Trade Publicity Committee. From there, iced coffee grew wildly popular, appearing in menus and recipes worldwide. In Appalachia, it has been common practice for generations to let a fresh pot of coffee go cold then pour it over ice in the evening.
Today, the American coffee industry is worth more than $80 billion and growing. Coffee shops and cafes remain popular with Millennials, but other age groups seem to be trending toward making their coffee at home as many people learned new homebrewing methods during the pandemic. Millennials are also the most likely to drink their coffee over ice.
When purchasing beans, Americans value taste above all, but also shop with their conscience, spending on average $1.50 more per pound for ethically sourced and/or sustainable coffee.
Here in Huntington, our local coffee roasters include Good Vibes Coffee, Grindstone Coffeeology, Hill Tree Roastery, Ignition Roasters, and the Old Village Roaster.
