All About Coffee by William H. Ukers (best new books to read .TXT) đź“•
CHAPTER II
HISTORY OF COFFEE PROPAGATION
A brief account of the cultivation of the coffee plant in the Old World, and of its introduction into the New--A romantic coffee adventure Page 5
CHAPTER III
EARLY HISTORY OF COFFEE DRINKING
Coffee in the Near East in the early centuries--Stories of its origin--Discovery by physicians and adoption by the Church--Its spread through Arabia, Persia, and Turkey--Persecutions and Intolerances--Early coffee manners and customs Page 11
CHAPTER IV
INTRODUCTION OF COFFEE INTO WESTERN EUROPE
When the three great temperance beverages, cocoa, tea, and coffee, came to Europe--Coffee first mentioned by Rauwolf in 1582--Early days of coffee in Italy--How Pope Clement VIII baptized it and made it a truly Christian beverage--The first Europe
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The tea department helped us to hold out until coffee got its hold on the public; for in those days every one used tea and insisted on having it good. Price was no object. How different now!
Five years later (1862) J. Nevison, an Englishman, drifted into town and opened at 85 North Fourth Street. He got out a very bombastic circular which caused us to put out the one I enclose (illustration, page 436). Then came a party named Childs; and after him, Hugh Menown, grand-uncle of the present Menown, of Menown & Gregory; and Mat Hunt; all passed over to the Great Majority. After the Civil War they multiplied pretty fast, coming and going until now we have nineteen roasting establishments in the city.
The late Julius J. Schotten also wrote the author as follows concerning the days of the Carter roaster and of the wholesale coffee-roasting business founded by William Schotten in 1862:
In the early days, every wholesale grocer was selling coffee; the wholesale grocer controlled ninety percent of the trade in the country. It did not pay the coffee roaster to have men on the road selling coffee in those days. Such being the case, seventy-five percent of the roasting done by the coffee roasters was job roasting, at one cent a pound.
In the beginning there were only two kinds of roasted coffee known to the trade in this section of the country (St. Louis) and of course one of these brands was "Rio"—the other; "Java". The former was a genuine Rio, but the Java was mostly Jamaica coffee.
Roasted coffee then was packed (for city trade) in five and ten pound packages, and this size package seemed to supply the wants of the ordinary grocer for a week. Occasionally a twenty-five pound package, and in a few instances as much as fifty pounds of one grade was sold at a time.
The class of customers the coffee roasters sold in those days were the smaller merchants; the larger stores, having their ideas as to quality, bought their coffees green. As they had very little sale for the roasted, they would send a half-sack, and sometimes a whole sack to have it roasted. It took a number of years to induce the larger grocers, and even the average grocers, to purchase their coffee already roasted.
Coffees were roasted in the old style, "pull-out" roaster cylinder. That is to say, it was necessary to stop the roaster and to pull out the cylinder to sample the coffee in order to know when to take the coffee off the fire. When the coffee was ready to take off, the cylinder was pulled out its entire length. It was then turned over and a slide nine inches wide, running the full length of the cylinder, was opened and the contents were dumped in the cooling box. When the coffee reached the cooling box, it took two men with hoes or wooden shovels to stir and turn it until it was properly cooled, there being no cooling arrangements then as we have nowadays.
At that time there were no stoning or separating machines; and as a bag of the ordinary green Jamaica coffee contained from three to five pounds of stones and sticks, it was necessary to hand-pick the coffee after it was roasted.
1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones's exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker's steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow's filterer. 7—Brain's Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart's percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun's cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson's percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin
After Carter, the next United States coffee-roaster patent was granted to J.R. Remington, of Baltimore, on a roaster employing a wheel of buckets to move the green coffee beans singly through a charcoal heated trough. It never became a commercial success. (See 4, page 630.)
In 1847–48, William and Elizabeth Dakin were granted patents in England on an apparatus for "cleaning and roasting coffee and for making decoctions." The roaster specification covered a gold, silver, platinum, or alloy-lined roasting cylinder and traversing carriage on an overhead railway to move the roaster in and out of the roasting oven; and the "decoction" specification covered an arrangement for twisting a cloth-bag ground-coffee-container in a coffee biggin, or applied a screw motion to a disk within a perforated cylinder containing the ground coffee, so as to squeeze the liquid out of the grounds after infusion had taken place.
The roaster has survived, but the coffee maker was not so fortunate. The Dakin idea was that coffee was injuriously affected by coming in contact with iron during the roasting process. The roasting cylinder was enclosed in an oven instead of being directly exposed to the furnace heat. The apparatus was provided also with a "taster," or sampler, the first of its kind, to enable the operator to examine the roasting berries without stopping the machine. As will be seen by referring to the picture of the model shown, the apparatus was ingenious and not without considerable merit. Dakin & Co. are still in existence in London, operating a machine very like the original model.
In 1848, Thomas John Knowlys was granted a patent in England on a perforated roasting cylinder coated with enamel.
It is to be noted in passing that this idea of handling the green bean with extreme delicacy, evidently obtained from the French, was never taken seriously in the United States, whose inventors chose to handle it with rough courage.
The first English patent on a coffee grinder was granted to Luke Herbert in 1848.
In 1849, Apoleoni Pierre Preterre, of Havre, was granted an English patent on a coffee roaster mounted on a weighing apparatus to indicate loss of weight in roasting and automatically stop the roasting process. At the same time he secured an English patent on a vacuum percolator, not unlike Durant's of 1827.
In 1849 also, Thomas R. Wood, of Cincinnati, was granted a United States patent on a spherical coffee roaster for use on kitchen stoves. It attained considerable popularity among housewives who preferred to do their own roasting. (See 6, page 630.)
In 1852, Edward Gee secured a patent in England on a coffee roaster fitted with inclined flanges for turning the beans while roasting.
C.W. Van Vliet, of Fishkill Landing, N.Y., was granted a United States patent in 1855 on a household coffee mill employing upper breaking and lower grinding cones. He assigned it to Charles Parker of Meriden, Conn. In 1860–61 several United States patents were granted John and Edmund Parker on coffee grinders for home use.
In 1862, E.J. Hyde, of Philadelphia, was granted a United States patent on a combined coffee-roaster and stove fitted with a crane on which the roasting cylinder was revolved and swung out horizontally for emptying and refilling. This machine proved to be a commercial success. Benedickt Fischer used one in his first roasting plant in New York. It is still being manufactured by the Bramhall Deane Company of New York.
In 1864, Jabez Burns, of New York, was granted a United States patent on the original Burns coffee roaster, the first machine which did not have to be moved away from the fire for discharging the roasted coffee, and one that marked a distinct advance in the manufacture of coffee-roasting apparatus. It was a closed iron cylinder set in brickwork. (See illustration, page 635.)
Jabez Burns had been a student of coffee roasting in New York for twenty years before he produced the machine that was to revolutionize the coffee business of the United States. He had brought with him from England a knowledge of the trade in that country, where he first began his business training by selling Java coffee at fourteen cents and Sumatra at eleven cents to hotels, boarding-houses, and private families.
Up to the time of the Civil War, the contrivances employed for roasting coffee in every case necessitated the removal of the roasting apparatus—whether pan, globe, or cylinder—from the fire. The process of causing coffee to discharge from the end of the roasting cylinder at the pleasure of the operator while the cylinder was still in motion was new; and the double set of flanges to produce this effect, and at the same time, during the process of roasting, to keep the coffee equally distributed from end to end of the cylinder, was new. Some one suggested this last improvement was simply an Archimedean screw placed in a cylinder, but Mr. Burns replied: "It is a double screw, a thing never suggested by the Archimedean screw. It is, in fact, a double right and left augur, one within the other, firmly secured together and also to the shell or cylinder, and when the cylinder revolves the desired result is obtained—the idea being entirely original."
Mr. Burns had watched the development of the coffee business from the time when the preparation of coffee was largely confined to the home, where the approved roasting implements were hot stones, or tiles, iron plates, skillets, and frying pans. Some of these were still in use twenty years after he produced his first machine; and he often said that coffee evenly roasted by such methods was just as good as if done by the best mechanical device ever invented. He also said: "Coffee can be roasted in very simple machinery. Some of the best we ever saw was done in a corn popper. Patent portable roasters are almost as numerous as rat traps or churns."
He early saw the practise of domestic roasting falling into disuse, as it was becoming possible to supply the consumer with roasted coffee for only a trifle more than in the green state, with all the labor and annoyance of roasting done away with—a talking point that John Arbuckle was quick to seize upon in his first Ariosa advertising.
In almost every town of any size there were concerns engaged in the roasting business. Within a few years, Burns machines were placed in all the principal roasting centers. Pupke & Reid in New York; Flint, Evans & Co., and James H. Forbes in St. Louis; Arbuckles & Co., in Pittsburgh; the Weikel & Smith Spice Co. in Philadelphia; Theodore F. Johnson & Co., in Newark; Evans & Walker in Detroit; W. & J.G. Flint in Milwaukee; and Parker & Harrison in Cincinnati, were among his first customers.
It is said that in 1845 there were facilities in and around New York to roast as much coffee as was then consumed in Great Britain. Steam power was being extensively used, and the roasting was done here for a large part of the country. The habit was to buy roasted coffee from the coffee and spice mills by the bag or larger quantity for country consumption; and the grocers and small tea stores, for local consumption, bought from twenty-five pounds upward at a time. This method cheapened the roasting of coffee to half a cent a pound; and then good profits could be made, for everything was cheap in those days. Even at
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