Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts
As loyal British subjects, the North American colonists emulated the coffee boom of the mother country, with the first American coffeehouse opening in
Throughout the first half of the 1800s the American taste for coffee swelled. Per-capita consumption grew to three pounds a year in 1830, five and a half pounds by 1850, and eight pounds by 1859. Although there were urban coffeehouses, most Americans drank coffee at home or brewed it over campfires while headed west. Typical North American coffee of the period was boiled until it was a bitter brew badly in need of milk and sugar to make it palatable.
The Civil War gave soldiers a permanent taste for the drink. Each Union soldier’s daily allotment included one-tenth of a pound of green coffee beans. For fifteen years following the Civil War, coffee prices remained high as consumption and production raced to match one another world wide. As a result, coffee cultivation exploded in Central America, Java,
By the 1870s, coffee had become an indispensable beverage to citizens of the Western world especially to Americans, who consumed six times as much as most Europeans. By 1876 the
