Part 19 (2/2)

Few agree about whether aged beans taste better. Generally, aging reduces the acidity, or brightness, of a cup of coffee. Aging therefore is usually considered inappropriate for the snappy high-grown coffees of Central America or the blander Brazils, but it enhances the heavy body of a Sumatra or Mysore.

22.

The tax reduction was worded vaguely due to Puerto Rican concerns. After Puerto Rico became an American protectorate in 1898, its coffee industry suffered terribly-not only from a devastating cyclone in 1899, but also because the former Spanish colony could no longer export its beans duty-free to Spain. For years the Puerto Ricans, as well as the Hawaiians-where coffee cultivation began in 1825-lobbied U.S. politicians to impose a protective tariff on all other ”foreign” coffee, in order to encourage the ”domestic” coffee industry. They never succeeded.

23.

Kellogg may not have liked coffee, but he liked Post's rip-off even less. ”Most coffee subst.i.tutes consist of cereals in some form combined with mola.s.ses and roasted, [which] develops in these subst.i.tutes poisonous phenolic and other smoke products the same as are produced in ordinary coffee.” He complained later that Post had ”made some millions by the sale of a cheap mixture of bran and mola.s.ses.”

24.

Post wrote in I Am Well! I Am Well! that ”whisky, morphine, tobacco, coffee, excessive animal pa.s.sions, and other unnatural conditions” contributed to ill health. Post knew about ”animal pa.s.sions,” bedding an a.s.sociate's wife and siring two children by her in 1894 and 1896. that ”whisky, morphine, tobacco, coffee, excessive animal pa.s.sions, and other unnatural conditions” contributed to ill health. Post knew about ”animal pa.s.sions,” bedding an a.s.sociate's wife and siring two children by her in 1894 and 1896.

25.

In his later years Post left the creation of new products to others. His cousin, Willis Post, who headed the British outpost, invented instant Postum in 1911, obviating the need to boil the drink for twenty minutes.

26.

In eighteenth-century Sweden twin brothers were sentenced to death for murder. King Gustav III commuted it to life sentences in order to study the then-controversial effects of tea and coffee. One brother drank large daily doses of tea, the other, coffee. The tea drinker died first, at eighty-three.

27.

For an a.s.sessment of coffee's effect on health, see chapter 19.

28.

See chapter 8 for a detailed account of the G. Was.h.i.+ngton brand, the most successful early instant coffee.

29.

”The air was thick with an all-embracing odor,” wrote Gerald Carson in The Old Country Store The Old Country Store, ”an aroma composed of dry herbs and wet dogs, or strong tobacco, green hides and raw humanity.” Bulk roasted coffee absorbed all such smells.

30.

Mail-order houses also made incursions into the retail coffee market. The 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalog Sears Roebuck Catalog, for instance, offered green, whole-roasted, or roasted ground coffees.

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