The Origin of Coffee in America
Types of Specialty Coffee
Captain John Smith, the founder of the Colony of Virginia, introduced
coffee in America when he shared it with the other Jamestown settlers in
1607 after learning about it in his travels to Turkey. Surprisingly,
coffee’s popularity did not take off right away. These newly arrived
Americans were still too accustomed to drinking tea, hard cider and ale.
After that period, the next early reference to coffee was in 1668 when a
beverage in New York was made from roasted coffee beans and flavored
with honey and cinnamon. By the mid-1700s, taverns often doubled as
coffee houses, but coffee was considered “only a drink for the
well-to-do” and tea was still the American drink of choice. Nonetheless,
during the 17th and 18th centuries, coffee houses were popping up all
around Boston, and that trend soon spread to other colonies. Then, on
December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty, a group of merchants and
tradesmen founded to protest British taxation, disguised themselves as
Native Americans, boarded docked ships and threw 342 chests of tea (an
amount worth about a million dollars in today’s dollars) into the Boston
Harbor in direct opposition to the tea tax.
Famously known as The Boston Tea Party, the eccentric
revolt sealed coffee’s fate in America. Drinking tea became an
unpatriotic act. Britain was now a country of tea-drinkers and America,
coffee-drinkers.