Colonial Coffee House

Guess what the newest exhibit at Colonial Williamsburg is - a coffee house!

From The Washington Post:
"Now [Williamsburg] is home to the modest Charlton's Coffeehouse, built from scratch on historic foundations and billed as the only 18th-century coffeehouse in America."

"At some point in the 1760s a young immigrant named Richard Charlton used the building -- adjacent to the Colonial Capitol -- as a coffeehouse, serving a brew that likely would have tasted burned and bitter to the contemporary palate."

Back in the day, coffee was a man's drink and men hung out at the coffeehouse like it was an intellectual pub. The American Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Colonial coffeehouses, following the London model, became powerful social catalysts, providing an excellent forum for the exchange of ideas and the distribution of news.

And, of course, people drank coffee at home -- along with tea and chocolate. In case you've ever wondered about the difference between a coffee pot, a tea pot, and a chocolate pot:

This is a chocolate pot.

Notice the removable finial - attached to the body of the pot by a chain so it isn't lost.

Chocolate pots have removable finials because the thick colonial cocoa needed to be stirred before it could be poured.

"A molinet, or stirring rod" would be inserted in the hole revealed when the finial taken off.

This is a coffee pot.

Coffee pots are "tall and tapered, with a curved pouring spout and a wooden handle to protect the pourer's hand from the heat-conducting metal."

And this is a tea pot. Tea pots, as the song says, are short and stout.

Tea was also an important beverage in colonial America leading up to the Revolution.

Remember, when the tax on tea was levied without their consent (no representation), outraged colonists reacted with The Boston Tea Party (December 1773).

You don't mess with a person's cuppa. :)

Scent of a Coffee

From the archives:

I was watching 1947's Born to Kill tonight and was amused to find a little bit of business about coffee toward the beginning of this film noir.

The private detective (who is the closest we're going to get to a hero in this flick) hears a delivery man comment about how the coffee in the cafe "sure smells good" and "isn't it a shame it never tastes as good as it smells." Our detective takes this comment and goes on to wax philosophical about how life is like that - better in theory than in fact.

I was somewhat surprised that their coffee didn't taste as good as it smelled.
What kind of sub-par coffee were the customers settling for?

Then I remembered that this movie was made back when people boiled the heck out of their coffee. If you let the percolator just run and run, you continually re-boiled the coffee grounds, and you ended up with a very bitter drink. Hence, the coffee smells better than it tastes.

Of course, they could also be talking about instant coffee, this being only a few years after World War II. But I'm betting it was the percolator.

With all our gourmet brands and specialty drinks, we forget how lucky we are just to have a cup of joe that tastes as good as it smells.