Coffee by the Bay
California’s coffee heritage includes a little-known and ill-fated foray into coffee agriculture. According to historian Luther N. Steward Jr., the push began in 1874 when Californians, “aroused by the high price of coffee”--at the time, Java beans went for 31 cents a pound--planted seeds from around the world in an attempt to raise a local crop.
One Santa Barbara rancher tried coffee seeds from Liberia, Costa Rica and the Sandwich Islands, only to lose his plants to “dry winds and blowing sands.” An Alameda County pioneer was done in by frost. In an article in Southern California Quarterly, Steward wrote: “California’s failure set the limits of profitable coffee agriculture at the Tropic of Cancer.”
The great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 actually helped the city’s fledgling coffee industry to go national. The disaster, which destroyed Hills Bros. plant and damaged Folgers’, disrupted coffee deliveries for many months.
Folgers temporarily set up shop in Oakland and barged coffee to the stricken city. With out-of-state customers clamoring for alternative sources of supply, Folgers established a plant in Kansas City--a rail hub and Missouri River port--two years later.
Coffee consumption in the United States has been in a slow but steady decline since the mid-1960s. “Our decline in consumption has mirrored the growth of soft drinks,” says George Boecklin, president of the National Coffee Assn., an industry group.
Boecklin attributes the drop in coffee consumption to the graying of a generation of coffee drinkers: the men and women who fought during World War II. “We had 12 million people in uniform, and one of the only things that was always available to them--on troop ships, in the field--was coffee,” he says. “They remained heavy coffee drinkers into middle age.”
“Today’s young people started out drinking soft drinks and have not developed into coffee drinkers,” Boecklin adds.
Leave it to a newspaperman to introduce Irish coffee to America. For, at least as legend has it, it was a globe-trotting columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who persuaded that city’s Buena Vista Cafe to offer the beverage in 1952.
Stanton Delaplane, the columnist in question, “had been in Ireland, where he’d acquired a taste for the drink,” says Bill Snow, the cafe’s general manager. And why not? The combination brought together two staples long associated with newspaper writers: hot coffee and strong drink.
It was a lucrative mixture for the cafe. Now a popular tourist spot, the Buena Vista sells an average of 2,200 Irish coffees a day at $2.55 each and goes through some 2,000 cases of its own private-label Irish whiskey a year.
The formula hasn’t changed since 1952: 1 1/2 teaspoons of sugar, 6 ounces of coffee and 1 ounces of Irish whiskey, topped with 1 ounce of whipped cream.
Decaffeinated coffee continues to grow in popularity as the nation’s coffee drinkers get older, while regular coffee gains on instant. Among ground coffees, Sanka’s share of the market climbed to 5% from 3.7% five years ago, according to figures compiled by John C. Maxwell Jr. of Wheat First Securities in Richmond, Va..
All told, General Foods brands hold 37.8% of the ground coffee market and 42.6% of the instant market. Procter & Gamble is second in the ground market with 27.5%, but third in instant with 19.5%. Nestle comes in third in ground coffee sales, with 8.6%, while edging out P&G; for second in instant sales with 26.8%.
