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Join coffee roaster Dean Cycon and food lover Judith Jones to explore America’s love affair with the red bean that arrived on American shores not long after the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. “Coffee: The Drink That Changed America” explores the brew’s amazing story, from its origins in the Middle East to the 21st century coffee palaces in America.
Originally a drink that had its origins in Ethiopia, it wasn’t really until the 17th century that coffee began its journey out of the Middle East into European coffee houses and beyond. The French brought the plant to the Americas, cultivating it in the Caribbean, but it was an English tax on tea that turned America to coffee in the lead up to the American Revolution.
A ration for soldiers in the Civil War and then in two World Wars, Americans love of coffee wasn’t just confined to the coffee break at work or the diner, where coffee was king. Instant coffee was an American invention as was the boutique coffee movement — a remodel of Italian coffee taste and etiquette popularized and then globalized by Starbucks, Peets, Coffee Bean and others.
Cycon and Jones trace coffee’s path from its origins to the first coffee houses in Vienna, Trieste and London, from plantations in the Caribbean and Hawaii to the artisanal coffee movement that is now taking the world by storm.
Produced by 555 Productions.
