Coffee Canon

Part investigative storytelling, part historical commentary, Coffee Canon contextualizes coffee’s long journey from obscure plant to modern necessity. Listen on iTunes or your favorite podcast client. Get previews to upcoming episodes and extra content by joining our email list here.

Episode Ten: Warfare and Coffee Part One – The Civil War

When I say the words, “Civil War” what are the first things that pop into your mind? If you’re from the United States, it’s probably things like slavery, Abraham Lincoln, or Gettysburg. But, in fact, the thing Civil War Soldiers journaled about more than anything else was coffee. War has a way of making people appreciate the small pleasures in life. Coffee, as it turns out, is one of the biggest small pleasures that exists.

Over the next several episodes we’ll be exploring the intersection of warfare and coffee, beginning this week with the American Civil War.

Civil War-era rifle with built in butt stock coffee grinder

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Episode Nine: The Double R Coffee House

Coffee Canon Episode Nine: The Double R Coffee House

Coffee’s history includes examples of shops and cafes that didn’t fit their historical context.  On this episode of Coffee Canon, we deep-dive into one of these; a shop that was opened in 1919, but bears a striking resemblance to modern artisan coffee shops. The Double R Coffee House was ahead of its time, and its owners bear a familiar, American name – Roosevelt.

This episode contains references to a wealth of sources and articles, which I’ve linked to below. Most notably, I ordered scans of the Library of Congress file titled “Double R Coffee House.”  You can download the PDF here.

Below are a couple of images from The Double R Coffee House, some of which are discussed in this episode (click for full resolution versions):

Interior of the Double R (portrait of Voltaire on the right wall)
Interior of the Double R (portrait of Voltaire on the right wall)
The Double R Menu showing two locations on the bottom
The Double R Menu showing two locations on the bottom
The Teddy Roosevelt family (1903, colorized)
The Teddy Roosevelt family (1903, colorized)

Final note: Coffee Canon is now available on Spotify! Click here to listen, and make sure to click the “Follow” button!

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Episode Eight: Modern Coffee Culture

The way we drink and experience coffee has changed drastically. To many people, it’s become a specialty beverage where taste not only matters, but is decrypted using a multi-tiered tasters wheel consisting of 73 individual flavors. Cafes today focus not just on profit margins, but on growing standards and fair wages for farmers. Baristas take their craft seriously, competing against each other for trophies shaped like espresso tampers and portafilters. So…how’d we get here?

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