Making more coffee with less: coping with hard times; the historic effort to make more with less, from adulteration, short-weigh

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The 1860s were a time of coffee emergence, and coffee challenges. During the Civil War, in the Northern U.S. coffee had replaced spirits as the stimulant ration in the Army and Navy. Coffee was a means of barter between soldiers, and at the end of the war, veterans went home with a taste for coffee that had not been with them when war had been declared. In the Confederacy, The Southern Banner, moaned in 1865, "For the stimulating property to which both tea and coffee owe their chief value, there is unfortunately no substitute; the best we can do is to dilute the little stocks which still remain, and cheat the palate, if we cannot deceive the nerves." Naval blockades had deprived the population of luxuries as coffee. As supplies dwindled, people turned to extenders and finally substitutes that, as implied in the Banner, were not very good but folks had to make do. If you were lucky enough to live along the Mississippi basin there was always coffee with chicory, at least until the fall of New Orleans on April 28, 1862. After that it was catch-as-catch-can coffee using everything from roasted acorns, to toasted bread crumbs as the makings.

In the new financial reality of 2009-10 we may discover that the idea of economy for the customer trumps everything else about the coffee they choose to buy. In previous generations, as mentioned earlier, when the need arose, Americans found methods to satiate their craving for coffee as best they could. Many of these we would now consider outside the acceptable, while others may be entrepreneurially interesting business solutions applicable to today's circumstances.

War-Torn Coffee

During the 1930s, though plentiful and cheap, there was a perceived need to stretch coffee as the dollar needed stretching generally. Adulteration, which had been a regular habit in the time prior to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, again began to taint the purity of coffee blends. The foreign material might be roasted chicory, or chickpeas, dandelion, or just plain saw dust. It was illegal but it made a pound of coffee appear to go further. At home, consumers used more water, re-used spent grounds and never threw away old coffee in the pot. In professional restaurant, hotel and institutional kitchens, where the gas fired, glass lined battery urns were state-of-the-art, coffee to water ratios stretched from pre war (WWI) two gallons per pound up to four gallons per pound and more as the depression deepened.

In this pre-paper filter era, ground coffee was placed in an unbleached muslin urn bag hung from a metal ring suspended in the urn. Extremely hot water from the connected "boiler" was held high over the coffee and poured down into it slowly in a circular motion; the coffee steward being sure to wet all the grounds evenly. When the prescribed volume of water had dripped through the grounds, a gallon of the brewed coffee was drawn-off, held high over the spent grounds in the urn bag and repoured through the grounds. Sometimes the recipe called for re-pouring several gallons of already brewed coffee through the grounds. The resulting beverage could be anything from a magnificent deep clear Indian ruby red velvety and intoxicating beverage, to a muddy, harsh, corrosively bitter brew depending upon the value of the beans used, the quantity of the re-pour and the skill of the coffee steward (it was almost always a man's job in that generation).

The heavyweight cuppa of the depression eras better kitchens was still served I with heavy cream. As the depression wore on, restaurateurs began to cut the 36% butterfat heavy cream with 3.5% butterfat milk to reduce cost by extending the cream. The resulting mixture became known as half-and-half with about 10.5% butterfat.

Stretching, Re-pouring and cream cutting were a fixture of the American restaurant and cafeteria scene through the early post kWWII years when a new generation of automatic brewing urns, using one-use paper filters, were introduced. The new technology produced a lighter beverage, accentuating the fruity top notes of the coffee. All of a sudden, the heavier pre-war cup of past crop character seemed passd. With scientific research by Dr. Gene Lockhart as a guide, and the Coffee Brewing Center of the Pan American Coffee Bureau Inc. as a proselytizer for all Arabica blends, incidentally requiring more coffee per cup, the American cup was poised for change. There would be one last stand for the old style coffee executives supported by their chemical engineers against a new generation of coffee roasters, but a flash point was coming.

Coffee Goes Commercial

In 1975 Brazil's coffee regions were visited by a devastating cold spell that would go down in coffee history as the Black Frost. In the year immediately following the calamity the green coffee market sky-rocketed, and U.S. consumption of coffee already on the wane since 1963 was severely tested. The result was the introduction of new coffee products by the country's largest roasters. One of these products was high yield roast ground coffee. The general idea was to get more coffee beverage out of every pound so that while the price was higher per pound the price per cup would not have risen as dramatically.

TORBED technology, developed by Torftech Limited, Berkshire, UK, can be used to produce High Yield coffee. The following is from the Torftech website: (www.torftech.com),

"Instead of traditional roasting, the green bean is heated rapidly in the first stage of roasting, the bean "bloats" in size allowing a greater extraction of texture and flavor when roasting is complete. This is explained by the development of more fissures in the roasted and ground bean allowing better contact with the hot water into which the coffee oils are dissolved.... The TORBED has shown itself to be capable of producing high quality, high yield and consistent roasted coffee. Due to the rapid heat transfer and simultaneous roasting capabilities of the TORBED process, the roasting time is dramatically reduced to just 2 to 3 minutes with excellent flavor development. The faster processing time results in a much lower energy consumption. The cheaper Robusta coffees achieve a much increased flavor development during roasting compared with conventional roasting technology allowing an additional 10-15% to be blended with Arabica coffees with no noticeable difference."

There is always a good idea ready to be exploited for those roasters who demand a specialized product. There are several patents assigned to large roasters that appear related to the TORBED technology and were used to creating a high yield roast/ground coffee.

A patent assigned to Folgers filed in 1992 (US Patent 5322703) has pre-dried, "low quality coffee beans include Robustas, low grade Naturals, low grade Brazils and low grade unwashed Arabicas coffee," that is subsequently dark flash-roasted (1-3 minutes) then blended with flash-roasted better and medium grade Arabica blend beans that have not been pre-dried.

The blend is then flaked. Flaking involves roll-milling a roast ground coffee. More coffee can be brewed from flaked coffee due to the increased extractability, as there is more surface area of the bean open to the action of the hot water than produced in traditional grinding methods. Where coarser grinds have limited surface area, fine grinds, while having extensive surface area create issues in brewing. Their particles may cause brew water to pool on the surface of the grinds, channel through the bed of grinds leaving some grinds dry while over extracting other grinds, or causing grinds to compact, preventing the brew water from passing through the "mud." Fine grinds may also suffer from having an unbalanced flavor/strength ratio. Flaked coffee suffers with low aroma levels, and may lack a desirable balance of flavor and strength. The flaked blend is then put together with traditional ground coffee and presented as blend of high yield coffee.

Folgers contended in their patent application that, "Very small amounts of these dried dark roasted beans can now be added to weak but flavorful coffees (i.e., high quality coffee such as Colombian). The result is a flavorful, full-strength coffee unadulterated by excessive burnt-rubbery flavor notes." The Folgers application also stated, "It was found that thin flaking the dried dark roasted coffee beans, or blends containing the dried beans, results in a surprisingly dark cup color. Flaking increases brew solids by about 20% but increases cup color by about 40%. Cup color is important to consumer perceptions. Although cup color per se does not contribute to coffee flavor or strength, brewed coffee with darker colors are perceived as having richer, stronger flavors." See: www.patentstorm.us/patents/5322703/fulltext.html for patent details.

In the 1980s everyone wanted to pack high yield coffee. A short cut for roasters to providing less while appearing to give the same, is illustrated by US Patent No. 4786001 (applied for in 1988) and assigned to Modern Processing Equipment Inc, Chi. IL. By changing the way coffee is moved and mixed within a industrial type roller-mill for coffee production, the product can either be compacted as to pack 16 oz in a traditional size coffee can, or fluffed to fill the can with 13 oz of coffee. The resulting roasters' goods were not high yield in extraction. They were high yield because you could fill more cans with then same amount of coffee.

Folgers, Hills Bros, Superior each produced high yield items. Choc Full o Nuts, Ultra Blend, Maxwell House Master Blend and General Foods ADC Coffee (made by the Maxwell House division) were all high yield brands of the time.

Good ideas die hard. Today, Maxwell House Super High Yield Coffee is available in 1.25-oz packages for use in a 64-oz brewer. Folgers Ultra Roast Product: PAG06929 is packed in a throw-weight of .8-oz or an equivalent yield of about 210 cups per pound of coffee. Massimo Zanetti produces Choc, and Hills high yield coffees.

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