>> NARRATOR: Next to water, it's the world's most popular drink. Centuries ago, it fueled the Industrial Revolution. And today, commuters keep their cup holders locked and loaded with lattes. Coffee is a comfort to millions and a necessity to many more. Coffeehouses have brewed creativity and inspiration since the first cafe opened in Constantinople. As America experiences a new coffeehouse explosion, roasting machines process millions of pounds a week to keep up with the cult of the bean. Now: "Coffee," on<i> Modern</i> <i>Marvels.</i> <font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> >> NARRATOR: The world currently consumes more than 100 million bags of coffee, like these, every year. At the Starbucks roasting facility in Kent, Washington, bags of green coffee beans, weighing 132 pounds each, arrive continually from Central and South America, Indonesia, Africa, and Yemen. This plant cleans, roasts, and packages more than 60 million pounds of coffee every year. In the 300,000-square-foot storage area, up to 20 ship containers are unloaded every day, and the burlap bags are piled 18 feet high. >> GIMBL: Behind us and around us is about two million pounds of green coffee, that's unroasted coffee. We'll roast that and package it in about seven to ten days. >> NARRATOR: There's enough coffee in this warehouse to supply 2,000 Starbucks stores... for about a week. This is one of three of the company's American roasting plants, and it supplies the coffee for Starbucks stores in the northwestern U.S. and in Asia. A computerized inventory system determines when it's time to call up a new batch for roasting. Before entering the roaster, the beans go through a cleaning process. >> GIMBL: We load the green coffee in through a grate, here on the floor, and a series of pneumatic elevators, like this one, carries the coffee into what we call our green bean cleaning machine. That machine uses a series of vibrating shelves, magnets, and vacuums to separate any foreign matter from the coffee. So, for instance: stones, small sticks, small bits of metal. >> NARRATOR: The green beans travel through a system of aluminum pneumatic tubes to one of the huge roasting machines. The roaster operates like a large clothes dryer. As it rotates, hot air is forced into the chamber to heat the beans. The roasted beans are spilled out into a large circular cooling pan and slowly stirred by a rotating arm. >> GIMBL: This is one of six coffee roasters we have here at the Kent roasting plant. We roast coffees in batches from between 200 and 700 pounds. >> NARRATOR: The coffee beans are roasted for 12 to 15 minutes, at temperatures that range between 350 and 450 degrees Fahrenheit. >> GIMBL: We need a different roast for each different coffee that we serve. For instance, what we have back here is espresso roast. This is our third darkest coffee. >> This is a single grande, two percent, extra hot, no whip, two-pump chocolate mocha. >> NARRATOR: At Seattle's Pike Place Market, the very first of more than 6,000 Starbucks stores in the U.S., it's busier than ever. >> Uh, three, please. >> JANEEN SIMMONS: The way the that the registers are set up and the way that our bar is set up, we actually have to toss the cups and, um, throw them from the register to the barista. >> NARRATOR: There's a specialty coffee explosion percolating throughout the world, and it's been led by Starbucks and founder, Howard Schultz. >> SCHULTZ: Today, there's over 9,000 Starbucks stores in 35 countries, serving almost 40 million people a week, and we employ over 100,000 people. >> NARRATOR: Schultz got the idea for the Starbucks chain while on a visit to Italy. >> SCHULTZ: There's 1,500 coffee bars in Milan alone. And I went from coffee bar to coffee bar, not only in Milan, but in other places-- Verona, as well. What really struck me was the sense of humanity, human connection around the coffee and coffee experience. Coffee is one of the great romantic beverages of our time. It's filled with such unique history, and it's a beverage of truth. >> NARRATOR: To tell the story of coffee, you have to start with the bean. But what we call coffee beans are actually coffee seeds. Coffee cherries usually contain two of these seeds, which, after processing and roasting, are ground to make coffee. The first recorded evidence of coffee cultivation comes from Ethiopia at the beginning of the 10th century AD, by some estimates, and as early as the sixth century AD by others. Legend has it that a goatherd named Kaldi first discovered coffee's kick when he noticed his goats eating it. Apparently, the goats got jumpy. >> TED LINGLE: Coffee is native to Ethiopia. It grows wild. And so, it's very reasonable to assume that, yes, in their grazing, the goats ate this, and it's quite conceivable that, yes, the caffeine within the coffee altered their behavior, particularly if they ate a lot of these cherries. >> STEWART LEE ALLEN: The first known consumption of coffee was as a food by a tribe called the Oromos in Ethiopia. And what they did is they would take their raw coffee beans and cook them in fat, and squeeze them into a ball about the size of a baseball, which they would sort of gnaw on as a kind of snack food. And, at some point, the beans got transferred across the Red Sea to Yemen, probably via the slave trade. The Oromos were probably eating it. >> NARRATOR: Yemen, in southern Arabia, is less than 200 miles from Ethiopia. And it's here that coffee trees were first cultivated on plantations, in the 15th century. From Yemen, coffee drinking spread throughout the Arab world. >> WADE DAVIS: It's a drink of attention, of acuity, of precision, of discipline, of intellect. And it always has struck me as perfect that the Arab civilization gave us mathematics, invented the zero-- in part, one could almost imagine, because of this sort of attentiveness to detail that their main stimulant of choice gave them. >> NARRATOR: According to legend, the Arabs refused to allow the export of fertile seeds, so they could hold on to their coffee, and their culture. >> DAVIS: It is Islam that became the repository of all the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and of classical Rome, during The Dark Ages of Europe. And, so, you have this sort of image of sitting around, you know, beneath the blue dome of the Saharan sky, sipping your incredibly concentrated dose of coffee, and then letting the human intellect run wild. >> NARRATOR: Around 1550, the world's first known coffeehouses opened in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. >> SHELDRAKE: Turkish coffee is a blend of water, sugar, and coffee. It's made in a device called an<i> ibrik.</i> And the water, the coffee, and the sugar are brought to a boil three times. Now, here we are at the second boil. And the traditional third boil. There is the Turkish coffee ready to be enjoyed. >> NARRATOR: In the 1600s, coffee and coffeehouses spread to Western Europe and England. >> DAVIS: Up until that point, in the 17th century, everybody in Europe drank alcohol. The entire continent of Europe was mildly besotted all the time. Why? Because if you lived in London or Paris, you couldn't drink the water of the Thames or the River Seine unless you wanted to get cholera or dysentery or some other parasitic disease. >> ALLEN: You would start a day with beer. At 10:00, instead of a coffee break, you'd have a beer break. And then, at lunch, you'd have more beer. And people were constantly commenting on this sort of haze everybody was in. And, so, what happened with the introduction of coffee, is that slowly replaced that. >> NARRATOR: Work and coffee became inseparable in the modern industrial age. And perhaps coffee made the age possible in the first place. >> DAVIS: You simply could not afford to be drunk while you were working the heavy-duty industrial machinery that gave rise to modern society or the Industrial Revolution as we know it. And, so, caffeine became part of the Industrial Revolution, because it became the drug of choice of the Protestant ethic, of the kind of anti-sensual, workaholic world that gave rise to-- the kind of-- the austerity of the Victorian Age. >> NARRATOR: Coffee made a big splash in a city where tea would later take over, when the first coffeehouse opened in London in 1652. By 1700, there were more than 2,000. They were called penny universities, because, for a penny, you could buy a cup of coffee and spend hours listening to enlightening conversations and debates. >> ALLEN: The cafés became the center of intellectual discussion-- sober, intellectual discussion. >> NARRATOR: One of the foundations of modern democracy, the ballot box, first appeared in London's Turk's Head Coffeehouse, where customers could anonymously cast votes on political controversies. Some London coffeehouses became headquarters for powerful business organizations, including Lloyd's of London at Lloyd's Coffeehouse, the London Shipping Exchange at the Baltic Coffeehouse, and the East India Company at the Jerusalem Café. >> DAVIS: But it was not just a stimulant for commerce. If you kind of look through the filter of history at the later part of the 17th century, the early part of the 18th century; the entire era is wired on caffeine. You see it in the literature, in the kind of reflexive cynicism of Jonathan Swift, the author of <i> Gulliver's Travels</i> or<i> A Modest</i> <i>Proposal,</i> in which he suggested a solution to the Irish problem being the feeding of Irish babies to the hungry people of the world. Totally tongue-in-cheek, but a kind of wired caffeine cynicism. >> NARRATOR: Eminent authors like Swift and Alexander Pope, and painters like William Hogarth, sipped their coffee at "Will's Café," while Isaac Newton frequented The Grecian Coffeehouse. >> ALLEN: So each café became associated with poetry, or science, or business. And from that idea of these cafes devoted to particular disciplines, grew the idea of a newspaper with different sections, because people would go to the café, note down the conversations, put them into these little sort of publications that became the modern newspaper. And that is where the modern newspaper was actually born, in the coffeehouses of London, in the 1600s to 1700s. >> NARRATOR: Throughout the 1600s, the world's coffee supply came almost entirely from Yemen. But the Dutch, who dominated the world's shipping trade, got their hands on some coffee seedlings and opened plantations in Ceylon in 1658... and Java in 1699. The first coffeehouse in Paris opened in 1672. Louis XIV was a coffee lover, and, in 1714, the Dutch presented him with his own coffee tree, which he cherished. Nine years later, a French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, took a seedling from the royal tree to Martinique in the Caribbean. Experts say most of the coffee now grown in Central and South America is descended from that single plant. A few of those seedlings would find their way to the Kona district of Hawaii. Coffee plants were first brought to Hawaii from Brazil in 1825 by Chief Boki, the governor of Oahu, on his way back from a voyage to London. In 1828, seedlings were planted in Kona on the big island of Hawaii by Reverend Samuel Ruggles, giving rise to Hawaii's coffee industry. Many Japanese immigrants were among the coffee-growing pioneers in Kona. >> EDWIN T. KANEKO: Many of the Japanese immigrants and their children, they had no other skills. You know, all they knew is coffee, so they just stayed here-- and we had bad times and then we had good times. >> NARRATOR: Hawaii, with it's tropical climate and mineral- rich volcanic soil, is the only coffee-producing state in America. And the Kona district now produces some of the world's most expensive coffee beans. But for decades, expensive coffee beans would be the last thing American consumers were interested in. They wanted low-priced coffee and lots of it. In an effort to keep costs down, some coffee brands would change their blends, but not necessarily for the better. "Coffee" will return, This 100-year-old "Living History" farm, operated by the Kona Historical Society... grows and processes coffee the old-fashioned way. >> SHEREE CHASE: It was a technology that was developed by the Japanese, first-generation and second-generation, beginning in the 1920s. So, this was a small, family mill. It was meant primarily to process the ripe coffee fruit into a dried product called parchment. >> JEFFREY MATSUYAMA: I remember using cans like this. If you notice this. A can like this. When you're a little kid, you learn to count first. So, I learned to count one to ten. >> NARRATOR: Jeffrey Matsuyama grew up in this area, on a coffee farm like this one. >> MATSUYAMA: You fill ten of these, and you could go play the rest of the day. I remember that, too. Most of the kids over here-- we were on a coffee schedule. We got out of school around August, because that's when the harvest started. They needed the children to harvest the coffee. >> NARRATOR: After picking, coffee cherries were taken to the farm's<i> kuriba</i> or processing shed. Here, the outer fruit of the coffee cherry was removed, using a device called a pulper. >> MATSUYAMA: I'd like to show you how simply it was made. Little piece punched out like this. Okay, what this does-- it squeezes the bean just like this, okay? See how the seeds come out and the pulp... Pulp falls out on one side, seeds on the other. >> NARRATOR: After pulping, the wet coffee seeds, what we know as beans, still have their inner covering, known as parchment. >> MATSUYAMA: We put in wet parchment. We call this parchment. Throw it inside there. It shakes it, and it gets all the moisture as it's drying itself off. All it does is actually drip-dry the coffee. But over here, we go one better. We have a drying platform here, all right? We get the wet beans. We drag it out like this. All the way, we start from one end of the platform, keep spreading it out. Use a rake like this. No good for oak leaves, but watch what it does to coffee. Look how easy it spreads the coffee. Works really great. >> NARRATOR: Just three years after this wet mill was built in Kona in 1926, the Probat Factory in Germany manufactured this roaster that Mike Sheldrake, a café owner in Long Beach, California, now uses every day to roast coffee. >> MIKE SHELDRAKE: This is a 1929 vintage German coffee roasting machine. This machine will do about 30 pounds of coffee per batch. And we can do about 100 pounds an hour. And, routinely, we'll roast ten to 12,000 pounds a month. Now, when the coffee gets close to being done, I'm going to keep sampling it with this "tryer," and I'm going to look for bean development, I'm going to look for size, I'm going to look for color, I'm going to look for bean pattern. I'm going to listen for a particular sound, and when I get the coffee exactly the way I want it-- and this coffee is right there now-- I'm going to dump it on the cooling tray like this to draw all the heat out of the coffee, to get it below 400 degrees. That's as good as a coffee is ever going to be. >> NARRATOR: Some of America's best-known coffee brands started out much like this. In San Francisco, in 1881, two brothers, Austin and Reuben Hills, began roasting coffee beans imported from Central and South America in front of their store. The aroma attracted customers, and sales took off. Three years later, the Hills Brothers abandoned retail sales for the wholesale coffee business. The familiar vacuum-packed can-- still used by most coffee companies today-- was pioneered by the Hills Brothers in 1900. The cans made it possible to keep coffee fresh over much longer periods. It would take the rest of the industry a decade to catch up. At the turn of the century, there were two other large San Francisco-based coffee companies battling Hills Brothers for supremacy in the West: MJB and Folger's. Back in those days, one of the most popular ways to brew coffee was the vacuum pot. And today, it's making a comeback. >> SHELDRAKE: The lower bowl holds the water, which is connected to the upper bowl by a seal. And then, the bottom bowl is heated, and the water will boil in the bottom bowl. The pressure will build up on top of the water and force the water up through the tube, through the filter, and into the coffee grounds, where it will actually brew. When it's through brewing, we'll remove the heat from the bottom bowl. It will form a vacuum and suck the coffee through the coffee filter into the bottom bowl, making an incredibly delicious cup of coffee. >> NARRATOR: In the early 1900s, most of the Eastern U.S. was dominated by the huge Arbuckle Coffee Company, whose plant along the Brooklyn waterfront occupied 12 city blocks. In 1913, Arbuckle rolled out a new premium Christmas blend-- Yuban. The name was apparently a truncation of "yuletide banquet." After a huge local advertising campaign, Yuban became the top-selling packaged coffee in New York City. Arbuckle and Yuban were eventually taken over by another coffee giant, Maxwell House. >> LINGLE: Maxwell House is another great branding story. There was a famous hotel in Tennessee, known as The Maxwell House. And the chef was so concerned about its coffee, that he created his own blend, which became the Maxwell House blend. >> NARRATOR: The growth of big coffee in the U.S. coincided with the growth of big advertising. Over the next few decades, national ad agencies based in New York City helped create national coffee giants that are still popular, including Yuban, Hills Brothers, Folgers, and Maxwell House. >> How do you do, ladies and gentlemen? >> NARRATOR: The growth of broadcasting networks accelerated the process. >> This is Harry Von Zell introducing something different in radio entertainment. >> LINGLE: And finally, about 75% of the total coffee volume in the United States was concentrated in the hands of just five companies. >> NARRATOR: For decades, advertising, broadcasting, and coffee fueled each other in a gigantic percolating money machine. But the coffee wasn't getting any better, and percolators, in fact, were part of the problem. In the 1950s, the percolator was hot-- a symbol of modernity and industrial progress on your very own stovetop. It even made a pleasant bubbling sound as it worked. >> BRUCE MILLETTO: This is a coffee that our parents drank. There's no worse way that you could ever produce coffee, or bastardize coffee, than with a percolator. A percolator, basically, takes the grounds and continually runs it through, over and over and over and over. >> NARRATOR: As the water percolates through the coffee, it falls back to the bottom of the pot. There it's reheated and forced back through the pumping system, over the coffee grounds again. Over-percolating can make the coffee undrinkable. >> LINGLE: The two really bad things are, reheating the coffee, 'cause that changes it chemically, and then rebrewing that coffee through, uh, the, uh, coffee grounds. >> NARRATOR: To make matters worse, according to experts, the quality of some major coffee brands sold in supermarkets was declining. Experts say price competition drove some leading brands to put cheaper and cheaper grades of ground coffee in their cans. >> LINGLE: And it was after these businesses were sold, and the families were no longer in control that then, the accountants took over. And the assumption was, "Well, if we save a few pennies on the blend cost, it's millions of dollars on the bottom line, and the consumers won't notice." >> NARRATOR: Some well-known brands began adding more of the inexpensive robusta coffee beans to their blends. >> SCHULTZ: There are two types of beans that are commercially grown. One is robusta, and one is arabica. The robusta coffee is the low-grade quality coffee that is found in instant coffee, and in many ways, the commercial coffee that America's been drinking for the past 50 years. And Americans did not know any better. >> NARRATOR: Widely grown in Vietnam and parts of Africa, robusta plants resist disease, and are easier to grow. They contain much more caffeine than the higher-priced arabica beans but produce a harsh, flat, and bitter brew. >> SCHULTZ: America was drinking swill... (<i> laughs</i> ) ...uh, and I would like to say that, uh, Starbucks, in many ways, created a sense of awareness, and-and a trial vehicle for people to recognize that there was something else. >> NARRATOR: Good quality or bad, millions of people in America, and around the world, need their morning cup of coffee, no matter how it tastes. Much of coffee's popularity has to do with caffeine-- a drug that stimulates the production of adrenal hormones. That causes a rise in blood sugar, producing the lift that coffee provides. Insulin is then secreted by the body causing sugar levels to return to normal. Most health experts say moderate coffee consumption is safe, but excessive amounts could cause problems. >> LINGLE: Coffee's been one of the lubricants of the industrialized world, and it's really the role that caffeine plays in stimulating our central nervous system, and making us speak more clearly, think more clearly. It improves our motor skills. It really lends itself to all of the activities that we normally undertake as part of an industrialized society. >> NARRATOR: The majority of coffee consumers still buy the lower-priced cans of ground coffee at the supermarket, but sales of so-called "specialty" or "gourmet" coffees are growing, and in dollar value, this represents about half of coffee sales in the U.S. In 1960, overall per capita consumption of coffee in America was 15-1/2 pounds annually. Today, it's only 57% of that-- less than nine pounds annually. >> LINGLE: The reason that consumption declined in the United States is that the commercial blends began to undermine their quality by introducing more and more lower grades, and particularly more and more robusta-type coffees. And so, the consumer very predictably responded by consuming less of the product. >> NARRATOR: It would take the ultimate coffee-making machine-- the modern espresso machine-- to create a new passion for great coffee. Here in the Cupping Department at Starbucks corporate headquarters in Seattle, coffee tasters sample beans at various stages, from delivery to roasting to packaging. >> WILLARD "DUB" HAY: The Cupping Room is the nerve center, really, for any coffee company because it's where all the quality evaluations are made. Cupping is an art, essentially. We take a certain amount of coffee and we roast it, grind it and put it into a glass. And then we take nearly boiling water and pour it over the top of that. And we leave the grounds in there, so you get all of the intensities, all of the aromas, all of the flavors. (<i> slurping loudly</i> ) >> NARRATOR: On a busy day, the department tastes as many as 800 cups. If they drank all the coffee they sipped, they'd probably never get any sleep. But, just as professional wine tasters do, cuppers spit out most of the liquid, grading coffee in much the same way as a glass of Chardonnay. >> HAY: There's a lot of similarities. We use terms like "buttery," "nutty," "caramely"-- a lot of different things you would find both in wine and in coffee. It's got a lot of rum to it. Yeah, like a dark rum. >> Yeah. >> HAY: it's very nice. (<i> both slurping loudly</i> ) >> NARRATOR: Plenty of cupping goes on at the Specialty Coffee Association of America, based in Long Beach, California. It teaches people how to become tasting pros. >> LINGLE: We've taken what had been a tradition, or sort of an art form, that we call cupping, and translated that into a very specific science. >> JOSEPH RIVERA: What's going on right now is ten of some of the best cuppers in Colombia are here through a U.S. aid funded... uh, government fund, and they're here doing a training on how to use some of the standards that we use to assess quality. (<i> slurping loudly</i> ) >> NARRATOR: So that it covers the entire palate, the coffee is sipped vigorously and loudly. (<i> slurping loudly</i> ) >> RIVERA: When you first get started with cupping, a lot of people end up kind of choking on some of the coffee, but you get used to it after awhile. Usually the louder it is, the better you are. (<i> slurping loudly</i> ) >> NARRATOR: Although coffee experts have common reference points, when it comes to their favorite cup of coffee, opinions differ widely. >> SCHULTZ: For me, it's coffee from Indonesia, Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, New Guinea. >> ALLEN: My favorite way would be a quadruple espresso, probably made with Brazilian espresso beans, scented with cardamom. >> HAY: I don't want to drink a big heavy Sumatra at 6:00 in the morning. I like a lighter coffee, I like an East African coffee then. >> MILLETTO: My favorite coffee is Ethiopian coffee, without a doubt. >> DAVIS: I tend to take a drip... use a drip machine to make coffee in the morning, and I always choose beans that are Colombian. >> KANEKO: I personally use the French press... the press method, which is kind of similar to what we call the old cowboy coffee. >> HAY: The method of preparation I prefer is the French press, because you get the intensity of the flavor. >> SHELDRAKE: This is a French press coffee brewer, and it's very simple to operate. You just put your coffee grounds in the pot, and then you fill the pot with hot water. And you want your water to be as close to 200 degrees as possible, to get full extraction. And then you just use this metal filter, that's reusable, and you just press the grounds down to the bottom, and you create a fresh cup of coffee that has all the oils and all the sediment and all the flavor that was originally in the coffee bean. >> NARRATOR: Undoubtedly, the most expensive way to make coffee is to use one of these $6,000 commercial espresso machines. >> MILLETTO: It's very important, when you extract this coffee, that you see very, very, very, very thin strands of coffee coming out. Often, the size of strands of spaghetti. The color we're seeing right now is a very, very deep rust color, and that's the color we want to see. >> NARRATOR: It wasn't until 1948, in Milan, that the espresso machine, as we know it, was perfected. Café owner and tinkerer Achille Gaggia came up with the secret, which involves the use of a heavy spring and a piston. This combination forces hot water through finely ground coffee much more rapidly than steam pressure alone, which old-fashioned espresso makers relied on. The piston and spring produce a much faster and, experts say, superior extraction of the coffee's flavor. >> MICHAEL GIRGIS: Some of the components on an espresso machine would be, first of all, the boiler. Inside the boiler is a heating element. The heating element will heat up the water, which will create steam pressure. >> NARRATOR: Hot water in the boiler doesn't go into your cup. Instead, it heats up fresh water by means of a heat exchanger. Perhaps the pinnacle of espresso machine art is the cappucino-- a combination of espresso coffee and steamed milk. >> MILLETTO: An original, Italian cappuccino, the way the Italians have been making cappuccino forever, you're gonna see the coffee in here. The one thing that you don't want to do is to have bitter espresso on the bottom and dry, white foam on top. >> NARRATOR: When Achille Gaggia came up with his new, improved machine in 1948, it led to an espresso café boom in Italy in the early 1950s, which soon spread to the rest of Europe. In modified form, the espresso boom hit San Francisco's North Beach area where beatniks, modern jazz, and beat poetry came together in coffeehouses. >> DAVIS: The coffeehouse, as a center of intrigue, became as vital and resonant in San Francisco in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as it had been in London in the late 17th century. Coffee as a stimulant of the imagination, as a kind of a glow that people would get as they gathered around a warm fireplace of the spirit that became the coffee pot, all of this naturally became a potent source of a movement that was quintessentially based on ideas. >> NARRATOR: As espresso helped ignite a counterculture, on the other side of the divide, offices and factories kept noses to the grindstone with machines that brewed bottomless cups of cheap coffee. But as the pace of modern life sped up, brewing was just too slow for some Americans. They wanted their caffeine fix to be "instant," and so it was. But to make what the industry calls soluble coffee would require a lot more ingenuity and technology than it takes to roast a bean. "Coffee" will retu Although instant coffee is less popular in the U.S. than it once was-- in most of Europe and Asia, it's the number-one way to make coffee. >> HAY: The UK, interestingly, is about 80% instant share, only 20% roasted ground. In much of the Third World, developing world, it's still instant coffee. >> SHARKEY: Worldwide, about 40% of the coffee market at retail is instant coffee. And Nescafé dominates this part of the market. >> NARRATOR: The development of instant coffee can be traced back to the Civil War, when soldiers on both sides craved coffee so much, that some carried carbines with a coffee mill built into the buttstock. Eventually, some Union soldiers received an early, crude form of instant coffee. Finely-ground coffee was mixed with sugar and milk to form a concentrated, gooey paste that was sealed in a can. By adding hot water to a spoonful of paste, a soldier could enjoy a fast and reasonably good cup of coffee. Instant coffee powder first came to America after an English chemist, living in Guatemala, named George Washington, developed a method to refine coffee crystals from brewed coffee. He moved to New York City, became an American citizen, and began selling "George Washington's Refined Coffee." The dehydrated coffee was only a minor success. But when World War I broke out, the U.S. Army requisitioned his entire output. After World War I, instant coffee went back to being a marginal product-- and it would take another world war to stir up interest. In World War II, GI's had instant coffee in their K rations that came from 12 different suppliers, including George Washington, Maxwell House, and Nescafé. Hot coffee in the trenches meant a lot. It was a great comfort to war- weary soldiers. And instant coffee powder made it much faster and easier to make. >> SHARKEY: Throughout World War II, the U.S. military actually was responsible for spreading Nescafé, and instant coffee, around the globe. And making instant coffee very popular in markets across Europe and Asia. >> NARRATOR: For decades, instant coffee was manufactured using the spray-dry process. Concentrated coffee is sprayed from a high tower in a large hot-air chamber. As the droplets fall, the remaining water evaporates, and dry crystals of coffee drop to the bottom of the chamber. >> SHARKEY: One of the drawbacks of spray-drying is that it uses heat, and heat is one of coffee's mortal enemies. Heat is not very friendly to the finer properties of coffee flavor and aroma. >> NARRATOR: In the 1960's, Nestlé came out with a new way to make instant coffee-- using a freeze-dry process. >> SHARKEY: The benefit of freeze-dried coffee is that it took heat out of the equation. >> NARRATOR: Freshly brewed coffee is condensed into an extract, and frozen in slabs. The slabs are then ground into small chunks, and put in pressurized chambers. Moisture, in the form of ice, is then drawn off-- leaving dry coffee crystals behind. >> LINGLE: The most difficult part in instant or soluble coffee is maintaining the aromatics. Companies have made great strides in doing this. Some of them will actually condense the smoke that comes out of a coffee roaster into a liquid form, and reintroduce that liquid into the powder before the jar is sealed. >> SHARKEY: The majority of the users of instant coffee are probably over the age of 50. However, we are seeing pockets of younger folks using instant coffee today. And one of the benefits we're seeing, amongst the younger folks, is there's not so much of a negative instant coffee perception, but really it's a blank slate. And these people just have not been communicated to. So at Nestlé, we are passionate about instant coffee. It's the only part of the coffee business that we participate in. >> NARRATOR: Yes, you really did hear the worlds "passionate" and "instant coffee" in the same sentence. >> SHARKEY: We have passion for instant coffee. Yes, we do. >> NARRATOR: And as a sign of the times, instant coffee is now going gourmet. >> SHARKEY: One of the most recent introductions that we're making is a 100% Colombian blend of instant coffee. Coffee connoisseurs know Colombian beans as the finest beans there are. >> NARRATOR: For many coffee connoisseurs, The subject of decaf is even more of a sore spot than instant. In some specialty coffeeehouses, a cup of decaf is called a "Why bother?" >> ALLEN: To me, talking about decaffeinated coffee is like talking about nothing. So, what can you say? >> NARRATOR: But for people who experience tremors, palpitations, or just plain irritability from drinking caffeine-- decaf is the only choice. It was invented by Ludwig Roselius, a German merchant from Bremen, who patented his invention and started a company to produce it in 1906. Roselius believed that his father, a professional coffee taster, had died from consuming too much caffeine. Ludwig's new process extracted caffeine from green coffee beans by superheating them with steam, and then flooding the softened beans with the solvent benzol. The solvent was removed by rinsing the beans in water, and steaming them. The caffeine-free coffee was soon being sold in Germany, France, and the U.S. In France, it was given a name meaning "sans caffeine"-- "Sanka." That eventually became its name everywhere. >> Drink five, ten cups a day, as many as you like, and still stay steady as a rock. >> NARRATOR: The familiar orange-colored Sanka jars are still be found on supermarket shelves. In many offices and restaurants, orange-rimmed coffee pots are used to indicate decaf. The practice began decades ago, after Sanka distributed thousands of orange-rimmed pots to restaurants. Some decaf coffees are now processed with water alone to remove the caffeine-- while others still rely on solvents. Instant and decaf both used science and technology to provide new ways to drink coffee. Decades later, an orthopedic surgeon in California would come up with a new way to grow coffee. Although coffee is a beverage that's been around for centuries, there's always room for improvement. New directions are being explored constantly-- and one of the explorers is Dr. Joe Alban, AKA Kona Joe. He's an orthopedic surgeon practicing in Los Alamitos, California, south of Los Angeles. Dr. Alban leads a double life, because he also owns and operates a 20-acre coffee farm in Kona-- where he's developed a new way to grow coffee, called the trellis method. >> ALBAN: No one has ever grown coffee before using a trellis. So this is a brand-new idea that we thought of, and we patented it. >> NARRATOR: If Dr. Alban's farm looks like a vineyard, it's with good reason. He developed the trellis method after studying the way wine grapes are grown. >> ALBAN: Not only is coffee a fruit, and wine grapes are a fruit, but many other fruits have been successfully trellised, like Fuji apples, peaches, pears and kiwis. And the trellis has increased production of all of those fruits, but also increased the sugars and made them all sweeter-tasting. >> The trellis system allows more sunlight and air to reach the entire coffee plant. >> ALBAN: This is a tree that's now two years old. And it's just at the right age to be trained to the trellis. By laying this vertical on its side, we're stretching the plant, making it wider, and a vertical can give rise to laterals, but also new verticals. >> NARRATOR: It was a long-term gamble, but the trellis method turned out to be a great success. >> ALBAN: These are our oldest, most mature trees. They're eight years old now, and we can see how that early split of the tree trunk, where we took those two flexible verticals, has now turned into a very thick, hearty trunk that has this sort of "T" shape. >> NARRATOR: Kona Joe's trellis-grown coffee now sells at a premium price-- and he can barely keep up with the demand. Each month, after two weeks on his coffee farm, Kona Joe becomes Dr. Joe Alban again, and returns to his medical practice in California. >> ALBAN: It is culture shock going back and forth. When I go back to California now, I take off my blue jeans and aloha shirt, scrub my hands, put on my white jacket, and go back to face some very serious problems. And it's always an adjustment for me, to go back and forth between the roles. >> NARRATOR: Coffee growers in Kona have a much higher standard of living than most of the world's coffee farmers-- many of whom barely manage to survive. The Fair Trade Movement tries to address that-- by providing fair trade certification when coffee buyers pay a minimum of $1.26 per pound to small independent growers. Fair trade coffee sells well in Europe, where the movement began-- and sales are growing in America. Yet another new direction for coffee is genetic engineering. Although it's still at the experimental stage, some speculate that scientists will eventually develop coffee trees that efficiently produce decaffeinated beans. But, so far, there's no talk of a cappuccino tree. >> LINGLE: Probably, in the near term, the genetic engineering that will have the greatest impact will be in the fruit ripening, particularly for coffees coming out of Brazil, where so much of the coffee is now mechanically harvested. Being able to have all of the fruit ripen at the same time is very important to the efficiency of that process. >> NARRATOR: The long-term future of coffee looks good-- as high-quality coffee consumption increases-- and drinkers worldwide turn to their regular cups for more than just a daily jolt. >> LINGLE: My forecast would be that, in the next hundred years, coffee will double in its volume. What will be much different is that coffee will truly move into the wine model. And it will become less and less a commodity. >> NARRATOR: No doubt coffee will still play a vital role that no fine wine can ever match, as long as it continues to get most of the world going every morning.<font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsy</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by <font color="#00FFFF"> Media Access Group at WGBH</font> access.wgbh.org
