My friend Trish Rothgeb pulled this video from sprudge.com and posted it on Facebook today from waaaay back (1961 to be exact). What a crack up! I have to admit that initially, I thought this was going to suck and was all poised and ready to start mocking it. As the clip wore on, I realized that especially for it’s time, this actually had some pretty good information in it! Check it out.
First of all, I love the eye pillow. Who uses those? And what was that foulness that got poured at the 1:03 mark? Hot Yoohoo? I was scared for a second, but they came to the second cup and cleared it all up. Whew!
Nearly right out of the blocks, they start talking about origins and where the coffee came from, complete with footage of farmers actually picking cherries from treese much like it looks even today. This question about where their coffee actually came from was lost among American consumers for many years as the general public just didn’t probe into those questions very often. The CBI narrator makes the statement “In this beverage that has become so much a part of our lives, there is a background; a tradition that reaches deeply into the culture of many lands.” All right, it’s a bit vague, but it does still direct the consumer to think beyond their local grocer as to where those beans might have come from.
This film was released just a couple of years after the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia (Colombian Coffee-growers Federation) launched their massively successful Juan Valdez campaign in 1959. It is possible that this film was a response to the success of that campaign, but that’s pure speculation. I just thought that was pretty cool because now, in any decent café or roasting works, one can usually see the shortened supply line as the focus has shifted away from coffee purchased for social causes like Fair Trade and gravitated towards Relationship and/or Direct Trade that is centered around quality nearly above all else. Quality was the core message of the Colombians and for decades, Colombian coffee was seen as the standard to beat in popular American culture. Still, it’s neat to see quality preparation methods being taught and maintained. It just reminds me that truly, there is nothing new under the sun. When I hear “See, this is new!” Nope. Check your archives and history books.
Mike Ferguson of Coffee Solutions made such a great detailed post about this film at coffeed.com that I just have to just cut and paste his comment directly in their entirety, but if you are that interested, you can reference the full coffeed thread. Mike said:
“Much of the original science behind brewing was conducted by the Coffee Brewing Institute. In his forward and introduction to The Coffee Brewing Handbook, Ted Lingle acknowledges the pioneering work of the Coffee Brewing Institute and Dr. E.E. Lockhart. The SCAA library contains a number of original CBI publications and they make for fascinating reading.
According to Lingle, The Coffee Brewing Institute was a joint effort between the National Coffee Association and the Pan American Coffee Bureau. The PACB was responsible also for a lot of consumer promotion of coffee. I have two or three coffee advertisements in my ephemera collection that were created by the PACB, one featuring broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Dr. Lockhart was an MIT food scientist and was the scientific director for the CBI from 1952 until 1964 and he once wrote “In the case of coffee, agriculture and industry have fostered art.”
Lingle explains that the CBI was closed and replaced by the “Coffee Brewing Center” in 1964. The CBC, he says, was focused on the foodservice industry and created The Golden Cup award, which SCAA revived about 16 years ago. The CBC conducted a lot of outreach to the trade and training. It is my understanding that a number of people from the founding generation of the specialty industry participated in these trainings or were trained by those who did. The CBC closed in 1974.
Today, the closest “living relative” to the CBI and CBC is the Norwegian Coffee Brewing Center (which was renamed to the European Coffee Brewing Centre a few years ago). Located in Oslo, it is a fascinating place that I have been lucky enough to visit. A “spiritual offspring” of the CBI and CBC would be the SCAA Technical Standards Committee.
Like all things funded by the ICO (an expansion of the Norwegian center to other countries was funded by the ICO in the late 1980s), they rise and fall with the fortunes of the industry and the existence or collapse of a International Coffee Agreement. In any case, all of these entities produced virtually identical standards in terms of the fundamental science of coffee.”
The first time that I heard about the Coffee Brewing Center was in about 2000 when I started facilitating internal training classes for Starbucks. There was a piece in which we actually referenced the CBC and credited them with developing the industry standard of 2 Tablespoons of coffee per 6 oz. of hot water. Starbucks simply adopted this recipe as did many, many other large-scale national and multi-national companies. I’m dying to know what proportions that the coffee taster in the film used when he was cupping. For a cup that size, I like to use 12-14 grams.
Café au lait, cappuccino (with whip and orange zest garnish, no less!), spiced Viennese Coffee (or Café Viennois), again with whipped cream, Turkish coffee and a version of what I assume to be close Café Cubano with is very strong and very sugary… All of these variations that were unavailable within the mainstream and seemed wildly exotic at the time are flashed about. How awesome to see them! I will say that at least the whipped cream looked like actual hand whipped cream or maybe a chantilly and not the pre-made drivel that we buy at the store in a pinch at Thanksgiving for the pumpkin pie.
Then it’s back to American culture and I love this next bit:
“How then do we make the perfect cup of coffee to our taste? Success is lies in a single word: Care Three simple ingredients go into the brewing process: water, coffee, time. Care will produce a perfect cup of coffee every time”
Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?
I won’t review the rest of the film scene by scene, but the narrator hits on all the basic elements to a good cup of coffee that we use today. The basics then are still the basics now which is great to see. When I am out talking to people about their home coffee brewing methods and am troubleshooting why someone’s coffee taste might be off, it’s a pretty quick checklist and all were mentioned by CBI. While we’re here and by way of a quick review, you’re looking for:
- Correct proportion of coffee to water
- Proper grind / coffee particle size
- Coffee Freshness
- Good water
- Equipment cleanliness
Commercial settings go even farther into detail (like water for instance gets into total dissolved solids and alkalinity, etc.), but as professionals, we should be minding the details. It’s what makes us professionals. Your job as a consumer is just to tip your cup back and enjoy the taste of all those professionally minded details and not care about a single one of them other than “WOW! THAT was one fantastic cup of coffee!”
Overall, a great glimpse of the past and my thanks again to Trish for dusting it off. As corny as it looks by 2009 standards, we owe a great debt to the people who came up with the information presented in that 1961 version of a Youtube video. Without the second wave, there would be no third.
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