I'm sitting here drinking espresso and doing some work on my book. Right now this is a very first draft and I'm not worried about dotting t's and crossing i's right now, just the basic thoughts and concept, I've been working on this part for 2 days, I'm about ready to get into the nuts and bolts of how I make coffee in camp, anyone who has drank it seems to think it is very good camp coffee.
Anyone who really knows about coffee knows one could write who books on coffee history, the origins, the selecting of the proper beans and on and on. I don't want to write a whole book on coffee, but I don't want to go into how to make good camp coffee with out touching on enough history as it concerns 19th century cooks in the 21st Century as well as a little bit of an explanation of how to select good coffee from the vast amounts of types one can obtain today.
Does this get the information needed with out going to far? The rest on how to make it will not take near as long.
...
When we think of the Old West one item that comes to mind among many is coffee, the coffee pot hanging on the iron over the campfire, the coffee pit on the stove in Marshal Dillion’s office or Arbuckle’s Ariosa Coffee in the paper bag and the stick of candy in each back as well as the coupons to clip and save to sent in for merchandise.
There have been reams written on how coffee was discovered and developed in the Middle East and slowly spread to Europe and from there to America. We have all heard the story about how England put a high tax on tea and the Colonists in Boston dumped the tea into the harbor and then went out and had a cup of coffee to celebrate, after that we became a coffee drinking nation.
The problem was coffee was many times more expensive than tea till the plantations of the West Indies, Central and South America got large enough to drive the price of coffee down. This would not happen till into the 1820’s, also coffee has to be roasted before it is ground and used. This was left up to the consumer till after the Civil War and beyond, it would not be till after the Civil War that coffee truly took over as the hot beverage and stimulant of choice.
One large advance in coffee came in the late 1860’s when John Arbuckle of Pittsburg invented and patented a method of sealing the roasted coffee beans by coating them with a mixture of egg white and sugar to seal the flavor into the bean. This was packaged in paper sacks holding one pound of coffee, one hundred pounds to a wooden case. Each bag had a peppermint stick in each bag as well as coupons on the sack that could be redeemed for merchandise.
For many years Arbuckle’s was the most popular coffee in the west and is often given the title of “The Coffee That Won the West.” Arbuckle had several blends before they faded away and were sold to CW Post early in the 20th Century, their Christmas blend known as YUBAN for Yuletide Blend still survives, and their original ARIOSA is now being made again in the original coated beans with the peppermint stick in each bag, but the coupons for merchandise has not been revived. The term for their coffee ARIOSA has been wondered and pondered by historians, but the most likely is that it stands for “Rio South America” that area being the largest coffee producer of the time period.
Arbuckle’s was not the only option in the period, just like today there were a lot of local businesses that roasted coffee for the local market, an improved coffee roaster was patented by Jabez Burns in 1864, this improvement made it easier for grocery stores to provide fresh roasted coffee. Other companies started providing pre-roasted coffee and shortly after the of the century pre-ground coffee, vacuum packed in cans started to take over the market. In the late 20th Century better quality fresh roasted whole beans started taking a larger and larger percent of the market; this makes it much easier for those of us who like really good coffee to make it in camp, more on this later.
If one really wants to experience camp life in the days before Arbuckle’s Coffee, most areas of the country have local coffee roasters who will sell you un-roasted green coffee beans. The rest is simple, just put the beans in a skillet, heat it up and keep stirring the beans till they obtain the desired roast you want. With skill and practice you can get a fairly even roast. This is the way the US Army issued coffee to soldiers till late in the 19th Century. I myself prefer to take the route of “I bought my beans from a local roaster,” and go with good quality fresh beans.
Before we get into one of the several possible ways to brew coffee in camp I want to touch some more on the coffee beans themselves. To brew truly good coffee you must have good coffee beans or at least good fresh ground coffee. We are living in a time where for most people in the United States it is not hard to obtain good coffee. Beside many of us being located near a local coffee house that roasts beans in house, most any larger grocery store will have at least a small selection of decent quality coffee for sale.
It has not always been this way, a lot of swill called coffee was brewed in the time, often caused by poor home roasting, poor quality coffee and improper brewing. There were those who spent the money for good coffee and time to properly roast it and brew it, but they were in a minority. The pre-packaged, pre-roasted name brand coffees really didn’t do a whole lot to improve this as costs were cut through the years, by the end of the 19th Century and through about 3/4th of the 20th, the United States enter what could be considered a dark age for coffee. Slowly in the 1970’s a lot of Americans discovered good coffee again.
In defense of all the bad coffee that was served in those times, coffee was not always looked as a refreshing beverage that gave you a nice “pick me up.” It was often brewed in a hurry with poor quality coffee, water and brewing equipment as a drug pure and simple. The soldier resting for a short time around a quick built fire after a long march in the rain, the cowboy who has been up for 36 hours trying to sort a mess out after lightning stampeded the herd, or one of many other reasons you need a stimulant. For these people and many even today coffee is a drug, pure and simple, they wanted it strong and hot, period. I’m sure anyone reading this that drinks coffee has used in more than once as a drug rather than just an enjoyable beverage, as I write this I’m doing both.
The selection of the beans is up to you, many do not realize how the different degrees of roasting and the different strains of coffee raised in places with different climate and soil will have a wide variety of tastes. Sometimes the beans are sold as blends where a taster directs the type and amount of beans used to make a blend that is consistent in taste, sometimes the beans are sold unblended and are sold as to the country they are from or in some cases the estate or plantation where they are grown. These can vary year to year, these are what I generally buy, I like to think of these in the same terms many think of single barrel whiskeys. What one has to do is sample different types of coffee and decide what you like, if you brew any good grounds up into decent coffee you will not get many complaints around the camp fire.
Some of the regions we can get coffee from today were not heavy producing regions in the 19th Century and may have export little or no coffee to the United States in the time, I don’t consider this a serious problem, I doubt if you brew up decent coffee anyone will question you that much or more likely few will have the knowledge to say you brew is not period correct if you tell them the origins of the coffee.
One thing I have not seen is anything on the flavored coffees we see today, I will not say they didn’t exist, but at the time of this writing I have never seen any evidence of them. However cream and sweetener were used by many, if you don’t have fresh cream, then canned milk was around and a lot of canned milk was used in coffee before the powdered creamers came on the market and even after.
Today most sweeten their coffee with white sugar or some fake white sugar, but then a lot of brown sugar, molasses, sorghum syrup or honey was used to sweeten coffee.
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