The coffee that settled the West!

Here is a tidbit about two coffee roasters

from Donald Schoenholt's

“Mr. John Arbuckle, who went on to become the greatest coffee roaster of his generation and the creator of the first national brand, "ARIOSA," was also one of the richest men in America during the gilded age of the 1880s and '90s. Arbuckle Bros. produced ARIOSA, known as "the coffee that won the West," and also roasted and packed several other popular brands, including their premium YUBAN brand (now owned by Kraft), which was the best selling brand in New York for years. 

Arbuckle's coffee was distributed in the age before lined paper bags, and coffee went stale and rancid pronto.  Coating, or "glazing" as it came to be known, was a way to lengthen its shelf life by keeping air away from the beans.  Many different compounds were used in the coffee trade. Arbuckle Bros. settled on a sugar based glaze.  They became such a prodigious user of sugar that they decided to enter the sugar business rather than give a profit on the huge quantities they needed to others.  The Sugar Trust didn't like that much and decided to enter the coffee business to spite Arbuckle.  For the better part of the next generation, the Sugar Trust's LION COFFEE battled it out with Arbuckle's brands throughout the courts and the cities of the nation.  The first great advertising campaign in history was this coffee war.  After fought to a stand-still, the sugar boys quit the coffee business, and the Arbuckle brothers were triumphant.  They strode upon the national stage until their deaths in the early part of the 20th Century.  Their heirs sold the business to Mr. C.W. Post (of Post Toasties and Postum fame), who was putting together a little company at that time that would be called General Foods.  Mr. Post joined the Arbuckle brands with the other little roaster he had just acquired from the Cheek Neal Coffee Co.; it was called Maxwell House.

With the advent of the Pure Food & Drug Act (1906), and the development of better packaging that retained freshness longer, glazing fell out of fashion.

Sugar glazed beans, now referred to as "torrefaction coffee," still retain a market in Spain and South America.


P.S.  LION COFFEE went broke eventually and languished in the Ohio court system as just a moldy old file until found by an entrepreneur who arranged with the court to revive the brand name.  It was moved to Hawaii where the lion, after two generations of slumber, roars again as a retailer, roaster and wholesaler of Hawaiian blend coffees.”

Travel throughout the western states with more appreciation of the great culture of rugged individualism. Wyoming, Montana, has a lot of appeal to see how "go west young man" really became the driving theme of development. Coffee has always been at great demand for hard working people, from cowboys to mountain men.

 Visit the Cody Museum, stop by Jackson hole, travel through Yellowstone, go up north and see part of the Lewis and Clark journeys. Maybe even visit the largest outdoor spa in the world, Thermopolis, or travel down and see independence rock. That would be a fabulous adventure for the whole family plus get them out of the stuffy, fluffy digital vanity world.