First stop was Qualia Coffee in Petworth. An intimate cafe nestled between rowhouses, Qualia roasts their specialty coffee in-house and boasts comfortable seating to make you feel right at home. Owner of Qualia Coffee Joel Finkelstein talked to us about the shop’s four-year history and its role as a former bike co-op, making it the perfect launching point and inspiring our collaborative spirit for the rest of the bike tour.

Passing through Georgia Ave and Columbia Heights, we arrived at Pleasant Pops Farmhouse Market and Cafe. A modern market with broad open windows, I was impressed by their creative treats. The homemade honey lavender popsicle was delicious, and I’ll definitely be going back for a guacamole pop.

After a short break, our next stop was Baked and Wired in Georgetown. I was excited to bike through Georgetown as a group to learn the safest bike-friendly route through this historic neighborhood. We arrived as the clouds parted after a mostly grey morning and it was glorious. Cyclists with small cups of espresso and plates of delicious quiche walked alongside the canal, soaking in the sunshine.

Up next, The Coffee Bar. One of my favorite coffee shops (and conveniently located a few blocks from my house), I love walking through Shaw and enjoying good coffee, conversation, and bagels at this former corner store marketplace. Like seagulls on an abandoned picnic, our large flock of cyclists descended upon TCB but the shop’s owner, Cait Lowry, was ready for us with a dainty lemonade and iced coffee stand outside.

Our final stop was Big Bear Cafe, the obligatory hipster haunt and family weekend spot of Bloomingdale. Surrounded by a beautiful garden of herbs and flowers, the patio provides the perfect shelter for drinking a cappuccino or a glass (or three) of sangria at the end of a long and fulfilling ride.

Each coffee shop handled the onslaught of orders like pros. I can definitely say that I was highly caffeinated by the end of the tour, but mostly invigorated by great conversations with new friends. The organizers Elizabeth O’Connell and Laura Westman did a great job explaining safety precautions and establishing a safe space for riders, and I felt a great sense of collaboration from our shared experience. Biking can be intimidating in any city, but I highly recommend group bike rides for riders of all levels to discover what neighborhood gems are hidden near you.

For bike and coffee enthusiasts who missed this ride, the second Wednesday and Thursday of each month marks the monthly DC Bike Party and Thursday Night Throwdown events, respectively. Mark your calendars for the Robot Ride on May 8th and TNT at Baked and Wired on May 9th.

The Coffee Bike Crawl is free to ride and open to all ages.

When: Sunday, May 5, 2013
9:30 a.m. meet up (wheels up at 10 a.m.)

Where: Meet at Qualia Coffee 3917 Georgia Ave, NW

Stops Include:

• Qualia Coffee (Petworth)
• Pleasant Pops Farmhouse Market & Cafe (U Street)
• Baked & Wired (Georgetown)
• The Coffee Bar (Shaw)
• Big Bear Cafe (Bloomingdale)

Download the event flyer here (pdf) or just click the image below, and be sure to check out the the Facebook page. District Bean is a proud sponsor of the DC Coffee Bike Crawl.

This TNT will include a live DJ, complimentary baked goods and assorted prizes and surprises. Sponsors for the event are MadCap Coffee, Trickling Springs Creamery, Crystal Press, 9:30 Club and (yours truly!) District Bean … who may or may not be providing a bottle of liquor to the winner.

This is a BYOB event, with a $5 buy-in to pour.

When: Thursday, May 9, 8:30 p.m. (sign up) and 9 p.m. (pour)
Where: Baked & Wired, 1052 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW (Georgetown)

More details will be posted to DMV Coffee.com

The auction is being run by CharityBuzz.com, an online auction site that provides a community of (well financed) bidders the opportunity to access luxury items and celebrity experiences. The proceeds from each auction are contributed to a charitable organization, which in this case is the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

What would you talk about with the CEO of Apple? Who knows, but there’s a bigger question at hand – what kind of coffee is served for $180,000? The obvious answer is whatever is brewed down at Caffe Macs, the onsite Apple employee eatery where coffee (I’ve heard it’s Starbucks) is provided free-of-charge. But I’d like to think such a high price would fetch some quality specialty coffee, from one of the myriad of Bay Area roasters or perhaps Verve Coffee Roasters just south of Cupertino in Santa Cruz.

**Update**

(April 29, 2013, 7:10 p.m.) The bidding now stands at $600,000 with 15 days remaining to place a bid.

The latest installment of Thursday Night Throwdown is coming up April 18 at The Coffee Bar. The latte art competition will be a battle for barista supremacy, per usual, only the April TNT will also pit DC competitors against their Chicago counterparts in the first city-to-city TNT of 2013.

TNT organizers DMV Coffee have been working with New Gotham Coffee, a similar organizing committee in Chicago, to stream both TNTs via webcast. The concurrent events will include the typical bracket-style competition in their respective locales, and then a selection of final competitors from each city will battle it out for the overall victory.

The Chicago event is being held at Metropolis Coffee.

This is a BYOB event.

When: Thursday, April 18, 8:30 p.m. (sign up) and 9 p.m. (pour)
Where: The Coffee Bar, 1201 S Street, NW

Additional details at DMV Coffee.

During the event, competitors will be introduced to multiple sets of brewed coffees, with each set containing two of the same and one different coffee. The challenge is to correctly and quickly identify the one coffee that is different.

To sweeten the deal, Counter Culture says it will send the overall winner of the Cup Tasters Challenge to compete at the U.S. Cup Tasters Challenge this April during the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s conference in Boston. To win, a competitor must best his or her regional challengers, as well as those from Ashville, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Durham, New York and Philadelphia.

The Cup Tasters Challenge is open to all participants and spectators, though there is a $5 entrance fee to compete and only the first 30 to sign up can participate. Additional details can be found at Counter Culture Coffee’s website or on the event page on Facebook.

Counter Culture Coffee Cup Tasters Challenge
Friday, March 15, 2013, 7-10 p.m.
Counter Culture Coffee
Washington DC Training Center
1840 Columbia Road NW, Suite 203

When: Thursday, March 14, 8:30 p.m. (sign up) and 9 p.m. (pour)
Where: Pitango Gelato Penn Quarter, 413 7th St, NW

Additional details posted at DMV Coffee.

A recent MarketWatch article caught my attention, as it addressed America’s past height of coffee consumption of the 1940s, the likely reasons for its decline thereafter and the market opportunities for a resurgence today. I highlighted some of the more interesting tidbits from that story here (A Return to Glory: America’s Coffee Drinking Prime), and you can read the MarketWatch article in full here.

Because we can learn a few lessons from our past, I thought it appropriate to include the original 1977 USDA report cited in the MarketWatch article. Thanks to a little thing called Public Domain, the USDA report is publicly available. It’s not overly technical, and it’s surprisingly interesting, relevant and easy to read. As time allows, peruse the full text below, complete with tables and graphs from the original report. You can also find a PDF version of the report here.

U.S. Coffee Consumption, 1946-76

Foreign Agricultural Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, February 1977

By Neil A. Lawrance, William H. Phillips, Alan H. Riffkin, and Abdullah A. Saleh, Foreign Commodity Analysis, Sugar and Tropical Products Division

Summary

Total coffee consumption in the United States has remained virtually unchanged since World War II, despite an expanding population, a growing economy, and rising real income. Per capita consumption of regular coffee has declined by about 40 percent since 1946—from 26.9 pounds (green bean equivalent) to 16.2 pounds in 1975.

In an attempt to identify the causes of the decline, two possible changes beyond traditional consumer demand factors of income and price were hypothesized: Changes in coffee taste and quality, and changes in American life-styles. An analytical model was constructed to account for taste and quality factors, in addition to income and price.

The results indicate that the introduction of Robusta beans (a bitter variety produced in Africa) in coffee blends has been one significant factor in the decline in consumption of regular coffee, presumably by giving consumers a taste they do not like. There also is evidence that social changes—rising incomes and new life-styles that encourage snacks and cold drinks—are factors, although it is not possible to determine the extent of their individual influences with present data.

The analysis shows a sharp rise in regular coffee prices after World War II to be largely responsible for a decline in per capita consumption until 1954, but that ensuing declines are not attributable to price— nor directly to the price of soft drinks, a hallmark of the new life-style.

The model uses a proxy to measure the taste effect of the increased use of Robusta beans, and includes a dummy variable, inserted beginning in 1969, to capture the effect of the new freeze-dried soluble coffee. Unlike spray-dried coffee, freeze-dried is a close flavor substitute for regular coffee, and therefore is likely to reduce regular coffee consumption. The model tries to explain only per capita regular consumption, as the spray-dried instant market is assumed to have been—except for a brief introductory period—an “add-on” convenience market. Elasticities are derived by linear least squares regression in the logs.

Results show an inelastic but significantly negative response in consumption to prices of regular coffee. Soft-drink prices have no significant effect. The income coefficient indicates that coffee consumption falls as income rises, but the elasticity, although unbiased, is statistically insignificant. A check with the historical change in per capita income using this estimate of income elasticity indicates that income rises may account for one-third of the decline in consumption of regular coffee from 1962 to 1974, but there is a statistical problem here. It is one of multicolinearity, with a resulting large standard error.

Experimentation with the soft drink proxy for a new life-style shift from coffee to soft drinks leads to the conclusion that the life-style/postwar-income-rise situation is detrimental to coffee consumption, but which factor is more important, or the true statistical significance of either, is impossible to determine.

Finally, the measure using the Robusta factor is significantly negative. The historical data shows that while the taste influence was overshadowed by price fluctuations from 1946 to 1962, the Robusta factor played a major role after this date in the consumption decline of regular coffee, along with the income/life-style variable. There was also some substitution toward freeze-dried coffee.

Any conclusion from these results that coffee processors should reduce Robusta bean content in their blends as a marketing measure is tempered by the fact that coffee consumption is part of a complex social process that hinders reverse causality. Nevertheless, externally induced reduction in the Robusta factor in 1975 coincided with a rise in per capita consumption, although this may be partially caused by other factors, such as the popularity of new automatic coffee makers.

Introduction

After World War II, the American consumer embarked upon a new era of unrivaled prosperity, and many goods—both new and old—benefited by the economic consequences of this development. However, coffee—the traditional American beverage—did not follow this trend and its total consumption—even with the boost from convenient soluble coffee and increasing population—has remained virtually unchanged in the last 30 years.

To coffee sellers, this position is even more alarming when considered in terms of the individual coffee-drinking patterns implied. Since 1946, per capita (over 15 years of age) regular coffee consumption (table 1) has gone down approximately 40 percent, and further drops are not as likely to be offset by rapid population growth or gains in per capita soluble coffee consumption.

In a traditional demand model—in which an individual’s consumption of an item responds only to his income, the item’s own price, and the prices of substitutable or complementary items—the fall in per capita consumption of coffee seems puzzling. Real coffee prices, although up over the 30-year period through 1975, did not rise abnormally out of line with those of other beverages, and real disposable income increased over 50 percent (Table 2).

Based on these shifts, coffee would appear to be an “inferior” item—that is, one whose consumption falls as income rises. But even though there is admittedly little room for increased consumption of a traditional item such as coffee as additional income is spent on more luxurious items, this beverage is not generally looked upon as a “cheap” drink that becomes unacceptable to richer tastes.

Traditional demand analysis often fails to investigate adequately factors in consumer demand other than income and price—factors such as taste, flavor, and quality, which are characteristics of the commodity and which influence the level of worth to the consumer. It has often been assumed that more traditional goods remain essentially unchanged over time and face the same demand, once income and price are given.

In reality, however, coffee, as a habitually consumed commodity, is highly sensitive to any social or technical factors that affect the early formative years of potential coffee consumers. These nontraditional demand characteristics involving coffee, both in the physical and psychological sense, can play an important role in explaining the fall in U.S. per capita consumption of regular coffee.

Two major possible characteristic changes for coffee can be hypothesized in the postwar period. The first is the technical introduction of more lower quality coffee beans into coffee blends. These beans, primarily of the African Robusta variety but also including lower-quality Latin American Arabicas, may have been added in quantities sufficient to impart a bitter taste to a cup of coffee, discouraging younger drinkers inclined to milder and sweeter tastes and encouraging older drinkers to consider coffee as a harsh, unhealthy beverage.

Secondly, there is the major social change in life styles, as America has become an increasingly prosperous and consumption-oriented society. With rising real disposable incomes and the postwar baby boom, Americans also become more oriented to youth and recreation, more involved in travel and outdoor activities. This has encouraged quick and cool food and beverage breaks as opposed to complete breakfasts and full meals that include coffee.

This social phenomenon can then be very closely identified with the rapid growth in per capita soft-drink consumption since World War II (1975 consumption was roughly 2.5 times that of 1946, according to National Soft Drink Association figures). Based on these two hypotheses, a model was constructed that attempts to explain changes in consumption of regular coffee.

A Model of U.S. Per Capita Regular Coffee Consumption

The following functional relationship is hypothesized: Y=f(X1 ,X2 ,X3 ,X4 ,XS). Y=U.S. per capita regular coffee consumption for the 15-years-and-older population (in pounds per year); X^U.S. real (deflated by food price index) retail regular coffee price (in cents per pound); X2=U.S. real (deflated by consumer price index) per capita disposable personal income (in dollars per year); X3=U.S. real (deflated by food price index) retail soft drink price (in cents per 72 ounces); X4=Percentage of total U.S. annual coffee imports of the Robusta variety; X5=Dummy variable equal to 0 before 1969 and 1 thereafter.

The model is of a traditional form, except for the last two variables. An individual’s consumption of regular coffee is postulated to be negatively related to its price and of an unknown relationship with income until the inferiority question is settled. The price of soft drinks, viewed as a competitive item, could be positively related to regular coffee consumption, although a strong case may exist that consumers do not react strongly to price differences between hot and cold drinks but decide, as part of a life-style social process, to have a cool or warm drink rather than react to relative prices within the chosen category.

The variable X4 is an attempt to capture the previously mentioned harsh taste characteristic of lower quality beans. As this idea has centered around Robusta beans, a proxy for the taste effect might be the percentage of Robusta coffee imports relative to total bean imports. While this ignores stock changes, the unavailability of roasting data broken down by type of bean prevents more accurate measures, and the assumption that stock changes are likely to affect all bean types more or less equally is not too difficult to accept.

Unfortunately, the story is not so simple. Imports of cheaper beans reportedly began about 1950 for use in instant coffee, where most of the taste differences would be lost anyway. Robusta imports grew rapidly, and by the early 1960′s were in excess of the amounts that could be used for instant coffee production (Table 3). Therefore, one suggested possibility for a measure of the taste characteristic for coffee was the relative excess of the imports that would be used in regular coffee, where the taste difference could show up.

Measures of this type were tried, but did not produce significant results. Two explanations of this could be that Robusta beans were used much earlier in the regular coffee blends than was necessitated by an “excess” of imports, or that despite instant coffee’s bland taste, the difference in beans had its effect.

Soluble coffee consumption and prices are left out of the model on the hypothesis that spray-dried instant coffee has been, except for a brief introductory period to be pointed out later, a convenience “add-on” to the market rather than a competitive substitute. It is very hard for a consumer to make a price comparison between regular and spray-dried instant coffee in the forms sold at retail, and the bland taste from the loss of volatile flavor particles in spray-dried processing precludes this convenience product from unduly impinging on the regular market.

In effect, the development of spray-dried instant coffee was mainly an attempt to meet the new life-style demand for quick beverages. However, the new freeze-dried soluble coffee introduced in 1969, while still an unlikely price competitor, is a close flavor substitute for regular coffee consumption, since this process retains more of the flavor particles lost in the spray-dried method. Owing to unsatisfactory data on freeze-dried consumption, a dummy variable is started in 1969 to capture any shift away from the regular market, as some people presumably switched from regular to a product that tasted almost as good and was much more convenient.

Finally, it should be noted that the model contains no explicit variable to reflect the life-style consumption shift to soft drinks. The problem is that this loose set of factors, proxied by per capita soft drink consumption, is intimately connected with rising real per capita disposable income since World War II, as reflected in a partial correlation coefficient of 0.96.

Therefore, in this model, the income coefficient can be regarded as really being the effect on regular coffee consumption of the new American life-style. In this sense, the question of whether or not coffee is an inferior good may be unanswerable.

Is the particular life-style change that has been occurring in the United States the inevitable result of real per capita income increases (making coffee an inferior item), or is it a phenomenon of the U.S. postwar period that has joined the two factors together (thereby not precluding coffee as a “normal” item)? Unfortunately, comparative cases of other nations are scarce, and any answer must be based largely on speculation.

Results and Historical Analysis

The model was estimated by ordinary least squares regression with 1946-1975 data from standard
sources (see Data Appendix), and was run linearly in the logs in order to estimate elasticities directly (the estimated parameters associated with the variables being the elasticity coefficients).

These estimated coefficients indicate that individual regular coffee consumption reacts inelasticly, but significantly, to coffee’s own price changes (2 percent drop for 10 percent price rise) and competitively with soft drink prices. Yet the coefficient on the latter variable is not statistically significant. Coffee has been such a habitual drink and small expenditure drain on the American consumer’s budget that he or she has not substantially reduced consumption when coffee prices rose.

The insignificant soft drink price coefficient indicates that people tend to pick a hot or warm beverage before comparing prices within the chosen category. In other words, cool beverages such as soft drinks are a life-style substitute, rather than a price competitor. Based on these results, consumption of regular coffee can be viewed as being not directly influenced by the consumption of soft drinks.

The income coefficient has a negative sign pointing toward inferiority, but it is statistically insignificant. However, this unbiased elasticity estimate, combined with the actual movements of income, may account—as will be shown later—for almost one-third of the fall in per capita consumption in the 1962-1974 period. Unfortunately, the standard error is disappointingly large, a problem that could be a result of the close, but not exact, relationship between the new life-style that prefers quick and cold beverages and the postwar rise in income.

Further experimentation that tried to include a measure of the taste shift in favor of soft drinks revealed an income coefficient that was virtually zero and a soft drink coefficient that was insignificantly negative in the same manner as this study’s income coefficient (accounting for a large proportion of the consumption fall, but with a large standard error). This is indicative of the multicollinearity dilemma posed by the similar movements in per capita income and per capita soft drink consumption.

In effect, regression analysis is unable to disentangle the separate effects of the related movements, and while calculating the combined effect, over-estimates one coefficient and underestimates the other, with large standard errors reflecting the uncertainty and blurring the significance of both variables.

In conclusion, there is evidence that the combined income/soft drink/life-style relationship lowers coffee consumption, but attributing a statistically significant influence to either or both factors—and possibly solving the inferiority question—is not possible with present data.

The other hypothesized characteristic-shifter, the Robusta factor, is significantly negative, which points out the realism added by allowing for taste as well as price and income changes. This variable indicates that the use of Robusta beans in coffee blends has had a negative effect on coffee consumption by giving consumers a taste they do not like. Finally, it is seen that the freeze-dried dummy variable is also significantly negative. Introduction of the flavorful convenience product did take away from regular consumption.

The principal end product of this regression is the significant Robusta-induced fall in regular coffee consumption. But statistical significance, while confirming the hypothesis that lower quality beans hurt the regular market, does not tell how much it hurt. The preceding chart, by using the statistically unbiased regression coefficients and the historical change in the explanatory variables, sheds additional light on the reasons behind the movements in U.S. per capita regular coffee consumption in each of three readily identifiable periods (Table 4).

The initial drop in per capita regular coffee consumption after World War II is largely attributed to sharply rising real regular coffee prices, which peaked in 1954 after Brazilian production shortfalls. This last year of the period is particularly notable, as it contains a large unexplained drop in consumption in addition to the big predicted drop relative to the higher prices.

A likely contributor to this shift is to be found in the soluble market, where a big jump in per capita consumption indicates that the new product was catching on. At this early stage in the developing soluble market, it would seem that some coffee consumption was being pulled away from the regular market as those coffee drinkers who valued convenience over taste switched to the new product.

After this date, however, it is hypothesized that any additional gains or losses in the spray-dried soluble market occurred in a convenience fringe, where instant coffee was consumed in places it could or would not have been before because of lack of time or space.

The next few years—until 1962—witnessed a largely stagnant situation, as regular consumption held steady and the soluble market edged toward its saturation point. In the regular market, stability was provided by the counteracting forces of falling real prices and the Robusta factor. By 1962 prices had leveled off in real terms to roughly the range they would maintain over the next period, thus allowing the growing Robusta and income/soft drink/life-style factors to depress regular consumption to new lows. In addition—as mentioned above—some regular consumption was replaced beginning in 1969 by freeze-dried coffee, which nevertheless at best was only able to maintain the total soluble market.

The Future for U.S. Coffee Consumption

By using the results of the regression, some of the problems faced by the coffee industry can be
examined. As seen above, regular coffee price variations have had their effect on consumption in the past. This takes on particular importance in view of the general food price increases since 1972. However, as these price rises were spread throughout the food sector, the effect on the coffee consumer may be largely blunted. And, although coffee price rises are of concern to American consumers, they need not be too alarming to processors in view of the inelasticity of coffee demand, which allows them to pass on most of these increases.

It is unlikely that the 5.1 pounds of regular per capita coffee consumption lost from 1946 to 1974 that was attributed in the regression to real price increases was the loss that really worried the industry, though it was certainly missed. It was the additional 6.8 pounds of per capita consumption apparently lost as a result of the combined effects of the Robusta-income/life-style factors. These have been an entirely uncompensated loss to processors and coffee growers. Robusta-related losses since 1954 may total 3 pounds, or 75 percent of the net loss for the period of 4 pounds from all causes. It should be pointed out, however, that a reduction in Robusta roastings by the industry will not necessarily bring back the 3 pounds. The problem the industry faces is that even if the trend of Robusta imports were reversed, the Robusta and life-style induced declines in consumption do more than reflect reductions in consumption by all coffee drinkers; they also are indicative of a largely social process in which young people do not form the coffee habit as they grow up.

This trend can be seen in Table 5, which gives the results of coffee consumption surveys (regular plus soluble) in the 3 benchmark years of the postwar era.

From 1954 to 1962, when overall per capita consumption went up slightly, the older age groups increased consumption under the influence of falling real prices and the convenience of soluble coffee. However, consumption in the formative age groups dropped. Moreover, consumption increases in the older age groups become progressively smaller from the older categories on down, reflecting the infiltration of 1954′s formative consumers into the not-as-established coffee drinkers of 1962.

From 1962 to 1974, consumption fell in all age categories as real prices stabilized. This consumption decline may be attributed to the Robusta factor, combined with the impact of the income/new life- style factor.

Over the 20-year period, only the older groups increased consumption, as formerly middle-aged, established coffee consumers moved into these groups. At the same time, consumption by the younger groups dropped as new coffee consumers failed to materialize in their former numbers.

The essential dilemma for coffee processors is that these young consumers may never be recovered, and will continue to lower per capita consumption for a whole generation as they continue to replace established coffee drinkers in the older age groups.

There is little the coffee industry can do about the income-life style influence. However, the Robusta factor possibly could be used to prevent further losses and to form new consumers for the future. Figures for 1975 show a sharp upturn in per capita consumption coincident with a sharp reduction in the Robusta factor, caused by poor weather and political difficulties in some supplying nations. Although a good proportion of this rise is statistically unexplained (perhaps because of the introduction of the new automatic coffee makers), roughly half is attributed by the regression to this externally imposed curtailment of Robusta imports.

Data Appendix

 All coffee data were assembled from the PanAmerican Coffee Bureau’s 1974 Annual Coffee Statistics and from U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. Price index, income, population, and soft drink price data were obtained up to recent years from the Bureau of the Census 1975 Historical Statistics and the 1975 Statistical Abstract. Recent data were obtained from the Bureau of Economic Analysis monthly Survey of Current Business an its biennial supplement, the 1975 Business Statistics. These last four publications are issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Soft drink consumption data were obtained from the National Soft Drink Association, Washington, D.C.

While a chain coffee store can seemingly be found on every corner of our cities, did you know that we’re far from the coffee consuming heights of years past? The roughly 23 gallons of coffee we consume each year pales in comparison to the whopping 48 gallons we drank in 1946. What happened? And can we really return to the glory of America’s coffee drinking prime?

Jeremy Olshan of MarketWatch has an excellent bit of reporting out today in which he examines the decline of coffee in America, and points to bright spots on the horizon for coffee’s future. In part, his article is based on a stellar 1977 USDA report (well, stellar in its coverage, not of the fact that coffee was at a near-historic low point), which attempted to pinpoint the reasons Americans were drinking less coffee.

That report revealed two notable factors. First, we began adopting different lifestyles and our relationship with coffee changed, from full breakfasts and complete lunches that included a cup of coffee, to quick breaks that featured quick and cool food and beverage items. The second factor was taste. To lower costs, producers began to focus on Robusta beans, the cheaper and more bitter relative of the favored Arabica.

Olshan reports there were other contributing factors, as well, such as the positioning of soft drinks as a healthy alternative and research – though, later refuted – that linked coffee consumption with heart disease, stunted growth and birth defects. There’s also the fact that beverage intake is, as Olshan notes, a zero-sum game. We really can only consume so much liquid in a day, and the proliferation of soft drinks, energy drinks and other beverage alternatives has created greater competition for coffee.

Interestingly, Olshan points to the oft-maligned K-Cup craze as one possible bright spot in the prospective uptick in American coffee. Like it or not, the speed and efficiency of home or office brewing on a Keurig machine may be what appeals to our lifestyle demands. There’s also the growing movement of coffee as a culinary art. Things like single-origin beans, exacting brews that highlight subtle nuance, and a greater overall appreciation of coffee could change our relationship from the commodity model.

The full article is worth a read, and I’ll also dig up the 1977 USDA report for further consideration.

MarketWatch – America’s Coffee Cup Seems Filled to the Rim

Image – Susan Hayward and Bill Williams in Deadline at Dawn (1946)

A recent video on the site, Specialty Coffee: The Pursuit of Deliciousness, offers an up close and behind the scenes exploration of specialty coffee featuring three of the industry’s trendsetting companies: LAMILL Coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee Co. and Handsome Coffee. Founders, roasters and baristas from each provide their perspective on the craft of specialty coffee and the care and preparation that enable something as simple as a coffee bean to become a transformative experience.

You can find other features on the Thrash Lab site, including profiles of butchers, the new wave of barbershops and New York’s pedicab community.

Image from ThrashLab.com