1920s References in Speakeasy Dead: Coffee

1922 (from vintageadbrowser.com)

 

I was planning to blog about coffee in the 1920s. It had been popular forever, sure. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s parents brewed it over their campfire. But had modern changes swept the land? How were beans roasted? Ground? Brewed? My extensive 15-minute sweep of the internet left me with a few unanswered questions.

 

 

Maxwell House was going strong in the 1920s, for example, and was delivering canned, roasted wake-up juice to a sleepy American public. But was this stuff ground or in beans? Ground, probably, but it’s hard to tell from the ads.

Maxwell House Coffee Ad Schooner “Blossom” Art (1924) (from vintageadbrowser.com)

Once the stuff was out of the cans, how was it brewed? A lot of people still boiled water and brewed coffee on their wood- or (increasingly) gas-fired stoves.

But some modern households had adopted the electric percolator, screwed (or later plugged) into those handy outlets that were created by adding wires along the surface of walls. Don’t worry kids. Most of the time, those wires were insulated.

But while the electrical wiring might be iffy by today’s standards, they knew how to serve and drink coffee in style.

Eric Magnussen, 1927