Ooh, I have a good book recommendation on this: [Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeeland). There's a whole chapter on how coffee became ubiquitous.
The coffee break is directly connected with industrialization. One of the [first recorded instance](https://my1053wjlt.com/the-origins-of-the-coffee-break-dates-back-over-100-years/) of a coffee break was 1902 in Buffalo, but the practice really took off during WWII when women replaced men in factories. Factory owners noticed that the women didn't have the same stamina as the young men they replaced. They started asking their employees why they thought that was. They said if they got two 15-minute breaks with coffee, that would refresh them to help them get through their shifts. Coffee had already long been associated with productivity and was ubiquitous in industrializing America, but during WWII, coffee breaks started to be incorporated into employment contracts. Also, coffee was often quite cheap depending on the weather and global politics (attempts to form coffee cartels to manipulate the price weren't particularly successful). There was a debate about whether the 15-minute break was considered free time or employer time (paid or unpaid), but in 1956, the courts ruled that since 15 minutes wasn't a long enough period to leave the work and do anything, it needed to be compensated. Gradually, a paid 15-minute break became incorporated into employment law.
The most popular way to drink coffee in the US during this period was the percolator (though the Chemex did exist). As automatic drip coffee makers became cheaper, employers were able to offer that as a benefit to attract employees and as white collar office work increased, employee schedules became less rigid. That led to a shift where coffee was available to employees at all times rather than just during their designated breaks.
>They started asking their employees why they thought that was.
I wish employers today would do this. I can think of lots more things to ask for. Thanks for the book rec!
Ah, yes, the good ol' """anonymous""" surveys that are *totally anonymous, we swear, also why didn't you fill out the survey* and aren't used at all, most of the time, or are handled in the absolute worst possible way.
I'm not disgruntled, who's disgruntled?
1-Ignore employee input
2- Hire expensive consulting firm
3- consultants ask employees for advice
4- consulting firm offers employee advice to employer and takes all the credit
5- company thanks the consultants
6- CEOs get bonuses for all the money “saved” thanks to the consulting firm
One thing that always gets left out of this story, is that almost all men smoked all day at this time, while it was socially unacceptable for women, so it may not have been the break itself that increased productivity, but just women getting stimulants like the men.
The vacuum coffee maker was very popular in diners.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1L5WwAFrPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1L5WwAFrPE)
Mom left two Silex pots in her hoard so I did a little research.
We recently watched *Woman of the Year* (1942) where Katherine Hepburn tries to make breakfast for the first time.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-Yx1V2q\_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-Yx1V2q_0)
And I’d be willing to bet that the “women not having the same stamina as men” had everything to do with those women having to attend to household and family care responsibilities at home, that their male counterparts did not.
They were mostly young women, but it's possible. It was 8 straight hours without breaks, which I certainly couldn't do today. Someone pointed out that the men likely took cigarette breaks, though these factory owners were very strict. They probably smoked while working.
What a great wormhole to try and go down as I'm getting ready to go to the office and consume my body weight in coffee by 5 pm 🤣🤣
Here is an article I found!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-29/a-brief-history-of-the-office-coffee-break
Coffee helps reduce sleepiness but otherwise really isn't not great for stimulating productivity. You would honestly probably see better results of afternoon coffee breaks were just replaced with a siesta. Especially in more mental professions. Because while it blocks the feeling of sleepiness, your brain still needs the sleep technically and would benefit from it.
Please review our subreddit's rules. Rule 5 is: "Answers must be on-topic. Food history can often lead to discussion of aspects of history/culture/religion etc. that may expand beyond the original question. This is normal, but please try to keep it relevant to the question asked or the answer you are trying to give."
If you go back far enough Americans didn’t drink much coffee but tea. Then during the 19th century coffee became the staple morning beverage. The history of this is fascinating but really references South American export markets growing. Now before coffee could really take off we had to stop drinking cowboy coffee. People basically just added ground coffee like tea to hot water. Each new technology advancement added a new to prepare coffee. Siphon and percolation being the first big innovations. But both these methods make kind of burnt coffee because brewed coffee keeps going through the heating loop. Drip coffee machines were a game changer and made it available for everyone to make “restaurant quality” coffee at home. But ultimately Why do work places all offer coffee. I think work places offer coffee as an amenity because people enjoy it. They would serve yerba matte if we drank that.
My father grew up on cowboy coffee (as well as cowboy beans). While it was an affectation in the 1920s, he knew real cowboys who were much older and carried dried beans and jerky in sacks on their horses
It would not be out of the ordinary for him to be out harvesting whatever, and they cooked up beans, coffee, and someone might shoot a Grouse or pheasant - they’d eat it at the campsite and continue the harvest the next day
As a little kid I became interested in running the chuckwagon on a cattle drive- probably because I understood that but didn’t understand herding cattle
My dad's a Boomer but has always preferred drinking a dark roast coffee and chicory blend. I'm amazed I turned out to quite like coffee, that's one of the biggest scent/flavor mismatch for my young palate!
*it probably helps that he also grew up with a variation of cowboy coffee and we live in the Rockies...
>Then during the 19th century coffee became the staple morning beverage.
So I listened to an edition of In Our Time about coffee (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1) and it explains how the American Civil War was a key driver to spread coffee into everyday American diets.
Both sides provided coffee to their troops, some of them would pretty much insist on coffee breaks during the day. And after the war, soldiers took this habit home with them and started to spread it.
I would recommend this particular episode to pretty much anyone, it's a very interesting listen.
I remember watching a civil war history show. It had a rifle that the butt of the rifle had been hallowed out to fit a coffee grinder in seamlessly. Other geopolitical factors going on at the time coffee was popularized in Britain but after colonization of the Indian subcontinent. tea became ridiculously cheap. The British stopped drinking expensive coffee and started drinking cheap tea. The reverse was true for Americans. Coffee became cheap and tea was expensive.
That coffee grinder sounds fascinating!
I heard that a lot of coffee from that era came from Brazil to America, so I imagine it was probably cheaper based on trade routes?
I don't know how long ago it began, but a famous court case has to do with the close nature of capitalism and coffee.
In 1955, a Denver tie making factory got into the Supreme Court over the coffee break. To make his employees work harder and keep them alert and awake- the owner of Los Wigwam Weaver factory did mandatory coffee breaks. What did he not do? Want to pay them for the time spent drinking the coffee he had made a mandatory part of the day. The S. C. actually sided with the workers for a change, deciding that the company benefitted from the caffeinated work force and thus from the labor of the workers (which included the coffee drinking) and thus had to pay up.
I watched a tasting history episode, great you tube channel btw. They went into how hard it was to get coffee in the civil war and how it became an intense motivator for people, maybe that kicked off the trend towards it being cemented in our work life.
I'm trying to remember the book they talked about on public radio, but in the Midwest the coffee break is generally attributed to the love Scandinavians have for the beverage, and the greater availability in the late 19th century for immigrants who came to the upper Midwest.
Stoughton, WI claims the first coffee break in 1880. Norwegian women who did seasonal tobacco work were allowed to run home at lunch to deal with children and starting dinner. Coffee breaks were more common to Swedes and Norwegians.
I’m not sure when it became a civilian workplace staple, but it’s been enough of an expected part of the American diet that it’s been a part of military rations since at least the civil war.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/coffee-and-civil-war-soldier#:~:text=Trade%20continued%20throughout%20the%20North,that%20they%20looked%20forward%20to.
About the same time as the cigarette really took off, the 1930s. Prior to the cigarette, cigars were the norm.
The cigarette was almost exactly enough tobacco to last the 15 minutes of an employee break. A cigar was way too much.
About the time labor laws were allowing 15 minutes of breaks per every 4 hours, coffee and cigs in work breaks really became the norm. I'm pretty sure the owners of the factories realized that providing coffee to their workers tended to pay for itself in added productivity. Same with allowing them to have a smoke on break.
Before drips there were percolators.
A lot of places up until the 70's had cafeterias where the employees and sometimes customers could go to have coffee and food.
My husband’s best friend made a very good living by having coffee routes in industrial parks. He delivered coffee, milk, creamer, stirrers, napkins styrofoam cups, sugar and sugar substitutes in 1980s.. He expanded into delivering snacks as well - danishes, muffins, bagels. Business owners paid him to deliver every day. He inherited a few coffee routes from his father who started it in 1960s. He expanded it and built in into a pretty large fleet once suburbs began building tall office buildings with multiple businesses in them.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. The Boston Tea Party was an epic event after which Americans shifted to drinking coffee because continuing to support the British tea industry would seem un-patriotic.
I don't know how big companies furnish employee coffee nowadays. I worked for a large law firm and they used Bunns that were connected directly to a water line so all we had to do was dump the grounds, put in a new filter and new bag of coffee and flip the on switch. We also had tea and instant soups.
It was on its way earlier than this, but 1774 was certainly an important year for that process. After the Sons of Libery dumped a couple million dollars in today's money worth of tea into the harbor, the coffee-vs-tea issue became political. Well, it already was, but this accelerated it. Tea meant you were a Loyalist or Tory; coffee meant you were a Son of Liberty, pro-independence.
And drip coffee makers date from 1800 or so.
People didn't make their own coffee - you had women who made the coffee and brought it around.
England kept an equivalent tradition for tea for quite a while - tea ladies were ubiquitous until then and there still are a few places that have them.
The coffee break was so ingrained in office culture that it made it to Broadway in 1961's musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying", winner of the Pulitzer Prize and seven Tony awards.
The song "coffee break" is a major comic moment, around the lack of coffee.
Ooh, I have a good book recommendation on this: [Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeeland). There's a whole chapter on how coffee became ubiquitous. The coffee break is directly connected with industrialization. One of the [first recorded instance](https://my1053wjlt.com/the-origins-of-the-coffee-break-dates-back-over-100-years/) of a coffee break was 1902 in Buffalo, but the practice really took off during WWII when women replaced men in factories. Factory owners noticed that the women didn't have the same stamina as the young men they replaced. They started asking their employees why they thought that was. They said if they got two 15-minute breaks with coffee, that would refresh them to help them get through their shifts. Coffee had already long been associated with productivity and was ubiquitous in industrializing America, but during WWII, coffee breaks started to be incorporated into employment contracts. Also, coffee was often quite cheap depending on the weather and global politics (attempts to form coffee cartels to manipulate the price weren't particularly successful). There was a debate about whether the 15-minute break was considered free time or employer time (paid or unpaid), but in 1956, the courts ruled that since 15 minutes wasn't a long enough period to leave the work and do anything, it needed to be compensated. Gradually, a paid 15-minute break became incorporated into employment law. The most popular way to drink coffee in the US during this period was the percolator (though the Chemex did exist). As automatic drip coffee makers became cheaper, employers were able to offer that as a benefit to attract employees and as white collar office work increased, employee schedules became less rigid. That led to a shift where coffee was available to employees at all times rather than just during their designated breaks.
>They started asking their employees why they thought that was. I wish employers today would do this. I can think of lots more things to ask for. Thanks for the book rec!
My employer has a survey every year. They don't necessarily listen to the results, though.
Ah, yes, the good ol' """anonymous""" surveys that are *totally anonymous, we swear, also why didn't you fill out the survey* and aren't used at all, most of the time, or are handled in the absolute worst possible way. I'm not disgruntled, who's disgruntled?
Our office hires an outside party, fwiw
1-Ignore employee input 2- Hire expensive consulting firm 3- consultants ask employees for advice 4- consulting firm offers employee advice to employer and takes all the credit 5- company thanks the consultants 6- CEOs get bonuses for all the money “saved” thanks to the consulting firm
In our case, employees complained about the firm and they got fired
One thing that always gets left out of this story, is that almost all men smoked all day at this time, while it was socially unacceptable for women, so it may not have been the break itself that increased productivity, but just women getting stimulants like the men.
The vacuum coffee maker was very popular in diners. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1L5WwAFrPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1L5WwAFrPE) Mom left two Silex pots in her hoard so I did a little research. We recently watched *Woman of the Year* (1942) where Katherine Hepburn tries to make breakfast for the first time. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-Yx1V2q\_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf-Yx1V2q_0)
And I’d be willing to bet that the “women not having the same stamina as men” had everything to do with those women having to attend to household and family care responsibilities at home, that their male counterparts did not.
They were mostly young women, but it's possible. It was 8 straight hours without breaks, which I certainly couldn't do today. Someone pointed out that the men likely took cigarette breaks, though these factory owners were very strict. They probably smoked while working.
Young women still had responsibilities and expectations at home. They often had to care for parents, younger siblings etc, and do laundry etc.
The men were living terrible lives in trench war, and dying or getting horrible wounds.
What a great wormhole to try and go down as I'm getting ready to go to the office and consume my body weight in coffee by 5 pm 🤣🤣 Here is an article I found! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-29/a-brief-history-of-the-office-coffee-break
[удалено]
Coffee helps reduce sleepiness but otherwise really isn't not great for stimulating productivity. You would honestly probably see better results of afternoon coffee breaks were just replaced with a siesta. Especially in more mental professions. Because while it blocks the feeling of sleepiness, your brain still needs the sleep technically and would benefit from it.
I am all for nap breaks at work, we should make this a social movement
Tons of other countries do it.
I've been wondering how many still do? When I was in Spain decades ago, they had siesta, but I don't know if that's still the case.
[Tons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta)
So I just put my Amazon scanning devise down on the factory floor and nap?
I am only in favor if I'm getting PAID my hourly rate for it.
One of the chief benefits of retirement has been my afternoon nap.
And in my personal case I never feel any effect from coffee -- good, bad or otherwise.
Why not just put the coke back in the cola.
Please review our subreddit's rules. Rule 5 is: "Answers must be on-topic. Food history can often lead to discussion of aspects of history/culture/religion etc. that may expand beyond the original question. This is normal, but please try to keep it relevant to the question asked or the answer you are trying to give."
Don't forget coffee is cheap per person to provide too
If you go back far enough Americans didn’t drink much coffee but tea. Then during the 19th century coffee became the staple morning beverage. The history of this is fascinating but really references South American export markets growing. Now before coffee could really take off we had to stop drinking cowboy coffee. People basically just added ground coffee like tea to hot water. Each new technology advancement added a new to prepare coffee. Siphon and percolation being the first big innovations. But both these methods make kind of burnt coffee because brewed coffee keeps going through the heating loop. Drip coffee machines were a game changer and made it available for everyone to make “restaurant quality” coffee at home. But ultimately Why do work places all offer coffee. I think work places offer coffee as an amenity because people enjoy it. They would serve yerba matte if we drank that.
My father grew up on cowboy coffee (as well as cowboy beans). While it was an affectation in the 1920s, he knew real cowboys who were much older and carried dried beans and jerky in sacks on their horses It would not be out of the ordinary for him to be out harvesting whatever, and they cooked up beans, coffee, and someone might shoot a Grouse or pheasant - they’d eat it at the campsite and continue the harvest the next day As a little kid I became interested in running the chuckwagon on a cattle drive- probably because I understood that but didn’t understand herding cattle
My dad's a Boomer but has always preferred drinking a dark roast coffee and chicory blend. I'm amazed I turned out to quite like coffee, that's one of the biggest scent/flavor mismatch for my young palate! *it probably helps that he also grew up with a variation of cowboy coffee and we live in the Rockies...
>Then during the 19th century coffee became the staple morning beverage. So I listened to an edition of In Our Time about coffee (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1) and it explains how the American Civil War was a key driver to spread coffee into everyday American diets. Both sides provided coffee to their troops, some of them would pretty much insist on coffee breaks during the day. And after the war, soldiers took this habit home with them and started to spread it. I would recommend this particular episode to pretty much anyone, it's a very interesting listen.
I remember watching a civil war history show. It had a rifle that the butt of the rifle had been hallowed out to fit a coffee grinder in seamlessly. Other geopolitical factors going on at the time coffee was popularized in Britain but after colonization of the Indian subcontinent. tea became ridiculously cheap. The British stopped drinking expensive coffee and started drinking cheap tea. The reverse was true for Americans. Coffee became cheap and tea was expensive.
That coffee grinder sounds fascinating! I heard that a lot of coffee from that era came from Brazil to America, so I imagine it was probably cheaper based on trade routes?
Yeah exactly the proximity and South America was industrializing quickly.
My work places have never offered free coffee. Staff pays into a coffee club.
I don't know how long ago it began, but a famous court case has to do with the close nature of capitalism and coffee. In 1955, a Denver tie making factory got into the Supreme Court over the coffee break. To make his employees work harder and keep them alert and awake- the owner of Los Wigwam Weaver factory did mandatory coffee breaks. What did he not do? Want to pay them for the time spent drinking the coffee he had made a mandatory part of the day. The S. C. actually sided with the workers for a change, deciding that the company benefitted from the caffeinated work force and thus from the labor of the workers (which included the coffee drinking) and thus had to pay up.
What if one of his employees practiced a religion that forbids coffee?
A valid question but one I don’t have an answer to
WW2. Came with military culture. But coffee was a standard beverage offering from the 1700's. Read the Wikipedia. It's fascinating.
It was always free for the last 40 years of my career. Teabags were also available.
The best perk of working at a site with a warehouse attached. There was fresh coffee available 24x7.
I watched a tasting history episode, great you tube channel btw. They went into how hard it was to get coffee in the civil war and how it became an intense motivator for people, maybe that kicked off the trend towards it being cemented in our work life.
I'm trying to remember the book they talked about on public radio, but in the Midwest the coffee break is generally attributed to the love Scandinavians have for the beverage, and the greater availability in the late 19th century for immigrants who came to the upper Midwest. Stoughton, WI claims the first coffee break in 1880. Norwegian women who did seasonal tobacco work were allowed to run home at lunch to deal with children and starting dinner. Coffee breaks were more common to Swedes and Norwegians.
I’ll pass on the egg coffee, though
I’m not sure when it became a civilian workplace staple, but it’s been enough of an expected part of the American diet that it’s been a part of military rations since at least the civil war. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/coffee-and-civil-war-soldier#:~:text=Trade%20continued%20throughout%20the%20North,that%20they%20looked%20forward%20to.
About the same time as the cigarette really took off, the 1930s. Prior to the cigarette, cigars were the norm. The cigarette was almost exactly enough tobacco to last the 15 minutes of an employee break. A cigar was way too much. About the time labor laws were allowing 15 minutes of breaks per every 4 hours, coffee and cigs in work breaks really became the norm. I'm pretty sure the owners of the factories realized that providing coffee to their workers tended to pay for itself in added productivity. Same with allowing them to have a smoke on break.
Probably from the moment it became easy to make coffee in an office setting, in the early 20th century.
Before drips there were percolators. A lot of places up until the 70's had cafeterias where the employees and sometimes customers could go to have coffee and food.
My husband’s best friend made a very good living by having coffee routes in industrial parks. He delivered coffee, milk, creamer, stirrers, napkins styrofoam cups, sugar and sugar substitutes in 1980s.. He expanded into delivering snacks as well - danishes, muffins, bagels. Business owners paid him to deliver every day. He inherited a few coffee routes from his father who started it in 1960s. He expanded it and built in into a pretty large fleet once suburbs began building tall office buildings with multiple businesses in them.
[удалено]
Not sure why this is being downvoted. The Boston Tea Party was an epic event after which Americans shifted to drinking coffee because continuing to support the British tea industry would seem un-patriotic.
When employers realized coffee is a cheap drug that keeps employees energized.
When we stopped being able.to drink alcohol and smoke at work.
I don't know how big companies furnish employee coffee nowadays. I worked for a large law firm and they used Bunns that were connected directly to a water line so all we had to do was dump the grounds, put in a new filter and new bag of coffee and flip the on switch. We also had tea and instant soups.
Just big Keurig-like machines now
Or the giant super automatics espresso ones.
It was on its way earlier than this, but 1774 was certainly an important year for that process. After the Sons of Libery dumped a couple million dollars in today's money worth of tea into the harbor, the coffee-vs-tea issue became political. Well, it already was, but this accelerated it. Tea meant you were a Loyalist or Tory; coffee meant you were a Son of Liberty, pro-independence. And drip coffee makers date from 1800 or so. People didn't make their own coffee - you had women who made the coffee and brought it around. England kept an equivalent tradition for tea for quite a while - tea ladies were ubiquitous until then and there still are a few places that have them.
The coffee break was so ingrained in office culture that it made it to Broadway in 1961's musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying", winner of the Pulitzer Prize and seven Tony awards. The song "coffee break" is a major comic moment, around the lack of coffee.