Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
I will follow up on your links to see if they contain any information I find persuasive.
The fact that your name is gwern means that I find your paragraphs far more persuasive than I would if I didn’t see the name on them.
Yes, there have always been plenty of sumgglers avoiding taxes by smuggling things into the EEUU. I know of this having been true of every era I know well and have no reason to doubt that it’s true about the rest.
But, in my experience… Most history books cite history books citing history books, building up their facts along the way. I’m going to say that the primary sources I’m most familiar with strongly indicate to me that coffee culture in the United States has more to do with the Revolutionary War than most history books say. Also, the anti-drug lobby is the anti-caffeine lobby which is the anti-alcohol lobby. They came for our pot. Then they came for our tobacco. We didn’t let them get the booze. And they’re not getting the caffeine. And we’re getting back our pot and our tobacco.
Lots of things tip together at inflection points in history. I would guess that the popularity of coffee and all of the derivatives of that graph rose steeply as part of the American Revolution. Because. The universe is causal. And the EEUU revolution really is the point in history that coffee seems to have become intertwined with the cause of the avant garde.
I drank a lot of green tea and a lot of raspberry tea growing up in the 90s. And in my experience, all home-made Iced Tea from the 90s was Lipton, but I’m not sure that there was no Lipton Green Tea that went into the Iced Tea I most remember.
Also, metrics are radically different depending on whether you sort by price or by weight or by volume, etc. It’s far easier to spend a lot of money on a few ounces of green tea than it is on most others, and when drinking matcha, I typically drink more weight of tea than I do with any other variety of tea. So… by dollars, I’d expect green tea to have been the most imported tea in the Americas at a time when it was responsible for about 1⁄200 cups of tea. Assuming my spending per cup matches reasonably with other people’s.
Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
I will follow up on your links to see if they contain any information I find persuasive.
The fact that your name is gwern means that I find your paragraphs far more persuasive than I would if I didn’t see the name on them.
Yes, there have always been plenty of sumgglers avoiding taxes by smuggling things into the EEUU. I know of this having been true of every era I know well and have no reason to doubt that it’s true about the rest.
But, in my experience… Most history books cite history books citing history books, building up their facts along the way. I’m going to say that the primary sources I’m most familiar with strongly indicate to me that coffee culture in the United States has more to do with the Revolutionary War than most history books say. Also, the anti-drug lobby is the anti-caffeine lobby which is the anti-alcohol lobby. They came for our pot. Then they came for our tobacco. We didn’t let them get the booze. And they’re not getting the caffeine. And we’re getting back our pot and our tobacco.
Lots of things tip together at inflection points in history. I would guess that the popularity of coffee and all of the derivatives of that graph rose steeply as part of the American Revolution. Because. The universe is causal. And the EEUU revolution really is the point in history that coffee seems to have become intertwined with the cause of the avant garde.
I drank a lot of green tea and a lot of raspberry tea growing up in the 90s. And in my experience, all home-made Iced Tea from the 90s was Lipton, but I’m not sure that there was no Lipton Green Tea that went into the Iced Tea I most remember.
Also, metrics are radically different depending on whether you sort by price or by weight or by volume, etc. It’s far easier to spend a lot of money on a few ounces of green tea than it is on most others, and when drinking matcha, I typically drink more weight of tea than I do with any other variety of tea. So… by dollars, I’d expect green tea to have been the most imported tea in the Americas at a time when it was responsible for about 1⁄200 cups of tea. Assuming my spending per cup matches reasonably with other people’s.