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There are a few different versions floating around about what happened when the Folger brothers arrived in San Francisco in the spring of 1850 (and even about the following 20 years). We assume that James and his brother, Henry, are likely the James and Henry Folger listed in an 1850 San Francisco directory as living at Pacific and Powell, an intersection that still exists. In the directory, James is listed as being a “mason.” James had learned carpentry while helping rebuild his father’s business after a fire on Nantucket, and his first job in California, at age 14, was to help William H. Bovee build a coffee plant, which was named “Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mill,” but had no steam-run anything, despite the name. The roasters were cranked by hand.

Throughout its 200 year history on the islands, coffee has had its ups and downs. Once California became a state, imports from Hawaii were subject to tariff, a brutal five cents a pound for coffee in 1864, according to reports by Twain. When Hawaii was annexed by the U.S. in 1898, the tariff went away, but the world coffee market collapsed that same year. Coffee covered over 6,000 acres at the time, much of it on large plantations. By the turn of the century, coffee land was being broken down into smaller farms. By 1910, eighty percent of Kona coffee was grown on small family farms and by 1922, coffee farms could only be found in Kona.

He won the part, only it wasn’t a part it was a role, the persona of a Colombian coffee farmer. Over the next 10 years, Duval would help create one of the most enduring advertising characters in history, Juan Valdez.

I’m not sure I know what this means, that over the last 100 years the average lifespan of a company has shrunk from 67 years to 15 years. But I think I know that the “average” coffee roasting company from “yesteryear” might be interesting to look at.

He would not be surprised to discover that his goats are part of his story but he would be very surprised to find that the berry from the bush would one day become so important that we would need a legend, true or not true or some comical combination of both, as a marker in time and space to which we could point and claim lineage of a sort. Beginnings are so important to us...

Not many of us, especially in the United States, can claim to live on land occupied by our ancestors for thousands of years. Although the Mam were at times forced into slavery by Aztecs (in part, because they were such good farmers, especially of cocoa, which Aztecs used as currency), they had their own kingdom, the capital city being Zaculeu, just outside of the present-day city of Huehuetenango where it is now a tourist destination. Although the Mam language is one of the most commonly spoken among Maya people in Huehuetenango, the region is as linguistically diverse as it is culturally unified.

I want to think this is George Peppard with John Wayne and he’s saying “I agree, and I love it when a plan comes together,” but the movie Trouble Along the Way was made in 1953 and George Peppard was not working as a professional actor until 1956. He did work with John Wayne in How the West was Won in 1962. But who knows. Peppard would have been 25 when this photo was taken and he was an aspiring actor … and it really looks like George Peppard.

Patent drawing of Burns original roaster, December 1864 issue of Scientific American. Image: Internet Archive used under Creative Commons. I don’t know what the chances are, the statistical likelihood, but...