![]() ![]() Holbrook, head of the coffee branch of the Subsistence Department, considered instant coffee instrumental in the face of chemical weapons : "The use of mustard gas by the Germans made it one of the most important articles of subsistence used by the army," he explained to the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in 1919. In a letter from the front that Pendergrast quotes, a soldier wrote: "There is one gentlemen I am going to look up first after I get through helping whip the Kaiser, and that is George Washington, of Brooklyn, the soldiers' friend." Soldiers stirred it into hot water, gulped from tin mugs, and called it "a cup of George," after the company's founder - whose name was apparently familiar to at least some of them. Soluble coffee was notably used on the front lines. "After trying to put it up in sticks, tablets, capsules and other forms," noted William Ukers in his authoritative All About Coffee, "it was determined that the best method was to pack it in envelopes." Each held a quarter ounce. By October 1918, just before the war's end, Uncle Sam was trying to get 37,000 pounds a day of the powder - far above the entire national daily output of 6,000 pounds, according to Mark Pendergrast's coffee history, Uncommon Grounds. military snapped up all the instant coffee it could. ![]() "They'd fill a hollowed space within the carbine's stock with coffee beans, grind it up, dump it out and cook coffee that way."Ĭompeting products were hitting the market when demand for soluble coffee skyrocketed with the American entry into the Great War in 1917. "Some Union soldiers got rifles with a mechanical grinder with a hand crank built into the buttstock," he told NPR. During the Civil War, Union soldiers received around 36 pounds of coffee a year, according to Jon Grinspan, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. troops had long looked toward coffee as a small source of salvation amid the hell of war. A postwar review of the military's coffee supply concurred, stating that it "restored courage and strength" and "kept up the morale." "Coffee was as important as beef and bread," a high-ranking Army official concluded after the war. One thing they couldn't do without? Coffee. By late June, American infantry troops began arriving in Europe. declared war on Germany and formally entered World War I. During World War I, instant coffee was a key provision for soldiers on the front. American servicemen enjoy a hot cup of coffee at a Salvation Army hut in New York, circa 1918. ![]()
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