Time for an Arbuckles' Break

The Coffee that Won the West

The Coffee that Won the West" actually came from the East coast.

And no, the company that roasted and packaged the coffee beans that helped fuel Manifest Destiny did not have a nine-letter name beginning with "S." (Hint: Starbucks.) The brand that helped western types get up in the morning and stay at it during the day and even into the night was Arbuckles'. Not only did the coffee put a little extra trot in your giddy up, it tasted good, too.

Coffee had been around a long time before Arbuckles' headed west, but with one grandee latte difference: Merchants sold green coffee beans only. A consumer had to do his or her own roasting. After a long, hard day in the saddle or bouncing around on a non-cushioned wagon seat, someone wanting a cup or two or three of Joe had to roast coffee beans in a skillet over the campfire (or, if indoors, over a wood-burning stove). Of course, before brewing a pot, the roasted beans had to be ground.

Not only did all that require a fair amount of effort, roasting coffee beans is much more exacting than it sounds. Too much heat for too long left your coffee tasting just like, well, burned coffee. By the mid-19th century, some big city coffee merchants did offer roasted beans, but their products' freshness was fleeting. Essentially, only city dwellers had a shot at a decent cup of coffee they didn't have to build from scratch. Not only that, in the South during the Civil War, coffee of any kind was as scarce as Confederates who had voted for Lincoln.

The end of that bloody sectional conflict was a good thing for the United States. It also saw a major breakthrough in the coffee business. About the time fighting stopped, Pittsburgh grocers John and Charles Arbuckle came up with an idea, doubtless after enjoying a strong cup of coffee, that changed everything for coffee sellers and coffee consumers. In 1868, the Scottish-born brothers Arbuckle--already skilled in properly roasting coffee beans--patented a process for covering roasted beans with a glaze made of egg and sugar. That, they had discovered, kept the beans flavorful, fresh and aromatic.

They began selling their new product in air-tight, one-pound Manila paper packages under the brand name of Arbuckles' Ariosa Coffee. Each package bore a yellow label with the word "Arbuckles'" in large red type. Below that was their trademark, a flying angel (who better to deliver coffee to a caffeine-needing populace?). Beneath the trademark, in a red-bordered box were the words "Ariosa Coffee" in black type.

(A note on nomenclature. "Ariosa" is a created name with "A" standing for Arbuckles' while 'rio" and "sa" refer to the company's primary coffee bean sources, the Brazilian ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos. Also, Arbuckles' always has had that apostrophe after it.)

The new product proved an immediate success. It smelled good, it tasted good and it was strong. The old Western joke is that when brewing a pot of cowboy coffee made with Arbuckles', the only way someone could tell whether it was fit to drink was to toss in a horseshoe. If the horseshoe sank to the bottom of the pot, the coffee wasn't ready yet. "The cook firmly believed there is no such thing as strong coffee but only weak people," writer-historian Edward Everett Dale wrote of one chuck wagon boss.

Especially in the rapidly settling west, Arbuckles' became a synonym for coffee. Shipped in strong wooden crates, Arbuckles' spread nation-wide, particularly across the wild west.

The crates, made of Maine fir and holding 50 or 100 packages each, became almost as popular as the coffee they contained. Seldom simply discarded, the crates usually ended up being taken apart for use as interior paneling, shelves, storage boxes, baby cradles, coffins, wagon seats and more. If nothing else, they made good firewood. Accordingly, today vintage Arbuckles' boxes are pretty rare and costly when they do show up on the market.

PR types today speak of "branding" a product, but when the Arbuckle men were building their business, branding was what cattlemen did to identify their stock. Even so, the two brothers apparently had no trouble grasping the value of having a name brand. Not only did they manufacture good coffee, they had a genius for marketing long before that word would take on its present meaning. The back of their coffee bags featured a one-cent coupon that could be accumulated and spent on assorted products that back then were categorized as "notions." A cowboy who went to the effort of cutting and saving coupons could redeem them for handkerchiefs, razors, guns and even wedding rings. Each coupon was worth one cent.

Not only that, as today's TV marketers would say, each package of Arbuckles' included a stick of peppermint candy. Chuck wagon cooks learned to use the candy as an inducement to get some cowpoke to grind the coffee. The candy apparently was tasty enough to trigger competition for the "right" to take on the extra work of turning the crank on the coffee grinder, truly a sweet deal for a cook who had no shortage of other chores needing his attention.

In the 1880s, the Arbuckle brothers moved their company to Brooklyn, where at the high point of their business they operated 85 roasting ovens in two large plants. They also had a five-story warehouse at 25 Jay Street that still stands. An advertising trade card they produced during that decade said the company was roasting 839,972 pounds of coffee a day. That, the card went on, "gives proof that for STRENGHT, PURITY and DELICOUSNESS it has no equal."

Following the Civil War, the U.S. enjoyed more than three decades of peace (not counting the Indian wars in the West) but in the early 1890s, war of another sort broke out for the Arbuckles. When Arbuckles', by that time the country's largest coffee company, decided to go into the sugar refining business, the nation's largest sugar company fired back by going into the coffee business. That triggered a trade war that while great for the consumer cost both competitors millions of dollars before they came to a legal agreement in 1900.

Despite its huge popularity, Arbuckles' did not survive the Great Depression. But in the late 1970s, Pennsylvanian Denney Willis acquired the Arbuckles' brand and began roasting and selling coffee marketed under that famous name. He and his wife Pat eventually relocated to Tucson, where the couple and their son are keeping the brand alive.

In 1994, El Paso professor and writer Francis L. Fugate wrote a book on the history of Arbuckles'. Published by Texas Western Press, the now out-of-print 233-page book was Fugate's final work. In fact, he died sitting in front of his desktop computer, putting the finishing touches on his manuscript.

One of the last things he must have typed was this refrain from an old cowboy song, which does a good job of summing up Arbuckles' mystique:

"Under the star-studded canopy vast

Arbuckles' Coffee and comfort at last,

Bacon that sizzles and crisps in the pan,

After the roundup smells good to a man.

Tales of the ranchman and rustlers retold,

Over the pipes as embers grow cold;

These are the tunes that memories play,

So make me a cowboy again for a day.

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