1950s/1960s: What was it about coffee?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m binge-watching “The Dick Van Dyke Show” from the 1960s, and one thing that is striking me is the characters seem to be always drinking coffee at what I would consider odd hours of the day. It’s late at night after a party, maybe about 11 pm, and Laura is offering coffee, and people are drinking it. After dinner, there’s always coffee. Somebody drops by, there’s always coffee.

My parents subscribed to this “always coffee” sentiment, which was fine in the mornings and afternoons when I visited, but I found that coffee after 6 pm meant that I could not sleep that night. Saying “No thanks” did not work with them, so I got stuck with having to drink coffee anyway (“Spoons, what’s wrong? Don’t you like your coffee?”) just to shut them up. And I spent many sleepless nights, because I got tired of fighting, “A gentleman always has coffee after meals, Spoons.” Yeah, well when that gentleman has to get to work in the morning, and makes that clear to the hostess, and has a few cups of coffee forced upon him, because you simply cannot finish a meal without coffee, and those cups of coffee are causing him to be sleepless and late for work …

Never mind. Why did hosts, such as on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s have coffee available at all hours? And why were they, like my parents, so insistent that people drink it at all hours?

Did nobody sleep back then?

2

Coffee doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Some folks can sleep just fine after having coffee. I’m like that. Back in the day, I used to drink coffee all the time at work. One employer even encouraged this by providing a constant supply of free coffee.

As to why everyone was always drinking it, I guess it was just a prevalent social custom at the time. On a family show like Dick Van Dyke, it certainly projected a cleaner image than drinking alcohol.

3

I always thought that was because of sponsors requiring it, same as the prevalence of smoking in the older shows and movies.

4

That may have been a factor, too. The major sponsors of the show were Procter & Gamble and, for a time, Kent cigarettes. P&G no longer sells coffee AFAIK but back in the day they owned both the Folgers and Millstone brands. Folgers was the biggie. They sold it to J.M. Smucker in 2008 for about $3 billion.

5

Because they couldn’t show people drinking high balls all day, which is actually what people did.

6

As the firstborn of 5, I became the designated babysitter when my folks went out. One of my duties was to have coffee ready for them when they got home, usually after 11. This was in the 60s before they switched to decaf.

I find it interesting that neither I nor any of my siblings (and for that matter, my husband and his siblings) are coffee drinkers. I’ve tried it a few times and it just doesn’t appeal. My caffeine of choice is Diet Coke, but I won’t drink it past noonish, lest I be awake half the night.

7

Coffee cups were smaller in those days. Only 6 ounces. A fraction of a mug.

8

My mother brewed after-dinner coffee in a percolator-- electric, not stove-top, so it got pretty hot-- that my parents got as a wedding gift, and served it in demitasse cups.

The percolated coffee (as brewed by my mother) had a very full flavor that was not as bitter as drip coffee, and frankly, since that percolator gave up the ghost around the year 2000 (an impressive life span, really; my parents were married in 1963-- but my mother hauled the thing out only for guests-- it was programmable auto-drip for ordinary days), and I have not had anything that compares to it, not even from a restaurant or Starbucks.

Anyway, I’ve a feeling that it didn’t have as much caffeine by volume as drip coffee. Caffeine is very bitter, which is why, to me, it tasted a lot better.

I used the percolator just a few times in my life, but you have a lot of control over what the coffee tastes like because you can control the temperature of the water and the time the coffee percolates, as well as the amount of water and grounds. With drip, you control just the last two.

Using a percolator was a special skill. If you remember the commercials where some people just couldn’t make coffee, what they couldn’t do was use a percolator-- well, and as it turned out, weren’t buying Folger’s, or whatever. But some people were great with percolators, and some were not. I imagine people good with controlling the flavor could control the caffeine content somewhat as well.

Then, there were the demitasse cups. They hold only 6ozs. They are in my kitchen now, and I just measured. The regular breakfast cups hold 8 ozs. My mugs hold 12 - 20 ozs, with 16 being typical.

There are 2 pots with the dishes; my mother decanted the percolated coffee into one, and made tea in the other (the pots looked different, and it was always clear to everyone which was tea and which was coffee without being told).

People served themselves what they wanted, and could pour just a very little, or could pour maybe 4ozs leaving room for cream & sugar. But if they wanted more than 6ozs, they needed a second cup.

Culture was different then, and so were laws. (My parents’ peak dinner party years were about 1978-1982, but the bell curve extended from 1964 to about a year before my father died in 1998-- come to think of it, it was more of a parabola..) They started around 5:30 with mixed drinks, hors d’oeuvres & nuts (the nuts were extremely important, for some reason) in the living room. My parents didn’t smoke, but they put out ashtrays.

There was wine at dinner. Usually about a bottle per 3 people.

I was occasionally at these dinner parties as a teenager. I’d fill a seat if there was a last-minute cancellation, but those were rare.

There were no designated drivers, and everyone was driving home. No one was driving far, but still, they might have all liked a small shot of caffeine for the road that wasn’t enough to keep them awake all night after being social for hours, having a big meal, a mixed drink, and a few glasses of wine. Just enough to perk them up for the drive home.

For all I know, that was the reason for the coffee custom in the first place.

I think less alcohol is served at gatherings to begin with-- and beer is more common than mixed drinks. Sit-down, suit & tie dinner parties aren’t so common, designated drivers are VERY common, and so is taking an Uber. Calling a cab to go home from a dinner party because you’d had a few glasses of wine with a big meal over several hours would have been bizarre in 1978.

Also, my parents weekday dinner parties used to break up around 10pm. People arrived 5:30 - 6:30, dinner began around 7pm, dessert was around 8:30, and people started leaving at 10.

Weekday nonetheless, a lot of parties will go on until midnight now. A small coffee at 9:30 is a lot different from a small coffee at 11:45.
:

9

I was born in 1960. Whenever my parents hosted a dinner party it almost always lasted until midnight and included card playing and television watching. Alcohol drinking was done but not heavily by anyone.

Around 11 or so a snack was served and my mother did indeed percolate (the worst way to make coffee, BTW) a pot of coffee and everyone except my Pop drank it (he didn’t drink coffee). Then around 12 people started leaving. I and my siblings were either in bed or sound asleep on the living room floor along with the children of the guests.

This scene happened numerous times during my childhood all the way until Pop died in the early 90’s.

Just part of that generation I guess. Dinner parties my wife and I have hosted are done and over by 8. Coffee or no.

10

My mother was a coffee fiend, totally addicted to the stuff. She drank a pot of coffee before even leaving for work, then imbibed all day at work. I don’t recall her drinking it in the evening, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. As noted above, it was just something people did after meals back then; it was expected as part of entertaining and likely a sign of a higher class of living.

I used to drink a lot of it, black, when I was in the Navy. There was always a 42 cup urn of the stuff somewhere nearby. It was pretty vile, as nobody ever cleaned the pot, but it was a habit, along with cigarettes.

Nowadays, I have one mug in the morning and that’s it. It’s a triple shot and cut with cream and sugar.

11

People drank coffee morning, noon and night back then. My parents did. And since I retired a few years ago, I find myself doing it too. For some odd reason, coffee doesn’t act as a stimulant for me except first thing in the morning. After that it seems to have the opposite effect.

12

I don’t actually remember this from TV - but was there always dessert involved? My family did not eat dessert on a daily basis in the 60s and 70s, but if there was dessert, even an hour or so after dinner was finished, there was coffee. Aunts/uncles dropped by in the evening after dinner - they brought cake and the host made coffee. And of course, the cups I get at a restaurant with dessert (which were the everyday cups at home in the past ) are much smaller than the mugs I use for breakfast.

Also, I think there was just a culture of adults drinking coffee with meals that doesn’t exist anymore - I remember working in fast-food restaurants in the 80s and it was very common for people of a certain age to have a coffee with their burger and I remember books and movies from the 50s and 60s where people ordered coffee with a “hamburger sandwich” or a steak dinner.

13

When I went to my first duty station in the Navy I did not know how to operate the urn.

I opened the top of the urn and deposited a random amount of fresh coffee on top of the wet mess of used grounds already sitting there in an equally wet filter.

I was not sure if I had to remove it.

Anyways, in my mind I figured it would just give things some extra kick.

One of the senior chiefs took a cup and spat a mouthful out right on the floor demanding to know who made the coffee.

I was thus educated on urn coffee preparation.

I have been a coffee drinker for most of my life.

My parents had both a percolator and, at some point, Mr. Coffee machines in the 1960s.

We also had instant.

My father worked all three shifts at a local steel mill so coffee needed to be available at all times.

For the coming home and the going back out.

No work lunch was packed without a thermos of coffee.

If I recall we also took a thermos of coffee with us in the car when we would go on drives longer than an hour or so.

14

I had the same experiencing growing up. Both of my parents and almost all of my extended adult family members drank coffee with meals.

For me, coffee is a morning brew and sometimes a drink for after dinner.

15

I think my parents were drinking coffee in the evening in the sixties and seventies. At some point ice tea became the beverage served with supper (this was the south, dinner was what you had at midday if that was when you had the main meal). When I was in high school and college my dad managed a car wash and would sit around with his buddies who owned the car wash as well as a few restaurants and drink cup after cup of coffee. I’d usually have ice tea or hot chocolate, or occasionally coke. My in-laws will ask if anyone wants coffee after dinner, but we never take them up on it. Maybe Ms. P will have a cup of decaf occasionally.

16

American coffee, like American beer, is famous worldwide for being like fucking in a canoe: bloody close to water. When other countries copy their coffee drinking habits you get sleepless nights.
Starbucks changed that, it seems. And a faible for craft beers is aparently improving beer over there, we’ll see whether this lasts. It feels so out of caracter. Still it is telling that the smallest Starbucks coffee serving size is like the biggest you get in European non-Starbucks coffee houses.
Do they still give endless coffee refills in American diners? They don’t do that with beer, but perhaps they should. Just another diuretic.

Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home…

17

A couple of misconceptions here about caffeine need clearing up. Caffeine has to be soaked out of the coffee beans. The smaller the particles, the easier it comes out, but the primary difference is how long they are wet. So although the pressure applied to an espresso results in more flavor coming through, a shot doesn’t have much more caffeine than a small cup of tea. Around 65mg.

The drip coffee process allows a little more time with water in contact with the beans. So a cup will have about 135mg of caffeine. The strongest coffee is made by a percolator, averaging 155mg per cup. I don’t know about cold brew or french press, but if it’s brewing longer, it ought to be even stronger.

I wish I could find a cite for all this, but it doesn’t come up on a quick search. I learned about it when I was pregnant and had to be very careful about my caffeine intake. Before that I drank a whole pot every morning before work. Now It’s just about 16 oz and I’m done.

In the 70’s my Mom drank coffee almost exclusively. She sometimes switched to iced tea in the Summer. But I often think her anxiety attacks might have been her body just begging for water.

As for serving coffee after dinner or in the evening, there was a definite “so you can drive home safely” ring to it. Whoever wasn’t driving was likely to have a sherry instead. Serving coffee before the guests went home was what a responsible host would do.

Also, I asked my neurologist once why caffeine sometimes made me sleepy. She said that most likely those were times when I was low on dopamine. The hit I received from a warm delicious cuppa overcame the effects of the caffeine to make me feel warm and drowsy. Makes sense to me.

18

Bewitched didn’t?

19

I remember my parents brewing a pot of coffee after dinner and drinking it when I was a child in the early ‘70s. They drank coffee all day long.

My father had served in the navy, which is probably where he picked up the habit. It was tough when they gave up caffeine in the late ‘70s, after my mother was diagnosed with hypoglycemia—man, were they ever cranky for a couple of weeks.

20

At home, German coffee drinking times are breakfast and the Nachmittagskaffee (afternoon coffee, which you usually have with a piece of cake and/or cookies). But at work, especially office jobs, it’s common to drink coffee all day. I used to be a software developer for decades, and coffee was everybody’s fuel!. So I used to have two cups at home for breakfast, but also usually 6 or 7 cups during my work day. Never cost me any sleep. Nowadays I’m retired, and I usually have an extended breakfast with 3 or 4 cups, but that’s it for the day.

ETA: I dimly remember a saying or meme that went something like this: “What’s a programmer? It’s a machine you pour coffee in and generates code”. Maybe someone has a better memory and can remember the correct quote.