Vintage coffee: Two industrial films tell it like it used to be[SIZE=-1]
Not Caribou or Kickapoo or Starbucks coffee, either. This was 1965 or so, and if you were drinking coffee, it was Bokar, Red Circle, Savarin, or good old Eight O'Clock. And it flowed from a massive aluminum percolator after brewing for what always seemed like at least four hours.
Maybe it was that percolator or all that half-and-half we dumped into our cups before dunking a huge hunk of my aunt's dense, butter-rich pound cake. But my aunt's coffee and those quiet Sundays were memorable.
Two films from the Prelinger Archives on Archive.org evoke that lost time with a beguiling mix of promotion, propaganda, and still-current facts on the making of what now surpasses even soda in popularity among adults?at least when it comes to soft drinks.
This Is Coffee, from 1961, is easily the better of the two pieces. The 12-minute film's faded color images take you through such "exotic" choices as café au lait and cappuccino as you visit South America. A Latin-tinged beat keeps the cadence as the buttery-voiced announcer talks you through "proper" coffee-making ("fresh water, the right grind, and time, carefully measured does the trick").
You even get the recipe for percolator coffee (six to eight minutes over gentle heat) for "the romance of evening when young dreams grow softly." Never mind that the Cold War was simmering to a boil; in this film made by the Coffee Brewers Institute, all is sweetness and light in this best of all possible worlds.
Time For Coffee is even older, judging by the cars and clothes (see the photo, above), it hails from somewhere just before Elvis gyrated onto the scene. This 12-minute-plus film, fittingly enough sponsored by the A&P Coffee Division of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, is a sort of Weekly Reader look at how coffee gets from the ground to your table. There amid an army of apparently contented villagers, the film takes you through the 24 major operations required, though I confess I counted more like 12, from picking, crushing, and washing the berries to drying, packing, roasting, tasting, shipping, retasting, and sealing the resulting beans.
And sure enough, as the sealed, packaged bags of finished coffee move down the space-age conveyor belt, there's the Eight O'Clock wending its way down the line toward some long-cleared breakfast table somewhere in an America long past.?Bob Markovich
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