There are people who are famous (or should be) because of what they have done for coffee – I am talking about inventors and innovators as well as the bold and the determined – and people who are famous for other reasons, like writing, acting, and being involved in politics. Follow the links for posts that do a deeper dive into the individuals who have shaped the world or at least the world of coffee.
I think it is important to remember that Famous People are just regular people who happened to get famous… and like those of us who are not (or at least, not yet) famous, they also develop a relationship with coffee. Here are some of the things they have said about our favorite beverage.
“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
“I will thank you also for sending me, if an oppertunity [sic] should offer soon by Water, one hundred weight, or even a Barrel of good Coffee,”
– George Washington
Upon drinking Maxwell House coffee, he declared it “Good to the last drop!”
– Teddy Roosevelt
“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“the favorite drink of the civilised [sic] world,”
– Thomas Jefferson
