Ultimately, and with monumental consequences for future world trade,
coffee was the winner in the beverage contest. As coffee consumption
in Britain was declining, her North American colonists, who as loyal
citizens had been drinking the tea provided by the East India
Company, were becoming increasingly unhappy about taxation without
representation. Possibly under the influence of the Dutch, who had
just pulled out of New Amsterdam, the first North American coffee
house opened in 1658, and its success led to the establishment of
several others by 1767, when George III pushed through the Townsend
Act, which among other horrors placed a tax on tea.
The
long-suffering colonist's patience finally ran out in December 1773,
when a boycott was organized in the major cities of the Atlantic
seaboard. Some local groups politely returned the chests of tea to
the ships, while others stored them, but the patrons of the Green
Dragon, Boston's well-known coffee house, who included John Adams
and Paul Revere - no doubt in the throws of a euphoric caffeine
frenzy - plotted the most famous event of the American Revolution,
the Boston Tea Party. and while the fish of Boston Harbour were
sipping their tea, any Spaniards in Florida or French in Louisiana
who were reading fortunes in their thick, swirling coffee grounds
might possibly have detected signs that a big change was on the way.
