A New England heat wave hits in July, and I take my refuge in a Dunkin’ Donuts. I ask the girl behind the counter if anyone dares buy a hot coffee on a morning like this one. “Only the older people,” she replies, adding, “I’d say 85% of our orders are iced.”
Iced coffee. The drink has seen a meteoric rise in coffee shops over the past 20 years, but is treasured nowhere more than Boston. Just ask our icons. The duet of Big Papi and Gronk sang the drink’s praises in 2015 and Ben Affleck allegedly guzzles the stuff. How did our city end up with this penchant? Perhaps, because Boston invented iced coffee…
Boston was not the first city in the British colonies to drink coffee; Philadelphia and New York had coffee houses earlier. According to Jim Vrabel’s When In Boston, John Sparry established the city’s first proper coffee establishment in October of 1676. Yet in the 100 years leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a dozen or so coffee houses would open in Boston and become the most influential establishments in the city.
Hot-headed Samuel Adams did not drink iced coffee–but his revolutionary actions and a boycott on British tea helped coffee solidify itself in both Bostonian and American tastes. The first civil society organization of Boston, the king-loving Merchants’ Club was born in the British Coffee House. Shortly after, the Whig Club sprung up in the Bunch of Grapes tavern. Finally, but most importantly, the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge purchased the Green Dragon Tavern on March 31, 1763. It became the meeting place of the Sons of Liberty and hosted the likes of Paul Revere and the group’s founder, Samuel Adams. It was this establishment that Daniel Webster called the “headquarters of the Revolution.”
It seems plausible that just before the Sons of Liberty executed the infamous Boston Tea Party, they had been drinking a hot boiler of coffee in the Green Dragon–or at least some beer. The tavern’s coffee boiler was donated to the Bostonian Society in 1915 and likely still sits in some local historian’s cupboards. See, at this time, taverns, ordinaries, and coffee houses were all nearly synonymous.
Other local coffee houses showed similar patriotism. The British Coffee House made an apt name change in 1780 to the American Coffee-House. Across colonial American cities, coffee houses had come to control the post office. Colonists saw these institutions as their means of communication (i.e. free speech) and also centers where heavily taxed goods were bought and sold, namely tea, stamps, sugar, and coffee. (Reynolds) The British drink became unpatriotic. Boycott ensued, but not against caffeine altogether. The diary of a merchant’s wife in 1775 illustrates the point: she first wrote that a man “drank tea with us,” then crossed it out and wrote coffee. (Petrovich) Tea was still popular, but coffee had gained an edge.
Yes, Boston’s first coffee houses served coffee hot, but they served it to men who were boycotting British tea. The tea leaf was unpatriotic contraband, but the coffee bean was a sign of the revolution. In this way, Bean Town helped to usher in both nascent independence and our nation’s early flirtations with coffee.
A cursory Google search on the origins of iced coffee suggests that the French invented it in 1840 at the Battle of Mazagran in Algeria. Hot from the North African climate, les militaires mixed coffee with cold water to make it refreshing. We beg to differ. Not only is this not an iced coffee (just a cold Americano), but mentions of iced coffee predate 1840, although not by much.
The Godey’s Lady’s Books, which marketed themselves to American women during much of the 19th century with articles on fashion, recipes, popular literature, and the like, published a recipe for coffee ice cream in its 10th edition in 1835. That same year, the 11th edition includes a story set in Italy, “one morning at breakfast I was thinking…just as I was finishing my last cup of iced coffee (for we were now in the dog days.)” The mention of the sweltering dog days seems to justify the strange addition of ice to coffee. At this time, iced coffee would still have been a new idea and could only be rationalized in far-off places like Italy.
On September 3, 1839, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans noted the new novelty with surprise, “They sell iced coffee in New York; so says the Boston Morning Post.” A silly idea to the writers, they quipped, “The next new fashion in drinkables will probably be iced hot whiskey punch.” An advertisement in a New York paper in May 1840 confirms iced coffee’s existence in the city, specifically at 573 Broadway: “Frenchman named Renaud opens Paris style saloon which serves ice creams, pastries, jellies,..also Ice Coffee, for breakfast.” This was the new coffee house–a place for ice creams, baked goods, and coffee.
So who chilled the first cup of iced coffee? We can’t say. What is abundantly clear is that iced coffee’s star was rising in the 1830s and became an increasingly common summer drink served in coffee houses. Still, the timing is not coincidental. The rise of iced coffee depended on one thing above all else–ice. Ice, in turn, came from Boston.
Enter Frederic Tudor, history’s “Ice King” of Boston. The man’s Bostonian credentials are unflinching. His father worked alongside George Washington and John Adams. Frederic’s business relied upon some of the Boston area’s most iconic watering holes like Spy Pond and Walden Pond. His brother even built the Bunker Hill Monument, for God’s sake.
Starting in 1806, Tudor began cutting blocks of ice from frozen ponds around Boston and shipping them to ports in the tropics. Coincidentally, his first shipment went to Martinique, the Caribbean island where coffee cultivation first began in the Western Hemisphere in 1723.
Tudor was able to leverage Boston’s abundant ice with the help of a horse-drawn ice sled that had blades for runners. (Keller) His sawdust insulation techniques reduced the melt to only 5% of his stock. From New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro, from Havana to Mumbai, Tudor changed the international taste for beverages. He convinced people that cold drinks were refreshing.
Who were the primary customers of Tudor’s ice conglomerate? Coffee houses, of course! The coffee houses of the 1800s doubled as ice cream parlors. Prior to electrified refrigeration, they required a continuous supply of ice. These saloons were serving a cold delicacy alongside a hot stimulant. It was only a matter of time before the two mixed. Someone must have put coffee into ice cream, and then decided ice in coffee was equally suitable.
An 1844 recipe that circulated in several publications proves the point: “cafe a la creme frappe de glace…Make a strong infusion of Mocha or Bourbon coffee; put it into a porcelain bowl, sugar it properly, and add to it an equal portion of boiled milk, or one-third the quantity of a rich cream. Surround the bowl with pounded ice.” The same cooling methods employed in ice cream manufacturing would have been used to chill the first iced coffees.
Tudor was acutely aware of his coffee clientele. In his correspondence with his business partner John W. Damon, who was opening an ice house in Cuba, Tudor writes, “the use of ice by the coffee houses, for cold drinks, has increased, while I suppose the ice-cream customers have diminished.” The Massachusetts Historical Society noted that Tudor first sold ice in Cuba in 1816 and that 90% of his sales were to coffee houses. (Pearson)
Whether a read through Tudor’s personal and business letters at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library would put the words “iced coffee” directly into his mouth, we cannot say. We do know that he mixed coffee and ice in his business endeavors during the 1830s. “I have thought it would be a good arrangement for the concern to invest the proceeds of the ice-house in coffee…By going into this speculation we may be able to bring up a poor year’s sale of ice.” Tudor’s partner claimed the Ice King had bought over 300,000 pounds of coffee in the city of Boston alone. When the price of coffee dropped, he was smothered in a debt that took 14 years to pay (Cooper and Griner).
Albeit risk-prone, Tudor was a visionary. He foresaw the future popularity of coffee, and he convinced the world of the refreshingness of cold drinks. He put his money on both of these beliefs–after all the money was coming from coffee houses whose inputs were mostly ice and coffee at the time.
It is no coincidence that iced coffee came to us in the 1830s, just as Tudor had established the world’s first major commercial ice operation. He accustomed the tongue to the refreshment of ice cold drinks, a feat funded by the purchases of coffee shops.
At the age of 17, William Rosenberg of Boston got his first job selling ice cream. He moved on to work in the Hingham Shipyards as an electrician and eventually a cafeteria worker. Seeing an opportunity in food, he opened his own shop in1950, Open Kettle. His two best sellers? Coffee and donuts. Rosenberg doubled down on the items and changed the shop’s name to Dunkin’ Donuts.
The chain began to spread across the Greater Boston Area. 19 years after its founding, the company went public. In 1989, Dunkin’ Donuts was acquired by Allied-Lyons who happened to own Baskin Robbins–coffee and ice cream once again married, this time corporately.
Not too long after the merger, a second major coffee entrepreneur in Boston, George Howell founder of the Coffee Connection, invented the Frappuccino. This coffee milk-shake (In Boston, a frappe) catapulted cold and creamy coffee beverages into the spotlight. Starbucks would buy out his company in 1994, but the Bostonian origins of the drink are undeniable.
Shortly after, Dunkin’ responded with the Coolatta. These cool drinks would mark the beginning of iced coffee’s modern resurgence. At first, milky, sweet, and even fruity, the iced drink craze soon included black coffee.
By 2010, Dunkin’ was the self-proclaimed number one retailer of iced coffee in America. In 2011, the same year Dunkin’ introduced the oxymoronic frozen hot chocolate, their Chef Global Marketing & Innovation Officer noted the importance of the frozen drink market, “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a significant increase in the popularity of our frozen beverages, not just in warm-weather months but all throughout the year.”
A 2018 Vending International report indicated the consumers had collectively downed 20% more iced coffee since 2013. The report estimated that we would be guzzling some 6.6 billion liters of the cool infusion by 2022.
Boston, we are living in the Florence of the current moment’s iced coffee renaissance. In the 1700s, our city’s Founding Fathers chose the drink as more American than tea. In the 1800s, our own Ice King lent the brew a couple of ice cubes. In the 1900s, our beloved local brand rekindled the taste for iced coffee. But today, it is us, Boston, the drinkers of iced coffee, to whom the gargantuan 32 ounce Dunkin’ cup is passed. Take this baton and hurry forth into the next era of our city’s coffee legacy.
Did Boston invent iced coffee? At the very least, we like it more than anybody else.
Drake, Samuel Adams. Old Boston Taverns and Tavern Clubs. W.A. Butterfield, 1917.
“GETTING INTO SOCIETY.” The Lady’s Book, vol. 11, 1 Nov. 1835, pp. 208+. American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society, link.gale.com/apps/doc/GSTGAL057021857/AAHP?u=balt85423&sid=bookmark-AAHP&xid=60b3d889. Accessed 11 July 2022.
“[New York; Boston].” Times-Picayune, 3 Sept. 1839, p. 2. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1223BCE5B718A166%40EANX-122423EA7869E8E8%402392986-1223CFC971C541B8%401-123BD489E75A6F76%40%255BNew%2BYork%253B%2BBoston%255D. Accessed 11 July 2022.
Sherman, John M. “The Green Dragon Tavern Ancient Colonial Tavern on Union Street : ”Headquarters of the Revolution’” Research Folder, Boston Public Library.
“The History of the Iced Coffee.” Coffee Magazine, https://www.coffeemagazine.co.za/blog/1/5617/the-history-of-the-iced-coffee.
Vrabel, Jim. When in Boston: A Time Line & Almanac. Northeastern University Press, 2004.
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