Coffee's role in colonial America extended from the Mayflower to the coffeehouses where revolution was planned

Long before the United States declared independence, coffee had established itself in colonial American life. Historian Michelle Craig McDonald, author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, told NPR that coffee's early presence in the colonies is explained by the origins of many Mayflower passengers — several came from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading hub in 17th-century Western Europe.

The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773 — when colonists dumped more than 92,000 pounds of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor — is often cited as the moment Americans pivoted from tea to coffee. John Adams reinforced that narrative in a July 1774 letter to his wife Abigail, recounting how a lodging-house proprietor refused to serve him tea and offered coffee instead, writing that "Tea must be universally renounced." But McDonald said the historical record complicates that story. Her study of advertisements from the 1760s and 1770s found that coffee was already more broadly available than tea before the Tea Party, in large part because it was cheaper per pound.

Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin added another layer of uncertainty: smuggling was so widespread in the colonial period that official trade records are unreliable guides to what people were actually consuming. Chaplin also noted that public declarations of coffee loyalty may not have reflected private behavior, suggesting some proclamations were as much political performance as genuine habit.