“Ye Olde Coffee House”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 916, 8 March 1930, Page 6

“Ye Olde Coffee House”

Home of Expert Roasting Plant for Coffee and Peanut Butter GOOD, rich coffee, with its exquisite flavour and delightful aroma, is one of the things that we of 1930 associate with the spacious days of 1630 and 1730, when Londoners had tiirte to choose and enjoy their coffee. And Auckland’s well-known quaint coffee factory and shop, with its sign, “Ye Olde Coffee House,” is the centre from which delicately roasted coffee (as well as “Friendship” Tea and Peanut Butter) is dispensed, just as the coffee houses of London did so long ago.

Coffee roasting is both an art and a science. The amount of machinery required is astonishing, hut no amount of machinery can make up for that careful touch of the expert coffee roaster which produces that genuinely

delicate flavour and taste. For these reasons the activities of Ye Olde Coffee House are worthy to be included in The Sun's weekly feature describing important industries. The history of coffee goes back to

the dim ages. It has been said that an Arabian goat first directed attention to the exhilarating effect of the plant, its strange prancings, after eating the berries, being observed with surprise. Later the coffee beans were crushed, mixed with fat and used as foodballs. Following this a kind of wine was brewed from the raw beans. It is over 700 years since coffee was first taken as a beverage, and it was only in the 13th century that roasting began to be practised. Originating in Arabia, the coffee cult gradually made its way westward to Turkey, Venice, France, England and North America. The first London "coffee house” was opened in 1652, and rapidly other houses of the same type were called into being in the metropolis. They were the regular meeting places of merchants, shipowners and sea captains. That vast insurance corporation known as Lloyd’s had its origin in a wellpatronised coffee house in Lombard Street, London, owned by a man named Edw-ard Lloyd, who died in 1712. The Coffee House here in Auckland is a very accurate replica of the coffee houses in London of that period. It is an ideal setting in this young country for an industry as valuable today as it was then. A cynic has said that hitherto coffee—really good coffee, that is to say—has never penetrated to New Zealand. Be that as it may, the reproach, if there be one, need no longer prevail, for Messrs. James Rovce and Co., the Auckland firm in question, have placed some of the finest of the world’s coffee on the market. So, once again, Auckland will enjoy the opportunity of leading the way in a notable movement, to wit, the popularising of pure coffee. If only Auckland ladies.rise to the occasion coffee, as perfect and as fragrant as any served in a Parisian cafe, may soon grace the breakfast tables of this Dominion. Incidentally and fortunately for Aucklanders, Messrs. Royce and Co. are able with facility (arising partly out of their elaborate roasting equipment) to place on the market a quality of peanut butter which, if equalled, has not been excelled in any other country.