All About Coffee

By William H. Ukers · 1922

All About Coffee is the classic single-volume survey from the early twentieth-century trade press: botany and chemistry, origins and shipping, roasting and retail, and the beverage’s place in social life—dense, dated in spots, and still unmatched as a period snapshot of how the industry understood itself. For anyone researching brands, advertising, or trade practice from the late 1800s into the 1920s, Ukers remains a first stop after primary sources.

Read free at Project Gutenberg — full 1922 first-edition text, HTML. Searchable in browser. No H&H, Hoffmann, Hayman, or San Antonio mentions; Ukers’ U.S. coverage emphasizes Eastern and Midwestern trade. Useful for period roasting terminology, packaging vocabulary, and retail trade context.

Further reading

• 100 Years of William Harrison Ukers’ “All About Coffee” — Mike Ferguson, Sprudge Special Projects, 12 Oct 2022. Centennial appreciation of the book’s lasting influence on coffee scholarship; also discusses Uncommon Grounds (Pendergrast) and Coffeland (Sedgewick) as its successors.