Wake-up juice.

Scandinavians and other northern types love their coffee. Charts of the top coffee-consuming nations vary from year to year, but among the top coffee drinkers you will always find Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Canada. Why? Because A) it's cold and they want to drink something hot and B) there's no sun for six months out of the year and they need caffeine to stay awake. 

 

A long time ago I visited Norway, one of the nations in my ancestral mishmash, and I remember that people sucked down coffee like they would die without it, and also that the coffee was really good. My wife, having heard such tales, and being a coffee hound herself, got me a couple of bags of Norway's finest coffee for Christmas. Here's one: 

 

Kjeldsberg is a coffee roaster in Trondheim, Norway, and I don't think there's any more Norwegian-sounding city than Trondheim. You could say it all day. Trondheim Trondheim Trondheim. Anyway, Rasmus Kjeldsberg started the company in 1856, correctly predicting that coffee was going to be a big business. That makes Kjeldsberg older than venerable American brands like Maxwell House (1892), Chock Full o' Nuts (1926), Martinson's (1898), Chase & Sanborn (1874), and Hills Bros. (1900), but not quite Folgers (1854). However, most U.S. brands have been bought and sold by big companies over the years*, and the quality of the coffee has not stayed top-notch, dare I say. Kjeldsberg is, I believe, still its own business, and business is good.

I don't consider myself a coffee snob, but I have to say that the Kjeldsberg kids know what they're doing. The two varieties I tried were delicious--full-bodied without being acidic and nasty, rich without tasting burned. Honest injun, it was better than any major American brand I know. It even surprised my wife, who expected some kind of thick Eurotrash goop that could only be forced down with cigarettes and baguettes. Well done, my Norske friends!

Many moons ago, when the idea of quality coffee was sweeping the nation (and we could always use some more sweeping), the head of a small company at which I was employed came back from the Frankfurt Book Fair. We were in the business of importing foreign books and Americanizing them for the US trade. While in Germany she had been in a discussion with some of the shifty foreigners about coffee, and they were comparing the coffee found in Italy, Germany, and other nations. 

"What do you think of American coffee?" she asked. 

After a moment, one of the fellows said, "It, too, is a beverage."

She thought that was hilarious. I admire the remark as well -- it so perfectly combines the desire to appear polite with the desire to look down upon others that perhaps no other continent can do as the Europeans do. 

Oh, well. I'll give them credit for the joe. We'll take everything else on a case-by-case basis.

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* For example, Chock Full o' Nuts, Chase and Sanborn, and Hills Bros. are currently owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, the American branch of Italian giant Massimo Zanetti Beverage Group; Maxwell House is owned by conglomerate Kraft Heinz; and Folgers is owned by J.M. Smucker Company, having broken free from America-hating Procter & Gamble in 2008, where it had been since 1963.