Life of Brine

What do taffy and decaf coffee have in common?

The answer to this and many other riddles that torment us daily will be apparent in just one minute, after I drop this message off to all the news anchors who just two or three weeks ago were singing the blues about how it was still cold and rainy. And now that it's hot and humid and we are getting damaging thunderstorms, they're saying, "Oh! When is it going to cool down, Bob?"

Sometimes you're sorry when you get what you ask for! In fact, if they were making a movie about summer, that could be the title! It's hot and sticky and lots of people have to make do with no power because of the storm damage, but hey! At least it warmed up!

Now back to, "What's He Rambling On About Now?"...

It might surprise you to find that decaffeinated coffee is more or less an accidental find, like chocolate chip cookies and potato chips. That happy cup o' java that won't keep you up all night is in your mug because of German merchant Ludwig Roselius. 

It was 1903, and Ludwig had ordered a shipload (!) of coffee beans that arrived on an actual ship! But the ship foundered and the coffee beans got soaked in salty sea water. 

The Good Ship Maxwell House. It really Sanka.

At first, it was feared that the entire shipment would have to be dumped as waste, or sold to Starbucks. (joke.)  But someone said, hey! Let's brew up a pot and see what it tastes like, and lo and behold, they all slept well that night, realizing they had discovered the basics of decaffeination. 

Truth to tell, they also wound up steaming the beans (another great movie title!) in various acids and bases, and using BENZENE to finish the job of removing all the go-go from the java.

Of course, today we recognize that Benzene is a carcinogen, so sorry, great-great-grandpa. We didn't know that Sanka 1906 would kill ya.

Sanka, by the way, got its name because it was coffee SANs KAffeine.

And how does saltwater taffy fit into this coffeepot? Well, this longtime seaside treat comes to us from Atlantic City, New Jersey, former home of a bankrupt Trump casino. The story of its provenance depends on which story you choose to believe:

• a lazy assistant in a candy store, whomping up a batch of taffy, grabbed a bucket of saltwater rather than fresh
• an overnight storm brought unexpected high tides into a candy shop, covering the taffy in seawater
• one of 33,000 emails sent by a former presidential candidate contained an error in the ingredients in a taffy recipe

Maybe it was a combination of the three stories, but ever since the 1920s, suntanned and windblown people have been dumping boxes of this goo on officebound coworkers on Monday mornings after vacation. "Got ya a little sumpin'!" is the standard excuse, usually answered with, "Oh, you shouldn't have!"

And really, they mean it.