16 December—It’s 252 years ago (forget your calculator, it was 1773) that the Sons of Liberty hosted the famous Boston Tea Party. Usually considered a protest against a tax preference that King George III’s Parliament in London offered the East India Company, it was in reality a particularly aggressive marketing strategy by coffee importers (including George Washington and John Hancock) to popularize their delectable and aromatic beans over tea leaves.

It’s not generally known that the Sons of Liberty were in fact a troupe of Broadway actors taking some time off to partake of the manifold pleasures of Bean Town who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. In all events, the coffee importers’ marketing strategy worked. Because the negative publicity surrounding the Sons of Liberty’s carefully staged event doomed tea in the nascent colonial American market and even went so far as to make the consumption of coffee a patriotic statement of America’s distinct—some would say notorious—identity.

Fashionable coffee houses replaced tea shops in what were then the colonies as the places to be seen—and heard, as it happens, since they became venues for (usually) civilized political discussion and debate. Tories naturally preferred basic conservative dark roast coffee while Whigs naturally favored a more liberal light roast. Really. And things haven’t changed, except that liberals now have latte to sip. Or guzzle, as the case may be. If they can afford it.

John Adams wrote to Abigail in 1774, “Tea must be universally renounced. . . . I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.” And he proudly switched to coffee, which remained his second-favorite brew after hard cider (which he quaffed for health reasons, of course) for the rest of his life.

And there’s John Hancock, an exceedingly wealthy patriot, politician, importer (of coffee and tea and lots more), smuggler (of everything), and shipping magnate with a signature to beat all signatures. Not only was he in on the Boston Tea Party, he went so far as to call tea drinkers enemies. Maybe tea’s an acquired taste, but come on.

Can it be that coffee was better for Hancock’s bottom line?