top of page

First decaffeinated coffee

  • hellothirstforfirsts
  • May 11
  • 9 min read

Who would have thought a product as wholesome and seemingly innocuous as decaffeinated coffee would have such a strong Nazi subplot?

Ludwig Roselius, decaffeinated coffee inventor

The rollercoaster of a story starts with the wonderfully named Ludwig Roselius, a specialist coffee merchant based in Bremen, Germany. But as we’ll see, he is so much more than just an importer of exotic beans: an ambitious and successful global entrepreneur, a vocal champion of local art, the inventor of decaf coffee, German diplomat, a committed Freemason, a marketing genius, one of the pioneers of Focke-Wulf military aircraft and a known Nazi sympathizer.

 

Gerhard Ludwig Wilhelm Roselius, forever known as Ludwig, was born in Bremen on 2nd June 1874, son of Diedrich and Elise. Not much is known about his very early years, except for an apprenticeship in Hanover at the age of 16 and the requisite military service later in 1893, aged 19. He joined his father’s coffee importing business – Roselius & Co. – in around 1894, where he was a ‘Prokurist’, an authorised company representative. Up until this point, he basically lived a good Bremen life, secure job, good prospects, artistic friends, dabbling in collecting art and attentive Freemason (he was a member of the ‘Niedersachsenrunde von 1900’, or Lower Saxony Round Table of 1900). But everything changed in 1902, when his father died aged just 59.

 

It is said that the doctor who attended Diedrich’s bedside attributed the cause of death to a lifetime of excessive coffee consumption (not that surprising for a coffee importer), the constant caffeine intake ultimately proving too much for his heart. Ludwig, of course, was devastated. He was the natural heir to the company, but the incident set him on a new path, one with multiple twists and turns, to create a great-tasting coffee without the detrimental effects of caffeine. 

 

His experiments started in earnest as he built a team of chemists and scientists to help him, but positive results were hard to come by.


Green coffee beans

The story goes that the first real breakthrough came in 1903, when his shipment of green coffee beans from Latin America (Nicaragua was mentioned) arrived sodden thanks to a turbulent voyage that saw the cargo hold take on copious amount of sea water. Not wanting to throw the beans away, he sent them for analysis to see if they could be saved. They results were surprising – the seawater, far from ruining the batch, had actually removed most of the caffeine. And once roasted and ground had kept almost all its flavour (albeit a bit salty round the edges). Cue endless hours in the lab with his chief chemist Karl Wimmer and chemistry student Friedrich Meyer, and they eventually came across the solution: The Roselius Process. 

 

Inspired by the saturation of the shipment, they steamed the raw (green) beans at temperatures of 20-100˚C for up to five hours until they were swollen to contain 30-40% moisture, effectively doubling in size. The water was then drained from the rotating drum and the beans rinsed or ‘washed’ with a benzene solution up to 15 times. Benzene was a chemical that at the time was used in solvents like paint strippers (and later would be used in gasoline production) but also had the beneficial effect of flushing out the caffeine. Once complete, the beans were dried and then packaged for shipment to roasters and distributors – now with at least 97% of the caffeine taken out. Today, benzene is no longer used, as it’s proven to be carcinogenic, but the process remains the same: beans are rinsed in a solvent, usually ethyl acetate, an organic fruit ester that’s commonly used to make nail polish remover (the one with the sharp pear drop smell).

 

Ludwig and his team had created decaffeinated coffee, patenting their invention as Deutsches Reich Patentschrift (DRP) 198279 in 1905.

 

Flush with success, Ludwig founded Kaffee-Handels-Aktiengesellschaft (Kaffee HAG) on 21st June 1906.

Kaffee HAG early advert

It was the world’s first company to produce decaffeinated coffee, with a factory in the Timber Harbour on the banks of the River Weser in Bremen. By 1907, they were producing around 13,000 pounds of decaf coffee per day using assembly lines, a brand-new concept and his coffee was widely credited as the first global use of the process for a mass-produced product. 

 

From the start, Ludwig used marketing in a strong and visionary way, perhaps exemplified best by becoming the first coffee to be advertised in cinemas during the silent film era. 

 

Possibly his greatest triumph was his packaging. Almost certainly due to his passion and eye for art, his pack designs were both captivating and minimalist, not a common trend in the era. He hired two graphic designers, Alfred Runge and Eduard Scotland, to create the identity. They came up with the distinctive lifebuoy brand icon, a subtle reference to being saved from caffeine, and used ivory, black and red in a dominant and recognisable way.


Kaffee HAG packaging

He also consistently pushed the health benefits of his coffee, feeding the media with endless medical reports stating his case, and introducing advertising slogans like ‘Nerves of steel through sport and HAG coffee’ and ‘Always harmless! Always digestible!’. HAG later participated in Dresden’s international Hygiene Exhibition in 1911, which was devoted to the promotion of sports.  

 

With the power of PR, packaging and ad campaigns behind him, success came quickly. The company expanded throughout Europe at a rate of knots, adapting to local markets as they went. In France, and several other countries, the brand was known as Sanka (short for ‘sans caféine’).

 

But Ludwig also wanted to expand into the USA. On 1st September 1908, two US patents were granted to him (US897763A and US897840A), for “for extracting caffeine from crude and unbroken green coffee beans, without materially impairing the aromatic constituents of the coffee”.


Ludwig's US patent for decaf

Sales of Kaffee HAG grew – priced at triple that of a regular cup of joe – followed by headquarters in New York in 1914 with a coffee extraction plant in New Brunswick, New Jersey.


We get an interesting insight into the marketing nous of Ludwig from a letter he sent to a US sales manager in 1914, which stated that New York is the “world’s biggest Jewish city”, so will offer them a unique sales opportunity. To quote Ludwig:



“The German experience has taught us that the Jews recognize the benefits of decaffeinated coffee long before others, and just as they set the tone in matters like going to the theatre and travelling to leisure resorts or spas, they will be the first to try decaffeinated coffee in America”.

Essentially, he was claiming that the Jewish shoppers were the trend-setters – win them over and you win the rest of the market.  

 

But then World War I broke out and everything changed. Suddenly, all German products were being banned or treated with extreme suspicion. With the creation of the Alien Property Custodian, in President Wilson’s administration, Ludwig’s dreams came crashing down. The office was responsible for seizing enemy property, bank accounts and business assets within the United States, preventing those nations from benefitting financially – a disaster for Ludwig and his German-based business, who lost everything, including his trademark. It worked well for the USA though, leading to overall seizures across all ‘enemy’ businesses of about $500 million, which then went on to fund the war effort. (Ludwig’s decaffeinated coffee came back to the US in 1922, after the war, but was now operating under the Sanka name).

 

Back in Bremen, Ludwig was becoming more important on the political scene – his business and marketing acumen had been recognised at the highest levels. In a seemingly leftfield turn of events, he was appointed Head of Propaganda in the Balkans by the Federal Foreign Office (the German foreign ministry) in 1915.


Ludwig Roselius

His objective was essentially to counter British and French propaganda in nearby neutral countries – to push a pro-German agenda and promote a sympathetic war story, which could ultimately manipulate public opinion to such an extent that they might join on the side of Germany. While it’s not exactly documented, some of Ludwig’s roles might have included ‘buying’ newspapers and journalists, recruiting agents, bribing politicians and founding pro-German parties. In the Balkans his work ultimately failed when Bulgaria, Greece and Romania joined the Central Powers. Ludwig was later appointed Bulgarian Consul General in 1917, although his role was now based firmly in Bremen.  

  

Ludwig was undoubtedly a political man, increasingly with a strong support for national socialism – the burgeoning far-right authoritarian ideology that became Nazism. He first met Adolf Hitler, who had risen through the ranks to become the leader of the party (although still relatively small in scale), in 1922 – when Hitler had travelled to Bremen specifically to ask Ludwig to join him in building the party and ask for funds. Ludwig declined, explaining he could do more for Germany if he remained outside politics. But by this time, he’d already captured Hitler’s interest by founding the Bremen airport company, which opened in 1922.


Adolf Hitler

Later, on 27th January 1932, in the ballroom of Düsseldorf’s Park Hotel, he again met with Adolf Hitler, who was speaking at a trade convention to elicit financial donations. Apparently, while he spoke well and eloquently for over two hours, he offered little in way of economic assurances, so only received small sums from the delegation.  


Böttcherstraße in Bremen

We know that Ludwig later fell out with Hitler and was never officially admitted to the Nazi Party despite two attempts to join – probably because he was a committed Freemason and was a lifelong champion of the Böttcherstraße – a street in Bremen with Nordic-style buildings that didn’t match the Nazi aesthetic.


But it's easy to see why Hitler wanted Ludwig on board. Decaffeinated coffee was the perfect fit with the Nazi ideology of ‘purity’, a natural extension of the health movement sweeping across the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s and early 30s. Ardent nationalists in Germany wanted a more ‘natural’ and ‘back-to-nature’ lifestyle, encouraging health movements like the Lebensreform (‘Life Reform’), which pushed a life without alcohol, refined sugar, meat, nicotine and any perceived ‘poisons’ like caffeine. It’s a philosophy that basically influenced the public health policy of the later Nazi regime.


Lebensreform (‘Life Reform’)

Ludwig probably couldn’t believe his luck – he had invented a zeitgeist product, one he couldn’t have timed any better with the prevailing winds of his homeland. His decaf was actively being included as part of a national state policy to promote a healthy Aryan population. But there are hints that he wasn’t 100% on-board with all the policies of the new Nazi party. Probably because of his sales experience in New York, Ludwig often advertised his coffee as being kosher, even writing in 1932 that: “Anyone who drinks Kaffee HAG is dear and important to us. Which political affiliation or creed he is, is for us completely irrelevant.” It was perhaps a gentle reminder that Ludwig was a human and businessman first and not a brainwashed political devotee. In the same year, Ludwig sold his Sanka brand to General Foods in the US.    

 

At Hitler’s 1936 Nuremberg Rally, officially known as the ‘Rally of Honor’, held in Nuremberg from 8th-14th September, Ludwig was an official supplier – handing out Kaba, a chocolate milk brand he’d been making since 1929, to more than 42,000 Hitler Youth members. (It was at this rally that Hitler publicly called out Ludwig with a speech against the art he championed, saying: “We do not want any connection with elements that view National Socialism only from hearsay and legends, and hence easily confuse it with ambiguous Nordic catchwords, and that build their foundation on some mystical civilization called Atlantis. National Socialism most definitely rejects this type of Böttcherstrassen culture”).


1936 Nuremberg Rally

While personally, he and Hitler were now politically and culturally miles apart, Ludwig’s products were still valued. In 1937, his decaffeinated coffee played a prominent role in the Reichsausstellung Schaffendes Volk festival in Düsseldorf (The Reich Exhibition of Creative People), which was one the most important propaganda exhibitions in Germany during the Nazi era – with over six million people flocking to see ‘the new German living’ settlements. Later, in the Hitler Youth Handbook of 1941, it clearly states that caffeine was a poison “in every form and in every strength”.

 

In the 1930s, Ludwig started suffering health problems. In 1934, he had his left leg amputated to stop the spread of bone cancer. And while it may have physically slowed him down, it didn’t intellectually. Less able to get around, he hired a 26-year-old university academic called Barbara Goette to help, who went on to become his companion, carer, confidante and collaborator.


Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau A.G

She proved especially important in Ludwig’s aviation interests. He’d been fascinated by flying since he was a boy, becoming a founding partner of Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau A.G in 1924, and involved in the company throughout his life – which was later part owned by the State and a reason Germany was so dominant and feared in the air during the war (the money generated from the company may also be the reason Hitler didn’t send him to a concentration camp for Ludwig’s vehement cultural defence of Böttcherstraße).

 

In the last few years of his life, Ludwig swapped Bremen (which was being mercilessly bombed by Allied forces) for Berlin in 1942. He died in the capital on 15th May 1943, after living for nine months in the luxury Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, coincidentally the same hotel Adolf Hitler stayed in when he was appointed Chancellor (the hotel was destroyed by a British air raid in November the same year).


Barbara Goette
Barbara Goette, Ludwig's carer & confidante

There is some suspicion of foul play about Ludwig’s death, as hinted at in a book about Barbara Goette’s life called ‘Bombshell’. In it, it’s suggested that Ludwig was injected with digitalis, a toxic agent extracted from foxglove plants, on Hitler’s command – presumably for daring to cross the Nazi leader during their many previous interactions. This, of course, cannot be proven, but adds another intriguing Hollywood twist in the tale of the now not-so-humble decaffeinated coffee.

 

Today, one in five drinkers regularly choose decaffeinated coffee, a number only likely to rise with the health and wellness trends amongst younger generations. In America, decaf sales have apparently grown faster than regular coffee every year over the last decade. It’s clear decaf is kind of having a moment. So it’s worth remembering the surprising story behind it – one that sometimes reads like a political thriller. So next time you find yourself sipping a decaf, spare a thought for the German inventor and industrialist referred to as The Lion.



Kaffee HAG early illustration and advert


Sanka decaf coffee advert


Kaffee HAG offices in Bremen, Germany

Comentários


Say hello or send me a drinks story 

Thanks for getting in touch!

© 2021 by A Thirst for Firsts. Created with Wix.com

bottom of page