This bottle is embossed COFFEE & CHICORY EXTRACT on one side and J. LYONS & CO LTD, LONDON on the other. This was donated to the museum in 2013. 

J. Lyons & Co. was founded at the end of the nineteenth century by Joseph Lyons and two of his brothers-in-law. At its peak, the company was responsible for corner house tea shops, a popular restaurant chain), a number of hotels and a range of product lines in food manufacturing. Lyons led the market with the development of a brand-new coffee and chicory essence. 

This bottle dates from the 1920's, when coffee extract provided an economical way for ordinary people to drink coffee. Lyon’s Coffee and Chicory Extract, a liquid coffee essence, was introduced in 1921. Before the invention of vacuum sealing, conventional ground coffee would lose up to 65% of its flavour within 24 hours. Liquid coffee and chicory essence could be kept much longer after opening. In manufacturing the coffee beans and roasted chicory root were pulverised into a powder and held in a container whilst steam is forced through. The resulting liquid was then drawn off. The mixture was then heated under vacuum to reduce it to a concentrated liquid essence which was then sweetened. The name was changed to ‘Bev’ in 1930. The advent of instant coffee (the first Nescafe was introduced by Nestle in 1938) inevitably made these extracts largely redundant. 

During WWII the Ministry of Food decided that coffee essence was a necessity as a morale booster. However, when Belgium and France were invaded, the supply of chicory was interrupted. Dr Edwin Hughes, a senior chemist at Lyons, discovered that artichokes were similar in composition to chicory. Covent Garden buyers purchased as many artichokes as possible which were dried under laboratory supervision in the hop-field kilns in Kent, before being pulverised and added to the preparation of coffee extract. This transformed Bev into a best seller. Weith the end of rationing, coffee essence sales declined. These essences are still used today in baking. In the circa 1930s J. Lyons and Co also printed a book entitled “60 recipes for flavouring with Lyns Coffee and Chicory Extract”. 

The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans played a critical role in shaping the existing coffee industry. In the 1700s coffee began to make its mark on Britain. Coffee houses appeared in England in around 1650 and by 1675 there were over 3000 coffee houses in England. Demand for coffee overlapped with the increasing demand for sugar. Tobacco fuelled the slave trade and established the “triangle trade” where the journey from Europe to Africa carried manufactured goods, and the journey from Africa to the Caribbean and America carried enslaved Africans to the growing plantations in the New World. From such locations as Jamaica, coffee was transported back into the U.K. By 1660, this arrangement was formalized when the Royal African Company was founded to trade along the western coast of Africa. Colonizers established vast coffee plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and parts of Central America, where coffee production became integral to the new economy. 

Enslaved people on coffee plantations endured brutal conditions. The exploitive legacy of coffee is still reflected in the modern treatment of exploited African and Latin American coffee farmers, many of whom are descendants of historically enslaved people.