Episode 24: Maxwell House Good to the Last Drop

I grew up Mormon, which meant coffee was off the table my entire childhood. So it's a little funny that the coffee myth I'm covering this week involves someone who never had a cup at all: Theodore Roosevelt. Maxwell House built one of the most famous slogans in coffee history on a story that was already secondhand before the company ever wrote it down.

This episode traces "good to the last drop" from a nearly identical Coca-Cola slogan in 1908, through its quiet debut on Maxwell House packaging around 1915, to the moment in the 1930s when the company started crediting Roosevelt with saying it at Nashville's Hermitage Hotel in 1907, more than a decade after he died and could no longer confirm or deny a word of it. Historians have called the story a likely myth for years, and the company kept repeating it anyway, most recently in a 2014 press release.

Along the way: the real Joel Cheek and the hotel the coffee was named after, what the specialty coffee industry looks like today, the psychology behind why a founding myth sells better than the truth, and my own coffee-free upbringing.