We are currently developing our coffee, so pre-order your bag today!
Pre-order St. Drogo's Brew!
Why St. Drogo?
You might have noticed the little character in our logo. That is a representation of St. Drogo. But who is St. Drogo, and why is he at the top of our page?
We have lots of Saints in the Catholic Church. During their lives, they were somehow connected to one thing or another, and people would begin asking for their prayers and intercessions for needs connected to those things. For instance, St. Crispin is the patron saint of cobblers because he made shoes at night to support his missionary work in the Roman Empire; or St. Fiacre (heard of him?) supported himself by gardening, so he is the patron saint of gardeners. Thus they became the patron saint of this or that. Not our saint.
St. Drogo was born in 1105 in what is now northeastern France right near the border of present-day Belgium. Although he was a very devout and prayerful young man, he worked as a shepherd for a while. During his day, pilgrimages were the rage, and he made nine or 10 of them to Rome. On one of these, he contracted the disease that deformed his face so much that it frightened whoever saw him. The villagers built a cell next to the local church to hide him, and he lived there for 40 years until his death, praying constantly.
But why is Drogo the patron saint of coffee houses? Coffee didn’t even make its way to France until sometime in the 1500s, long after St. Drogo’s death. I wonder (and it’s only a guess) if people would go outside St. Drogo’s cell and talk to him. And good conversations are what happened at coffee shops. But then again, maybe not.
I have claimed to St. Drago as the patron saint of my little website. We have adopted a coffee shop theme because we want to encourage good conversations around the theme of our Catholic faith in today’s very troubling world. And in that regard, we are offering coffee [link here] for sale to help support this website and the work.
God bless, and drink up.
A Little More About Coffee!
A Short History of Coffee
Coffee is actually a fairly recent discovery. There are several stories about when it was first discovered, but my favorite includes goats.
Apparently, there was a goat herder by the name of Kaldi who was tending his goats in a forest on the Ethiopian plateau. He noticed that when his goats ate the berries off of certain bushes, is goats became very energetic (some stories say they danced), and they couldn’t sleep at night. He reported what he discovered to the Abbot of the local monastery. Some beans had fallen into a fire, and they gave off a wonderful aroma, so they roasted them. But the roasted beans were hard, so they boiled them to soften them. And voilà, we had the coffee drink. The Abbot found that drinking the liquid helped him to stay awake during prayer. Soon all of the monks were drinking it. And from there, it spread throughout the world.
At least that’s one version of the story, and I like it.
Coffee in St. Louis
When Americans think of coffee today, they don’t tend to think about St. Louis. But that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, as late as the 1920s, St. Louis was recognized as the coffee capital of the US. When the French settled in St. Louis in the early 1700s, they brought coffee with them. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, coffee was shipped up the Mississippi from New Orleans, roasted in St. Louis, and distributed throughout the US. Although St. Louis has of late been somehow eclipsed by other cities on the coffee map, we still have fine coffee roasters, and we believe that St. Drogo’s Brew comes from one of the best of them.
Drink up, and pray longer.