Looking for a local coffee substitute? Well, most people aren’t, but if you are this might be a good one! Meskwaki (Fox), Pawnee, and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tribes have long roasted the bean-like seeds and used them to make a hot drink. Roasting the beans neutralizes alkaloids present in the pods. Wealthy colonizers apparently dismissed this free beverage as inferior to the real deal, but poor settlers couldn’t afford buying imported coffee, native to the tropics of Africa. The lime green inner pulp of Kentucky Coffeetree’s seedpods also serves as a sweetener and medicine to calm fevers and headaches. Indigenous healers have used Coffeetree roots powered and mixed with water to treat hemorrhaging, particularly for women in labor.

Coffeetree fixes nitrogen, though at lower rates than other legumes. They’re native from the upper Midwest to the Northeast, resilient in droughts, and commonly used as ornamentation on streets and parks. They prefer riparian areas such as floodplains and lowlands where they spread through root suckers to hold soil and prevent erosion, and we’ve seen them powering through abandoned gravel lots! Great Lakes tribes such as the Omaha have used Coffeetree beans for bowl-and-dice games, most commonly played by women, that served ceremonial and recreational purposes. Ceremonial dice games, played by almost every Native American culture, provide healing from sickness by honoring spirits and encouraging important kinds of dreams. Colonials laws banned these games as part of state-sanctioned efforts to eradicate Native lifeways. But many of these cultures still live and resurge, and so does Kentucky Coffeetree, which spread with the help of Indigenous people. Flooding and freeze-and-thaw cycles are the only natural way these seeds are scarified and dispersed, but Coffeetree groves often grow near former Indigenous communities. Carving patterns into the beans for ceremonial games effectively scarified the seeds, now ready to germinate when scattered along streambanks!

We propagate our Coffeetree from seeds we collect from beautifully-formed landscaped trees.