At the top of the genre, one no longer substitutes one coffee for another; one manufactures the bean. Walsh describes two generations. The first is a dyed plaster-of-Paris bean, coarse, detectable by its weight and its hardness. The second, which he judges far more dangerous, is an artificial bean of wheat flour bound with biscuit dust, glue and molasses, molded to the exact shape of the roasted bean, cleft included, and flavored with caramel or chocolate; in the cup, a blackish, muddy liquid with a greasy residue at the bottom.

It took watching a bean long enough to reproduce its outline, adjusting a paste that takes the cleft and keeps it as it dries, finding a binder that holds up to grinding and an aroma that survives hot water: product design. Ukers still reports occasional cases of molded beans in 1922, and the official method of analysis spots them by their too-perfect regularity of shape. Roasted peas and pieces of chicory mixed into whole-bean coffee, for their part, are sorted by hand and identified under the microscope.

Walsh 1894, p. 205; Ukers 1922, ch. XVII, p. 170-171; LC ch. 10