During the Civil War the beans from “Kentucky Coffee Trees” were tried as coffee bean substitutes.

I had a friend in Hillsborough NC who had a Kentucky Coffee tree in his yard.

He collected his “pods” off his lawn one fall and brought them into a Chapel Hill coffee shop where I helped break the fairly tough pods open and the shop owner/roaster roasted them dark brown and finely ground them.

Yuck....

We talked about soaking the grounds in Methyl Chloride to isolate, weigh, and calculate the the caffeine percent, but that never got done

11. It is thought that hunting tribes put large quantities of the seeds into rivers in order to stupefy fish and make them easy to catch.

from

https://mileshearn.com/2019/09/11/25-kentucky-coffee-tree-facts/

In Broward County FL at a farmer’s market I bought small sample bags of Robusta coffee locally grown in a field right up against the Everglades.
Taste wasn’t horrible but not good. Hurricane Wilma ruined the young trees.

Nestle has a new hybrid coffee tree that resists the Central America coffee rust disease,
and can tolerate a range of altitudes and temperatures.