The Curious Barista's Guide to Coffee

by Tristan Stephenson

  Seats could not be reserved in a coffee house, there were no class prejudices, and besides women no one would be refused entrance. Here, merchants, politicians, lobbyists, intellectuals, scientists, journalists, scholars, poets and common men alike all took seats, sometimes to discuss business, but most of the time simply to enjoy a coffee and partake in the discourse and debate of their chosen subject, all to the ‘rattling noise of Kettle, Skimmers and Ladles among the Braziers’.

  John Starky’s A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (1661) eloquently summarizes the situation:

  ‘Here is no respect of persons. Boldly therefor let any person, who comes to drink Coffee sit down in the very Chair, for here a Seat is to be given to no man. That great privilege of equality is only peculiar to the Golden Age, and to a Coffee-house.’

  Coffee houses were ideal places to chew the political fat, too, which could, and probably did, include talk of dissent and treason. Charles II (1660–85) of England placed spies in the London’s coffee shops then attempted to ban the establishments altogether, claiming in a proclamation issued on 29th December 1675 that they caused men to, ‘mis-spend much of their time, which might and probably would otherwise by imployed in and about their Lawful Callings and Affairs.’ The bill was never passed, however, thanks to appeals from coffee men and politicians alike.

  The interior of an early London coffee house shows a room that is buzzing with activity.

  By the end of the 17th century, some London coffee shops had started to become referred to as ‘penny universities’. They became a breeding ground for new ways of scientific thinking, an incubator for hypotheses and theories, and sometimes even a staging ground for what were termed ‘natural philosophy’ demonstrations and experiments.

  Since many coffee houses specialized in specific fields of business, news, arts, discussion or learning, it was shops such as the Grecian, Marine and Garraways that the likes of Christopher Wren (the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral) and the English scientist Robert Hooke would visit. The Marine also became the stage for James Hodgson, one of London’s earliest celebrity scientists. Isaac Newton’s eponymous work, Principia, in which he shared his gravity theory for the first time, was published in 1687, and some would say, had more to do with his local Cambridge coffee house than it did with fallen apples.

  The Scottish academic Adam Smith wrote a large part of what is perhaps the most important piece of literature concerning economics and finance of any time – The Wealth of Nations – in the British Coffee Shop in London. Coffee houses like the British Coffee Shop functioned as common rooms in which to discuss the topics of trade and commerce, where a network of runners could rapidly disseminate stock-sensitive news from the colonies among all the relevant coffee shops. Jonathan’s coffee shop was one such coffee hangout that became a popular alternative trading post to the Royal Exchange when strict protocols were enforced by the crown. Almost 100 years later, in 1773, a group of traders broke away and established a new coffee shop, called New Jonathan’s. That name lasted only a short time, however, and it became known as the Stock Exchange (now known as the London Stock Exchange).

  Dishes of coffee adorn the table of this 17th-century English coffee house.

  One of the world’s largest insurance brokers, Lloyds of London, also started life as a coffee shop, and even today the porters who work there are referred to as waiters. Well-known publications such as The Spectator, The Guardian and Tatler were either directly birthed from or heavily influenced by the coffee shop, too. News and commentary that would previously have only been the preserve of the higher social ranks was suddenly available to the masses. Tatler, when it first launched in 1709, even had section headers named after prominent London coffee shops.

  And what of the coffee itself? Not so good, it seems. In his 1661 book, A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses, John Starky colourfully describes the drinks he received with such phrases as ‘boiled soot’, ‘made with the scent of old crusts’, and I have seen other references to ‘horse pond liquor’, and ‘hot hell-broth’. Most coffee houses roasted their own, of course, and given the above descriptions it is fair to say they may have been on the darker side, but it’s likely that questionable brewing methods, adopted from Ottoman practices, where coffee is repeatedly boiled, is the cause for the strongly brewed and bitter brews that most shops served. Some 17th-century recipes even recommended using water that has been previously boiled for 15 minutes with old coffee grounds to season it. The appearance of the drink perhaps took greater precedence over its flavour and some shop owners experimented with elaborate filtration techniques, using egg whites and isinglass (a substance extracted from the swim bladders of fish) in an attempt to clarify their brews and remove some of the sludge. It was also commonplace to brew all the coffee in the morning, then reheat it to order throughout the day, which is another practice that would have done no favour for the flavour.

  Paris' first coffee house opened in 1672, 20 years after London, with some sources even suggesting that the our old friend Pasqua Rosée was involved in its conception. Virtually all traces of its existence appear to have been lost to time, unfortunately. This contrasts with Café Procope, which was established in 1686, and became a famous meeting place of the French Enlightenment; Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire frequented it. Indeed, Voltaire, who was rumoured to have consumed 40 cups of coffee a day, arguably conceived his Encyclopédie, the world's first modern encyclopedia at Café Procope. Two of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were also known to meet at Café Procope, which still exists today, incidentally.

  Another popular Parisian coffee house, Café de Foy, was the stage for the rallying cry that started the French Revolution. Under the watchful eyes of police spies, while standing on a table brandishing a pistol, Camille Desmoulins roused his countrymen with his historic appeal ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ on 12th July 1789. The Bastille fell two days later, and the French Revolution had begun.

  Although it was irrefutably London that was hit hardest by the coffee-house bug, most European cities had at least one coffee house by the close of the 1670s and the first American shop was opened in Boston in 1671. New York had to wait another 25 years to get its first, which was opened by a British immigrant on South Broadway.

  Coffee became a revolutionary drink in 1789, when Camille Desmoulins leaped onto a table at Café de Foy in Paris to exhort his comrades to arms.

  THE DRINK OF THE NEW WORLD

  At the beginning of the 18th century, coffee consumption in Europe was higher than it have ever been and European nations were becoming increasingly nervous about their reliance on coffee shipped from Mokha through the trading port of Venice. The Dutch were the first to take action when they successfully cultivated seedlings in India’s Malabar region and in Dutch Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and then in 1699 took some seedlings to Batavia (the former name of the present-day capital, Jakarta) in Java. Around a decade later, 360 kg/800 lbs of Dutch-grown Java coffee arrived in Amsterdam and sold for a very high price. The Arab monopoly on coffee had been broken, and before too long, the Dutch megacorporation known as the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), was shipping over half of all the coffee consumed in Europe from its colonial ports in Java, a city that would forever be synonymous with coffee.

  Around the same time that the Dutch began growing coffee in Indonesia the French took small trees to the island of Bourbon (now known as Réunion), which lies 800 km/500 miles east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean. Some reports suggest that these trees came from Java, while others suggest that they were a gift from a Yemeni Sultan; other reports even claim that coffee was indigenous to the island. However it got there, it was a pivotal moment in the development of coffee as we know it today, because the tree mutated into a new variety that later became known as bourbon.

  Bourbon varieties produce around 20 per cent more fruit than typical varieties (see page 24), and when one French official visited Bourbon in 1711 he found ‘wild coffee tr
ees, of a height of ten to twelve feet, fill of fruit’. It took another 150 years before the variety was planted in Brazil, but thanks to the clean acidity and balance that bourbon varieties exhibited – of which there are now nearly two dozen including mutations and hybrids – they are among the most highly respected in the world today.

  Gabriel de Clieu famously sharing water rations with his precious coffee sapling during the long voyage across the Atlantic in 1720.

  The Netherlands was also probably the first nation to cultivate coffee in the West Indies, having sent plants to its Surinam colony in the Guianas (in north-eastern South America) as early as 1713. The more popular legend of coffee’s arrival in the Americas occurred seven years later, however, in 1720, when Gabriel de Clieu, a captain in the French navy, transported a single coffee plant across the Atlantic. The story of the escapade is detailed in his personal account, Année littéraire, published in 1774. If de Clieu is to believed (or even if not, for that matter) then Hollywood is surely missing a trick, as it turns out to be a tale of blockbuster proportions.

  De Clieu correctly determined that coffee would grow just fine in any region where sugarcane flourished, so the French island of Martinique was a sure bet. However, our hero didn’t own a coffee plant himself and would first need to acquire one. The slight hitch was that at the time there was only one known example in all of France – a gift from the Mayor of Amsterdam to King Louis XIV – and it was contained within the greenhouses of the French royal gardens. De Clieu used his good looks and charm to seduce a local 'lady of good quality' and persuaded her to court one of the royal physicians. His arm sufficiently twisted, the physician stole the plant from the greenhouse and gave it to de Clieu.

  Wasting no time, de Clieu secreted himself and his prize (safely contained within a terrarium of his own making) aboard a French navy ship destined for Martinique. What perils genuinely befell him will remain a mystery, but according to his account he safeguarded his plant through storms, attack by Tunisian pirates, attempted theft by a Dutch spy (who apparently manage to rip a few leaves off the plant), starvation, sea monsters, and much more besides. For some weeks during the voyage, the rationing of drinking water was in effect and de Clieu was even forced to share his ration with his beloved sapling. None of it was in vain, though, as de Clieu successfully planted the tree on Martinique and seeded new plants. The numbers vary wildly, but one count of coffee trees on the island a mere nine years later totalled around 3 million.

  Following the success on Martinique, other French islands took cuttings or were gifted coffee seedlings. Coffee plantations around the Caribbean and central America grew at an exponential rate. Coffee hit Colombia in 1723, Brazil in 1727 – allegedly smuggled in a bouquet of flowers that was gifted from the wife of the governor of French Guyana to a Brazilian lieutenant-colonel – Jamaica in 1728, Venezuela in 1730, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1735, Guatemala in 1747 and Cuba in 1748.

  By 1780, San Domingo in Haiti provided no less than half of the world’s supply of coffee. Virtually all the coffee in the Americas, and indeed nearly all the coffee in commercial production at the time, could trace its lineage to a single tree planted in the conservatory of King Louis XIV in 1713.

  GLOBAL DOMINATION

  The development of sugar beet as an alternative to sugarcane in the early 1800s caused the price of that most reliable of new world crops to plummet. Demand for coffee in Europe remained on the increase, however, so many of the colonies in Central and South America ramped up production and provided a ready supply of green beans. If the events of the Boston Tea Party on 6th December 1773 wasn’t enough to get America drinking coffee, the War of 1812, which temporarily cut off tea shipments as well as seeing America adopt all things French, including coffee, was enough to secure coffee as the national drink.

  No one gained more from this than Brazil, where coffee was seen less as agriculture and more as industry – an approach that remains largely in place even today. Huge swathes of land in the Paraíba River area, near the city of Rio de Janeiro, were swallowed up to coffee plantations, employing the efforts of entire legions of slaves and lining the pockets of the super-rich coffee barons. By 1920, Brazil claimed up to 80 per cent of the world’s coffee supply; today it is around 35 per cent.

  Unfortunately the themes of slavery, inequality and capitalism were not unique to Brazilian coffee history. The passage of this black gold through the 19th and 20th centuries sees, time and time again, the interference of the Europeans and later on the Americans, who leveraged their economic might to quietly manipulate or brashly and unashamedly bend a coffee-producing nation to their will. For many of these countries, coffee became a ball and chain that bridled them in their early developmental stages, and served only to fulfil the needs of wealthy western nations. In many African coffee-producing countries, colonialism, mostly under the British and Belgians, crippled and constricted development. The likes of Kenya and Malawi had no ownership or control over their farms, but things were even worse in Burundi where, in 1933, every farmer in the Belgian- controlled central African nation was forced to grow a minimum of 50 coffee trees.

  Even when decolonization began after World War II, many of the world’s coffee-producing countries continued to struggle through civil uprising, social upheaval, economic depression, political instability and foreign trade embargoes, not to mention coffee leaf rust (see page 28), coffee market instability and drought. And in far too many cases the newly installed governments of these damaged nations were no better than the ones that had come before. The stories of such acts make for depressing reading, such as the indigenous families of Guatemala who were displaced from their land to make way for coffee plantations, or the indigo farmers of El Salvador who received little or no compensation when their smallholdings were seized by the state to grow coffee.

  China is famous for its tea-drinking, but even this backstreet in Chengdu has not escaped the Starbucks treatment.

  It wasn’t all doom and gloom, of course, but squeaky-clean success stories are few and far between. In Central America, it is Costa Rica that stands as the pin-up coffee nation, and this is partly thanks to a government that has, for almost 200 years, gently encouraged its citizens to grow coffee – at one time they even gave away coffee seeds and land for free!

  In general, the 20th century saw a continuous rise in demand for coffee. Coffee consumption in the US grew more or less every year, reaching a peak in 1946, when the average American was consuming nearly 1 kg/2.2 lbs a month – twice that of the figures for 1900. The popularity of instant soluble coffee has increased American imports, and this in turn drove the market for cheaper robusta coffee (see page 24), which has helped put coffee-producing countries like Vietnam on the map.

  Prior to the introduction of instant coffee, the past 200 years has seen the dynamic between green coffee and the consumer change significantly. Coffee began as an exotic drink that was served to people who visited coffee houses, before evolving into something that was both roasted and brewed in the family home. The shift to buying pre-roasted coffee took much longer than it probably should have and this was largely down to (quite rightly) consumer fear about shady counterfeit coffee, made from chicory, peas, corn… pretty much anything. An important law was passed in Germany in 1875 that forbade the sale of ‘substitute’ coffee beans marketed as coffee. Counterfeit and adulterated coffee had been blighting the German market for some time, with one journal for housewives, published in 1845, advising women to wash their coffee beans before grinding to check if ink leaches out. The new legislation did great things for consumer faith in off-the-shelf roasted coffee though, rapidly killing off the home-roasting tradition, while hugely increasing demand for commercially roasted coffee.

  The average mid-20th century coffee consumer was furnished with much more information than most of us are today, as this advertisement for Chase & Sanborn Coffee shows.

  It might seem hypocritical to celebrate the death of home roa
sting in a book that teaches you how to roast at home (see pages 58–59) but I think it goes without saying that things have moved on since then. It’s important to note, though, that Germany was perhaps more ahead of the time that any other nation in creating a stable commercial coffee roasting industry with quality at its core, which goes some way towards explaining why German coffee roasters are the most sought after.

  THE EVOLUTION OF THE CAFé

  For most of the world it has been the rise of espresso drinking culture that has driven coffee consumption outside of the home over the past 50 years. In Europe, the Italians did an exceptional job of arousing a sense of romance and passion in us when it comes to the no-longer-so-simple act of drinking a cup of coffee. Espresso bars first appeared in the 1950s, in London, Melbourne, Wellington and San Francisco, and were initially perceived by many as fake, showy, overly-stylized and downright weird. The sociologist, Richard Hobbart described that atmosphere of one London espresso bar in 1957 as ‘spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk’. Those that frequented such establishments tended to be of the younger generation and were labelled by their elders as ‘wild, sexually promiscuous and irresponsible’ – although this seems a common complaint between one generation and the next. It seems plausible to me that those who were embracing the espresso bar were experiencing a taste of not just a new type of coffee, but also of the enlightenment and liberation that had been granted to those who frequented the coffee houses of the 17th century.

  Over the decades that followed, the knee-jerk reaction that had initially fought to culturally fendoff the espresso bar slackened into an embrace, as all things Continental became a badge of honour. The espresso machine became an icon of modernity in its time, and remains a powerful statement of well-cultured taste even today.