Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  The smell now is exotic and overwhelming. She pours the first round of the brew into small three-ounce cups, without handles, along with a spoonful of sugar. Everyone sips, murmuring appreciation. The coffee is thick, with some of the grounds suspended in the drink. When the cup is drained, however, most of the sediment remains on the bottom.

  Twice more, the hostess adds a bit of water and brings the coffee to a boil for more servings. Then the guests take their leave.

  Coffee Goes Arab

  Once the Ethiopians discovered coffee, it was only a matter of time until the drink spread through trade with the Arabs across the narrow band of the Red Sea. It is possible that when the Ethiopians invaded and ruled Yemen for some fifty years in the sixth century, they deliberately set up coffee plantations. The Arabs took to the stimulating drink. (According to legend, Mohammed proclaimed that under the invigorating influence of coffee he could “unhorse forty men and possess forty women.”) They began cultivating the trees, complete with irrigation ditches, in the nearby mountains, calling it qahwa, an Arab word for wine—from which the name coffee derives. Others believe that the name “coffee” derives from (1) the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, (2) the Arab word quwwa (power), or (3) kafta, the drink made from the khat plant.

  At first the Arab Sufi monks adopted coffee as a drink that would allow them to stay awake for midnight prayers more easily. While coffee was first considered a medicine or religious aid, it soon enough slipped into everyday use. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes, reserved for ceremonial imbibing. For those who did not have such means, coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, sprang up. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item.

  As the drink gained in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. “The patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes,” Ralph Hattox notes in his history of the Arab coffeehouses, “ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.”

  When Khair-Beg, the young governor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee, like wine, must be outlawed by the Koran, and he induced his religious, legal, and medical advisers to agree. Thus, in 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were forcibly closed.

  The ban lasted only until the Cairo sultan, a habitual coffee drinker, heard about it and reversed the edict. Other Arab rulers and religious leaders, however, also denounced coffee during the course of the 1500s. The Grand Vizier Kuprili of Constantinople, for example, fearing sedition during a war, closed the city’s coffeehouses. Anyone caught drinking coffee was soundly cudgeled. Offenders found imbibing a second time were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the Bosporus. Even so, many continued to drink coffee in secret, and eventually the ban was withdrawn.

  Why did coffee drinking persist in the face of persecution in these early Arab societies? The addictive nature of caffeine provides one answer, of course; yet there is more to it. Coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects. Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry, and irreverence in equal measure. So important did the brew become in Turkey that a lack of sufficient coffee provided grounds for a woman to seek a divorce.

  Smugglers, New Cultivation, and Arrival in the Western World

  The Ottoman Turks occupied Yemen in 1536, and soon afterward the coffee bean became an important export throughout the Turkish Empire. The beans generally were exported from the Yemeni port of Mocha, so the coffee from that region took on the name of the port. The trade route involved shipping the coffee to Suez and transporting it by camel to Alexandrian warehouses, where it was picked up by French and Venetian merchants. Because the coffee trade had become a major source of income, the Turks jealously guarded their monopoly over the trees’ cultivation in Yemen. No berries were allowed to leave the country unless they first had been steeped in boiling water or partially roasted to prevent germination.

  Inevitably, these precautions were circumvented. Sometime during the 1600s a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan smuggled out seven seeds by taping them to his stomach and successfully cultivated them in southern India, in the mountains of Mysore. In 1616 the Dutch, who dominated the world’s shipping trade, managed to transport a tree to Holland from Aden. From its offspring the Dutch began growing coffee in Ceylon in 1658. In 1699 another Dutchman transplanted trees from Malabar to Java, followed by cultivation in Sumatra, Celebes, Timor, Bali, and other islands in the East Indies. For many years to come, the production of the Dutch East Indies determined the price of coffee in the world market.

  During the 1700s Java and Mocha became the most famous and sought-after coffees, and those words are still synonymous with the black brew, though little high-quality coffee currently comes from Java, and Mocha ceased operation as a viable port in 1869 with the completion of the Suez Canal.

  At first Europeans didn’t know what to make of the strange new brew. In 1610 traveling British poet Sir George Sandys noted that the Turks sat “chatting most of the day” over their coffee, which he described as “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.” He added, however, that it “helpeth, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacrity.”

  Europeans eventually took to coffee with a passion. Pope Clement VIII, who died in 1605, supposedly tasted the Muslim drink at the behest of his priests, who wanted him to ban it. “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious,” he reputedly exclaimed, “that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”

  In the first half of the seventeenth century, coffee was still an exotic beverage and, like other such rare substances as sugar, cocoa, and tea, initially was used primarily as an expensive medicine by the upper classes. Over the next fifty years, however, Europeans were to discover the social as well as medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink. By the 1650s coffee was sold on Italian streets by aquacedratajo, or lemonade vendors, who dispensed chocolate and liquor as well. Venice’s first coffeehouse opened in 1683. Named for the drink it served, the caffè (spelled café elsewhere in Europe) quickly became synonymous with relaxed companionship, animated conversation, and tasty food.

  Surprisingly, given their subsequent enthusiasm for coffee, the French lagged behind the Italians and British in adopting the coffeehouse. In 1669 a new Turkish ambassador, Soliman Aga, introduced coffee at his sumptuous Parisian parties, inspiring a craze for all things Turkish. Male guests, given voluminous dressing gowns, learned to loll comfortably without chairs in the luxurious surroundings and to drink the exotic new beverage. Still, it appeared to be only a novelty.

  French doctors, threatened by the medicinal claims made for coffee, went on the counterattack in Marseilles in 1679: “We note with horror that this beverage . . . has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine.” Then, in a fine burst of pseudoscience, one young physician blasted coffee, asserting that it “dried up the cerebrospinal fluid and the convolutions . . . the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence.” Six years later, however, Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, another French physician, wrote a book strongly defending coffee, and by 1696 one Paris doctor was prescribing coffee enemas to “sweeten” the lower bowel and freshen the complexion.

  It wasn’t until 1689 when François Procope, an Italian immigrant, opened his Café de Procope directly opposite the Comédie Française that the famous French coffeehouse took root. Soon French actors, authors, dramatists, and musicians were meeting there for coffee and literary conversations. In the next century the café attracted notables such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Dider
ot, and a visiting Benjamin Franklin. Coffee also provided a living for fortune-tellers, who claimed to read coffee grounds.

  The French historian Michelet described the advent of coffee as “the auspicious revolution of the times, the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament.” Certainly coffee lessened the intake of alcohol, while the cafés provided a wonderful intellectual stew that ultimately spawned the French Revolution. The coffeehouses of continental Europe were egalitarian meeting places where, as the food writer Margaret Visser notes, “men and women could, without impropriety, consort as they had never done before. They could meet in public places and talk.”

  Increasingly they did so over coffee that was not nearly so harsh a brew as the Turks made. In 1710, rather than boiling coffee, the French first made it by the infusion method, with powdered coffee suspended in a cloth bag, over which boiling water was poured. Soon they also discovered the joys of sweetened “milky coffee.” The Marquise de Sévigné declared this form of coffee “the nicest thing in the world,” and many French citizens took to café au lait, particularly for breakfast.

  French writer Honoré de Balzac did not trifle with such milky coffee, though. He consumed finely pulverized roasted coffee on an empty stomach with virtually no water. The results were spectacular. “Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop.” Finally, his creative juices flowing, Balzac could write. “Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

  Kolschitzky and Camel Fodder

  Coffee arrived in Vienna a bit later than in France. In July 1683 the Turkish army, threatening to invade Europe, massed outside Vienna for a prolonged siege. The count in charge of the Viennese troops desperately needed a messenger who could pass through the Turkish lines to reach nearby Polish troops who would come to the rescue. Georg Franz Kolschitzky, who had lived in the Arab world for many years, took on the job, disguised in a Turkish uniform. On September 12, in a decisive battle, the Turks were routed.

  The fleeing Turks left tents, oxen, camels, sheep, honey, rice, grain, gold—and five hundred huge sacks filled with strange-looking beans that the Viennese thought must be camel fodder. Having no use for camels, they began to burn the bags. Kolschitzky, catching a whiff of that familiar odor, intervened. “Holy Mary!” he yelled. “That is coffee that you are burning! If you don’t know what coffee is, give the stuff to me. I can find a good use for it.” Having observed the Turkish customs, he knew the rudiments of roasting, grinding, and brewing, and he soon opened the Blue Bottle, among the first Viennese cafés. Like the Turks, he sweetened the coffee considerably, but he also strained out the grounds and added a big dollop of milk.2

  Within a few decades, coffee practically fueled the intellectual life of the city. “The city of Vienna is filled with coffee houses,” wrote a visitor early in the 1700s, “where the novelists or those who busy themselves with newspapers delight to meet.” Unlike rowdy beer halls, the cafés provided a place for lively conversation and mental concentration.

  Coffee historian Ian Bersten believes that the Arab taste for black coffee, and the widespread European (and eventually American) habit of taking coffee with milk, owes something to genetics. The Anglo-Saxons could tolerate milk, while Mediterranean peoples—Arabs, Greek Cypriots, and southern Italians—tended to be lactose-intolerant. That is why they continue to take their coffee straight, if sometimes well sweetened. “From the two ends of Europe,” writes Bersten, “there eventually developed two totally different ways to brew this new commodity—either filtered in Northern Europe or espresso style in Southern Europe. The intolerance to milk may have even caused cappuccinos to be smaller in Italy so that milk intolerance problems could be minimized.”

  Lovelier Than a Thousand Kisses

  Coffee and coffeehouses reached Germany in the 1670s. By 1721 there were coffeehouses in most major German cities. For quite a while the coffee habit remained the province of the upper classes. Many physicians warned that it caused sterility or stillbirths. In 1732 the drink had become controversial (and popular) enough to inspire Johann Sebastian Bach to write his humorous Coffee Cantata, in which a daughter begs her stern father to allow her this favorite vice:Dear father, do not be so strict! If I can’t have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I’m just like a dried up piece of roast goat! Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee, and if anyone wishes to please me, let him present me with—coffee!3

  Later in the century, coffee-obsessed Ludwig van Beethoven ground precisely sixty beans to brew a cup.

  By 1777 the hot beverage had become entirely too popular for Frederick the Great, who issued a manifesto in favor of Germany’s more traditional drink: “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors.” Four years later the king forbade coffee’s roasting except in official government establishments, forcing the poor to resort to coffee substitutes, such as roast chicory root, dried fig, barley, wheat, or corn. They also managed to get hold of real coffee beans and roast them clandestinely, but government spies, pejoratively named coffee smellers by the populace, put them out of business. Eventually coffee outlived all the efforts to stifle it in Germany. Frauen particularly loved their Kaffeeklatches, gossipy social interludes that gave the brew a more feminine image.

  Every other European country also discovered coffee during the same period. Green beans reached Holland by way of Dutch traders. The Scandinavian countries were slower to adopt it—though today they boast the highest per capita consumption on earth. Nowhere did coffee have such a dynamic and immediate impact, however, as in England.

  The British Coffee Invasion

  Like a black torrent the coffee rage drenched England, beginning in 1650 at Oxford University, where Jacobs, a Lebanese Jew, opened the first coffeehouse for “some who delighted in noveltie.” Two years later in London, Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, opened a coffeehouse and printed the first coffee advertisement, a broadside touting “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink,” described asa simple innocent thing, composed into a Drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, lasting an hour before, and not Eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured.

  Pasqua Rosée made extravagant medicinal claims; his 1652 ad asserted that coffee would aid digestion, cure headaches, coughs, consumption, dropsy, gout, and scurvy, and prevent miscarriages. More practically, he wrote, “It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch; and therefore you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.”

  By 1700 there were, by some accounts, more than 2,000 London coffeehouses, occupying more premises and paying more rent than any other trade. They came to be known as penny universities, because for that price one could purchase a cup of coffee and sit for hours listening to extraordinary conversations—or, as a 1657 newspaper advertisement put it, “PUBLICK INTERCOURSE.” Each coffeehouse specialized in a different type of clientele. In one, physicians could be consulted. Others served Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, Jews, literati, merchants, traders, fops, Whigs, Tories, army officers, actors, lawyers, clergy, or wits. The coffeehouses provided England’s first egalitarian meeting place, where a man was expected to chat with his tablemates whether he knew them or not.

  Edward Lloyd’s establishment catered primarily to seafarers and merchants, and he regularly prepared �
�ships’ lists” for underwriters who met there to offer insurance. Thus began Lloyd’s of London, the famous insurance company. Other coffeehouses spawned the Stock Exchange, the Bankers’ Clearing-house, and newspapers such as The Tattler and The Spectator.

  Before the advent of coffee, the British imbibed alcohol, often in Falstaffian proportions. “What immoderate drinking in every place!” complained a British commentator in 1624. “How they flock to the tavern! [Here they] drown their wits, seeth their brains in ale.” Fifty years later another observed that “coffee-drinking hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations; for whereas formerly Apprentices and Clerks with others, used to take their mornings’ draught in Ale, Beer or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakefull and civill drink.”

  Not that most coffeehouses were universally uplifting places; rather, they were chaotic, smelly, wildly energetic, and capitalistic. “There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheese-store,” one contemporary noted. “Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking, some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge.”