When the sweet Poison of the Treacherous Grape
Had acted on the world a general rape;…
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome liquor
That heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker.
Anonymous Puritan, 1674
THE TEETOALING PURITANS JUMPED ON THIS “BLACK WINE” AS A God-given alternative to beer. Better than an alternative, because it was thought to cure drunkenness. Sylvester DuFour’s pamphlet Traitez nouveau et curieux du café, du thé, et du chocolat reported that coffee “sobers you up instantaneously, or in any event it sobers up those who are not fully intoxicated.” Nonsense, of course, although recent tests indicate that the equivalent of two cups of coffee actually reverses some of alcohol’s milder effects in a person with up to 0.04 percent alcohol blood levels (0.1% is considered intoxicated). This kind of mild alcoholic fog, however, was what most plagued Europe at the time, the “dizziness in the brain” that struck clerks after their midmorning beer break, according to private correspondence from the time. The growth of coffeehouses not only sobered up the clerks but slowly ended the midmorning pint altogether, according to historian James Howell. In 1652 there was exactly one coffeehouse in London. By 1700 there were over two thousand.
The confluence of the Puritans and coffee, however, did not exist on the Continent. In the early 1600s Pope Clement VIII was even asked by his bishops to ban the “diabolical hell brew,” apparenty on the grounds that its black color and ritualistic use by the Sufis made it a Satanic perversion of the Eucharist wine. He declined—after trying a cup and liking it—but the Catholic heebie-jeebies helped ensure that continental Europeans kept breakfasting on beer-soup for almost one hundred years after their English competitors had made the switch.
Aside from sobering up the workplace, coffeehouses gave Brits an alternative to taverns in which to meet and talk. Taverns were not the safest place to discuss politics or religion. Everybody was armed or drunk, usually both, and proprietors sensibly discouraged heated discussions. Coffeehouses, on the other hand, encouraged political debate, which was precisely why King Charles II banned them in 1675 (he withdrew the ban in eleven days). Even worse, from the monarchists’ point of view, cafés posted rules urging:
Gentry, tradesmen, sit down together,
Pre-eminence of place none here should mind
But take the next fit seat that he can find
Nor need any, if finer person come,
R ise up to assigne to them his room.
This democratic inclination manifested itself most forcefully in London’s famous Turk’s Head Coffeehouse, where the ballot box, the foundation of modern democracy, first appeared so customers could safely voice their opinions on controversial political topics. This innovation occurred after the repressions of Oliver the Great and ensured that the government spies who plagued the café could not identify “traitors.”
There were, of course, some problems. Hot drinks were relatively rare at the time. DuFour had to advise his readers not to lap them up like a dog, “nor put your tongue in the cup.” People were confused over the spoon’s role, using it either to “cool” this oddly hot brew by pouring it back and forth or to eat it like soup. They added mustard and champagne and mint and molasses and roasted carrots. (Amazingly, English coffee, as horrible as it was, was better than their first tea, the leaves of which the Brits ate as a boiled vegetable.)
Coffee, however, was more than a mere substitute for beer. It is a stimulant, both physical and mental, and its usurpation of a depressant like alcohol caused changes that echoed, to a word, the ancient prayer of the coffee-chewing cults of Ethiopia, which goes, you may recall, like this:
Coffeepot give us peace
coffeepot let children grow
let our wealth swell
please protect us from evils.
Coffee’s ability to “swell our wealth” was manifested most noticeably in Britain, where coffeehouses became headquarters for some of the world’s most powerful businesses, including Lloyd’s of London (Lloyd’s Coffeehouse) and the London Shipping Exchange (Baltic Coffeehouse) and East India Company (Jerusalem Café). The physical design of British coffeehouses also set the pace for the modern office. Tables set aside for certain groups of merchants turned into curtained stalls for greater privacy. These became offices or cubicles, which to this day remain gathered about a common pot. Until recently the messengers at the British Stock Exchange were called waiters, a holdover from the not too distant days when the exchange was an actual coffeehouse with waiters.
Other cafés evolved into centers for the arts and sciences. Isaac Newton hung out at the Grecian Coffeehouse; Will’s Café was the haunt of writers like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and painters like Hogarth frequented Old Slaughter’s. As cafés became more specialized, keeping current by visiting became impractical. Then a man named Richard Steele decided to publish a weekly compilation of the most interesting gossip collected from the coffeehouses. To help keep the café’s flavor, each section had a “correspondent’s desk” at the appropriate establishment; poetry came from Will’s Coffeehouse, foreign news from St. James Coffeehouse, arts and entertainment from White’s. Steele also had his “reporters” write in dialogue to give the reader the illusion he was actually sitting in a café overhearing a real conversation. Up until then, the writing of lifelike dialogue had been viewed as being beneath an author’s notice. “Until the time…writers had not practiced the studied simplicity of true conversation,” writes English literary historian Harold Routh. “It was here [at the coffeehouse] that men learnt to unravel literary ideals in a style that was colloquial as well as cultured.”
Intelligent people discussing interesting things in an intelligible manner. Quite a concept. Steele’s newsletter became Tatler, the first modern magazine; his idea of correspondents and sections provided the prototype for the modern newspaper, the one institution that all agree is essential for a vital democracy (London’s second oldest newspaper is Lloyd’s News, which began as a bulletin board in Lloyd’s Coffeehouse.) Small wonder that pamphleteers of the time wrote that “coffee and commonwealth came in together…to make a free and sober nation.” Coffeehouses had made civilized conversation into a popular sport.
Measuring how recreational drugs alter societies is almost impossible. Analyzing how they affect the individual, however, is a little easier. If you drink three liters of ale, your ability to remember anything you were taught decreases by up to 80 percent. Conversely, coffee increases memory capacity. Drunk, you’d be more likely to resort to violence. More importantly, if pregnant women drank only one third the average three liters of ale a day—and since drinking was considered healthy, there’s no reason to think they didn’t—their newborns’ IQ-level would have been diminished 7 percent. If they drank one liter above that average, almost half of their children would have been born retarded due to fetal alcohol syndrome.
Based on this kind of reasoning, one might conclude that the average medieval European was a thuggish idiot. That’s silly. But try having a liter of strong ale with breakfast tomorrow (that’s three bottles) and see how your day goes. We all know how it went when Europe changed from a culture addicted to depressants to one high on stimulants (at least during the day). Within two hundred years of Europe’s first cup, famine and the plague were historical footnotes. Governments became more democratic, slavery vanished, and the standards of living and literacy went through the roof. War became less frequent and more horrible. For better or worse, the ancient Ethiopian coffee prayer had been answered with a vengeance.2
I STARTED THIS COFFEECENTRIC HISTORY OF HUMANITY IN JEST. After all, people have made similar charts based on the rise and fall of the hemline, and it would be absurd, even for me, to fail to acknowledge that historic events are spawned by a myriad of circumstances. But the coincidences at times seem overwhelming. When coffee was the sole provenance of the Arabs, their civilization flourished beyond all others. Once the Ottomans got hold of the
bean, they became the most powerful and tolerant nation on the planet. Its early appearance in Great Britain helped jump-start that nation’s drive for world dominance. It was in the cafés of Paris that the French Revolution was born. Napoleon, a coffee lover equal to any, then led his countrymen to the domination of Europe, only to fall almost immediately after foolishly banning Paris’s beloved petit noir; he repented, and his dying request was for a cup of St. Helena’s espresso. As colonists, the Americans actually made tea illegal.They replaced it with joe, causing an inevitable power shift that continues today, with Japan, traditionally tea-consuming, now doting on the finest jamaican Blue Mountain.
Only three times has the West voluntarily dosed itself with mind-altering agents: alcohol starting at an unknown date, caffeine in the seventeenth century, and psychedelics in the late twentieth. How alcohol affected early society is impossible to measure, and the jury is still out on psychedelics. But it’s worth noting that coffee (or caffeine) and psychedelics have been associated with strikingly similar cultural revolutions. Richard Steele drinking coffee and talking about reforming the monarchy is the same person as Abbie Hoffman smoking a joint and plotting how to resist the Vietnam War. Voltaire’s caffeinated cynicism was as symptomatic of his era’s favorite buzz as Gins-burg’s was of his. Politically, the human rights movements of the 1700s (antimonarchical) and the 1900s (civil rights) both came to fruition as their associated pharmacies entered the mainstream. The coffee-crazed mobs of the French Revolution bear a certain resemblance to the pot-addled Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s. All this, by the way, is why American pundits should find consolation in the popularity of drugs like cocaine: despite their negative effects, it indicates Yanks still view getting wired as the preferred state of being. They should reserve their wails for the day when heroin and hot milk become the drugs of choice.
Drugs directly alter human behavior, productivity, and even reason. I’m not saying that medieval man was stupider than his modern cousin. He was merely decaffeinated and much like you or me before our first cup: grouchy and muddleheaded. It’s also worth noting that the faults associated with alcohol (sloppy reasoning, credulity, and excessive emotion) were the vices of the medieval age, while the ills of excessive coffee drinking (overanalysis and short attention span) appear to plague our era. Some historians, however, have suggested that there is indeed a Precaffeinated Man, one physiologically distinct from Homo coffea. The renowned Wolfgang Schivelbush, in his book Tastes of Paradise, argues that the “massive, heavy body types typical of seventeenth-century paintings had their physiological explanation in high beer and beer soup consumption.” The “insertion” of coffee, he continues, “achieved chemically … what the Protestants sought to fulfill spiritually” by “drying” up the beer-soaked bums and replacing them with “rationalistic, forward-looking bodies” typical of the lean cynics of the nineteenth century.
Ridiculous? Perhaps. If you really want ridiculous, though, try this one. Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa. What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries? What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to new ways of looking at old problems, much as it did Europeans? Could this group of berry nibblers be the Missing Link, and that memory of the bright but bitter-tasting fruit be the archetype for the story of the Garden of Eden?
Now that’s ridiculous.
OF COURSE, NOT EVERYBODY AGREES WITH THE THESIS JUST outlined. A German sociologist of some sort had gone so far as to propose the exact opposite, that coffee caused the downfall of great civilizations. So from Vienna I took a train toward Germany. First the Austrian police searched me, then the Germans. Peoples smell faded. Nobody smiled. It was all too typical.
The fact that this sociologist was stationed in Munich was no surprise. München is the home of the famous Oktoberfest, an annual get-together where thousands of beer lovers from all over the world (that means Australia) gather to drink themselves into a hysterical state of idiocy. It’s the last great drinking festival from the medieval period and the perfect place for the last great anticoffee propagandist, Dr. Josef Joffe (pronounced “jof-fee”).
“Ah, the Oktoberfest is an event,” was Dr. Joffe’s noncommittal comment. “But you have misunderstood my theory. I call it the Joffe Coffee Theory of Expansionism.”
Joffe was a surprise on two counts. I’d expected some sort of crank. He turned out to be a trained sociologist and the head political editor of the German equivalent of The New York Times, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a pleasantly bearish fellow who gave every appearance of enjoying the good things in life, including coffee, which his private secretary served immediately. So at the very least he was a well-paid crank.
Neither was his theory what I’d expected. It had come to him when, during a visit to Soviet Russia, he complained to his KGB handler about the awful coffee. The KGB dude replied that it was really the Kremlin’s answer to America’s neutron bomb—both killed people but left the buildings intact.
“It was then that I first saw this theory, this vision,” said Joffe. “Bad coffee equals expansionism, imperialism, and war; good coffee drips with civility and pacifism and lassitude. I prove it. Quick—who makes the best coffee in the world?”
“The Italians?”
“And when was the last time the Italians won a war?”
“Hmm—what, A.D. 300?”
“And when did you Americans finally learn how to make coffee?”
“Oh, I guess in the sixties sometime.”
“And when was the Vietnam War?”
“I see,” I said. “Am I to understand that you’re saying, for instance, that the current round of Chinese expansionism is the result of their inability to brew a decent cup of coffee?”
“Absolutely.” He gestured to the window. “If we really wanted to end Chinese aggression today we would bomb them with Gaggia coffeemakers.”
“Perhaps the UN peacemakers should carry Melita drips and Ethiopian Sidamo.”
“Instead of machine guns? Precisely.”
“What’s the coffee like at the UN, do you know?”
He shook his head sadly. “It’s not a pretty thought.”
So his theory was pro-joe; or was it? His secretary brought in more coffee. Josef took a call. Maybe it was the sound of Josef speaking in German, a language so elegant and cruel, but something was bothering me. Dr. Joffe was clearly a lover of the cup, and his theory appeared to be the product of an enlightened mind. But when I pondered its parameters I saw the ominous truth: if bad coffee makes warmongers and good coffee creates wimps, all coffee, ipso facto, is evil.
It was, in fact, the old German anticoffee propaganda reborn. Germany has been the home for Europe’s most voracious coffee haters since a ban issued by Frederick the Great in 1777. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects,” he wrote. “Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished by beer, and the king does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied on.” Bishops urged their congregations to destroy their coffee-making equipment. Frederick even hired wounded soldiers to roam the streets sniffing for the smell of roasting beans. These “coffee sniffers” were so successful that there came to be two types of coffee in Germany: “bean-coffee” (real coffee) and “coffee” (made from burnt bread, caramelized carrots, chicory, and God knows what else.)
“Yes, I remember that,” said Joffe when he got off the phone. “We called it muck-fuck. Yes, yes, you pronounce it just like that, but you spell it mocha-faux. Means fake mocha. You must know the song that is sung to the musical notes of C-A-F-F-E-E? It goes ‘Trink nicht so viel Caff-ee’ (Drink Not So Much Coffee). I think the tune is from a piece by Mozart.”
Joffe’s song is actually a remnant of yet a second antijava campaign which urged Germans to drink only chicory coffee because buying the real thing enriched “enemies” in France and Holland. Packages of chicory brew were decorated with labels showing a German peasan
t sowing chicory and waving away bags of coffee, under the caption “Healthy and Wealthy Without You.”
It was so successful that Germany remained the sole decaffeinated and nondemocratic European power until World War I, two lacks that set the stage for the rise of the Nazis. It’s worth noting that Hitler gained his following by speaking in bars, not cafés. To be fair, Gandhi, who was a vegetarian like Hitler, disapproved of coffee as well.
But we mustn’t dwell on old wrongs. Germany has made amends and now serves some of the best coffee around.
“All this also proves my theory,” said Joffe. “Before the war, Germans made the worst coffee in the world and, look, it got them all the way to Moscow! Since we learned how to make a cup, we have become as aggressive as sloths. Admittedly,” he added, “this does not look good for America.”
“I don’t understand.”
“America used to make atrocious coffee and great bombs. But since Starbucks they’ve been unable to win a war. If Starbucks expands unchecked, the Age of American greatness will end in an ocean of hazelnut and amaretto—you just don’t fight with a Frappuccino in hand.”
“This sounds fine, Joffe,” I said, confronting him with my suspicions. “But if good coffee means decadence and bad coffee means war, how can coffee be anything but the devil’s cup?”
“My friend, no, no, no.” He shook his silver mane. “Ask yourself one question—is war a good thing?”
“Of course not,” I murmured, taking another sip. “War is bad.”
“Then good coffee is good.” He unwrapped a cigarillo and lit up. “And bad coffee is bad. What could be more logical?”
“I like you, Joffe,” I said. This was true. I mean, I didn’t want to kiss him, but I might have sat in his lap. “Have you discussed this theory with other sociologists?”
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