History of Coffee: from devil’s brew to our favourite beverage
57:29 Share

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught...

She's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are grinding our beans, popping on the kettle and plunging our cafetiere as we learn all about the history of coffee. And to help us get caffeinated and educated, we've invited over two very special coffee guests.

In History Corner, he's a research professor in history at the University of Hertfordshire, where he's a historian of consumption, especially the history of coffee. Maybe you've read his book, Coffee, A Global History, or listened to his podcast series, A History of Coffee. It's Professor Jonathan Morris. Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you, Greg.

Hey!

I'm actually fuming because I heard that you tried to get Sabrina Carpenter for this episode. Yeah. She was busy doing the Grammys or something. I was busy watching the Grammys. So actually... A key important question here. I'm relying on you. Do you drink coffee? I restrict my coffee intake because I like the smell of coffee. Right. And I like it as a sort of cultural... As sort of a cultural...

It makes me feel like I want to die. Perfect guess for the podcast. But I do, I am, I'm sort of like, inoculising, that's not a word. I'm sort of building up my tolerance to coffee. And sometimes people don't know that it causes such a reaction on me. So if I'm feeling chaotic, I will occasionally order coffee. No one else knows that it's a big moment, but it is like, it's terrible. Having a coffee is really like opening a vortex into another reality for me.

I don't drink coffee at all. I don't know anything about coffee. So, Jonathan, I'm assuming you're a coffee drinker. I am a coffee drinker. I'm beginning to think it's also a murder weapon within the context of this studio. All right. And you're going to talk us through the history of coffee. So we're going to learn plenty today. So what do you know? ♪

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And whether you've got a crippling caffeine problem, whether you keep it decaf, whether like Sophie, it is a dangerous thing for you, or if you're like me, you just can't stand the bitterness. You all know what coffee is. I don't know if it explains to you what coffee is. In terms of pop culture, coffee is just part of our life. Coffee shops crop up all over our favourite pop

at pop culture. You've got Central Perk in Friends. You've got Luke's Diner in Gilmore Girls. You've got Will Ferrell enjoying the best cup of coffee in the world in Elf. Giles from Buffy, featuring in the Sexy Nescafe adverts from the 90s. You've got Sabrina Carpenter, already mentioned by Sophie, the espresso summertime hit. And my personal fave would be Paul Rudd ranting in Role Models about the stupidly inconsistent name of all the different coffee sizes. Venti means 20, he shouts. But what about the history of coffee? How did it become the world's favourite beverage?

And what do goats have to do with it? Let's find out. Right, Professor Jonathan, can we start with the basics? I'm pretty sure Nespresso pods do not grow on trees. That is correct. They do not. Good. So what is coffee in the wild? We call it a tree, but it's really more like a shrub. It kind of grows underneath, as it were, the forest canopy. So you go into the forest, you'd find these shrubs. They'd be about sort of eight feet tall, something like that.

It has beautiful white flowers. Those turn into red cherries. Inside the red cherries are the seeds. The seeds, which we for some reason call beans, are what we use to make the coffee. So we have to kind of get the seeds out and turn that into coffee. And there's caffeine in those seeds beans? There is caffeine in those seeds beans. And reputedly, it's there to put off some of the insects that might otherwise prey on the coffee. However, it also enchants the bees that pollinate it.

Oh, that's very wholesome. Sophie, maybe you're being enchanted. I'm being enchanted. I want to take some Joe back to the hive. And it's the seeds, beans...

that we import green and then roast to get the colour of coffee that we know and the smell of coffee that we know and the taste. Where in the world do these beans, trees, shrubs, whatever they are, grow? Where is their natural habitat? So the natural habitat is really in Ethiopia, southwest Ethiopia. And from there they have spread around the world. There are about 120 species of coffee, but the one that we use the most, which is called Arabica, is of course from Ethiopia. Lovely. Mmm.

There is a story, there is a sort of lovely myth that people like to talk about, that the first time people got hooked on caffeine in these wild coffee plants involved an animal. Sophie, do you want to guess what the animal was and what the story was? Oh, do I get any clues on the animal? Sure. Is it a big animal? No, medium-sized. OK, I feel from context clues...

of being in this room earlier, you said goats? I did say goats. And I feel it might have been a goat. It is a goat. So tell me the story. Recount for me this fabled myth. Okay, so there's like a goat. He's just a guy, but he's also a goat. And he lives on a farm. There's a farmer who's called Guy. He has a goat.

And then he realises that his goat is acting like really unconventionally. It's an old goat, but he's acting more like a kid, you know? He's got a spring in his step. He's fighting trolls. He's got loads of energy. And he's like, what? Fighting trolls is a lovely reference. Thank you so much. We go deep into the fairy tale lore. And he's like, what's going on? My goat's mad. My goat's been cursed by a witch.

Yeah, is it like unconventional goat behaviour? I think that's pretty good. I think Sophie should be writing the origin myth. Definitely an improvement. The real origin myth, well, it's just real origin myth, it's not real. It's really about the goat herd, a guy called Caldy, and he sees his goats and they're dancing away. I see that. And he's saying, what's going on? And he's seeing that they're eating these red berries and then they're starting to dance. Caldy thinks, hmm, red berries, let's see what I can do.

takes a few berries on himself, throws some very good moves, decides to take these back, goes to the kind of scholar in his local village and the guy tries them, doesn't like them, throws them on the fire, somehow or other smells that smell that you really liked and says, oh, we should take these, grind them down, make a coffee beverage with it.

And that is the story of how coffee is formed. Okay. And that's an Ethiopian heritage. It's an Ethiopian heritage. It's really from sort of the southwest of Ethiopia. There are a few other stories. Yeah, there's one involving...

Solomon? King Solomon? Yeah, that's right. Apparently the angel Gabriel came down and said to Solomon, you know, roast and throw some coffee beans and you'll cure the illness of the entire town, you'll make them lively and active again, etc. I love that, like, animals getting intoxicated is our gateway into, like, medicine and, like...

Because I think there is a legend about the discovery of palm wine and it's because that's why I asked if it was a big animal because apparently elephants would be like sort of rutting at the trees and getting pissed. That's right. And you just have some really intense goats having like really deep conversations. Yeah. Very fast. That's our kind of mythic origins. But what about an actual historical reference, Jonathan? Have we got

something that we can say this is the first mention of coffee? I think what we can best say is we've got the first Arabic manuscript that mentions coffee that we can definitively say mentions coffee and that's written in about 1515, written by a guy with a very long name that ends in Al-Jazari. It concentrates and tells his version of the story of coffee and in it he highlights that another sort of Sufi mystic, a man called Al-Dubani,

said that the Sufis should bring over coffee to Yemen from Ethiopia to consume in place of cat, which was in short supply, because this would enable them to sort of stay awake and go into their trance-like state while they were carrying out their nightly devotions.

So that seems to be the most viable option, as it were, for what we can say is the sort of the earliest clear use of coffee in that way. But it may have been older. That's just our earliest reference. That's our earliest reference. There's bits in the famous physician who we used to call Avicenna, who kind of

I wrote loads of books. There's some references there to something that you might think is coffee, but you could equally label as almost anything else based on that description. So we don't know for sure. And what we can say is probably that obviously the indigenous people in southwest Ethiopia, in Kaffir in particular, were probably using coffee for a variety of things, but foraging the coffee, not growing it. Ethiopia to Yemen crosses across the straits and into Yemen, so we're into the Arab world. Exactly.

From Yemen, do we get it then spreading out through those sort of trade routes out through the Middle East? Yeah, essentially coffee kind of circulates through the Middle East up the Red Sea, that kind of diaspora, really the kind of sort of Islamic diaspora around there.

The big next stage is, in a sense, at a certain point, the Yemenis start growing the coffee themselves. And that's quite a big transformation. So what we can also definitively say is they are the first to cultivate coffee as opposed to forage coffee. Gotcha. And so it spreads through trade routes. You've got Mecca, Jeddah, Medina, Cairo, these big, big cities in the...

Islamic world. At what point do people go, but it tastes nice and I'm not a Sufi mystic, but could I just drink it? When does it become a beverage? Yeah, so probably relatively quickly in the 1500s. The thing is that the big question here and why this is so important in Islam is that

Is coffee licit to drink? Is coffee intoxicating? Because if it is, you shouldn't be drinking it. Right, okay. But if it is not intoxicating, then you could start drinking it. And if you could start drinking it, well, of course, then you're going to start socialising around it. So it creates the possibility, as it were, to move beyond the religious and start actually meeting up to drink coffee. So it's within the rules of Islam, you can drink coffee. Well, this becomes a very challenged thing, right? Okay.

So it kind of goes to a debate, almost goes to trial. Can you drink coffee? And it's occasioned by this pasha in Mecca,

who basically sees people drinking coffee outside the mosque and then kind of arrests them and stages a trial of whether it's legitimate to drink coffee. Ooh. Sophie, this Pasha, which means governor really, he's called, I think, Kayir Beg. Why do you think he wants to ban coffee? What do you think is a problem about it? I think it's interesting. I think maybe I sort of think it leads to licentiousness. I think maybe...

I think people mainly become more annoying when they're on coffee. When they're caffeinated. Rather than sort of like more like inspiring like libertine tendencies. I think maybe he thought it made people like distracted and less sort of easy to...

Control? Yeah, I think that's usually why substances are banned. I think there's a good instance. I mean, that's probably about right, I think, Jonathan. Yeah, I'm finding Sophie's inherent knowledge of coffee is very impressive here. Yeah, I mean, that is, I think, what we really know. Because I think what they're actually trying to ban, what certainly the Skyfield-Kybegfell threatens about, is are these people saying things that we don't want them saying to each other? Are they...

passing on ideas or doing things, you know, exactly. The upshot of this is that actually for a while, public gatherings around coffee are banned, but coffee drinking is not. But the end practice result is that actually it becomes something that people do socialise with and this moves into the creation of the coffee house, etc. So it begins to become at that point a social drink.

It's used a lot by students, for example. What a change that might be for students in the 15th century. How would that work? Yes. Gosh. So students in the 1500s, okay. And it's Suleiman the Magnificent.

He closes down the coffee houses in Istanbul and Aleppo and Damascus. And yet somehow, as you say, the coffee house culture starts to thrive. Yeah. The Ottomans basically sort of take over influence in the peninsula. We can kind of trace the way that the coffee house moves up through Aleppo, Damascus and eventually arrives into Istanbul. And Suleiman at first is very welcoming. And then 10 years later, he wants them all closed.

The reason, again, seems to be about, if you like, the fear of what might be going on in the coffee houses. The stated reasons are, you know, well, this is all a bit dubious. There might be things being consumed there that aren't actually coffee. There might be gaming. There might be gambling. There are some interesting questions about the status of the, as it were, the serving boys. So the things that he thinks are...

or articulate are wrong with coffee houses. And then there's the underlying assumption that we have that, again, is Suleiman worried that people might be going around saying he's not so magnificent. Oh, I see.

I see. Okay. By the 1600s, I think we find coffee in Europe. So how does it come into Europe, Jonathan? Yeah, it comes in a little bit before. I mean, we have the usual thing of travellers in the sort of the Middle Eastern regions reporting back on coffee. There's a clergyman from England, William Biddulph, writes a letter from Aleppo in 1600 describing coffee or describing, you know, the common drink called coffer, which is a black kind of drink made of a common pulse like peas called carver.

which being ground and milled and boiled in water, they drink it as hot as they can suffer it, which is pretty much a description of how you drink coffee today. We know in Venice, which obviously was a port city, you'd have a lot of Turkish merchants in there. One of them died in Venice in about 1575.

He was murdered, right? He was murdered. Yeah, he didn't just die, he was killed. So they had an investigation, so obviously he had to go and look at his stuff, and in it they found little coffee cups. So we kind of deduced from that that coffee was beginning to be drunk in Venice, at least by those sort of, you know, expatriate merchants. That's interesting. But he certainly had the gear, I think that's what we can say. When they went to investigate his stuff, he had the gear.

And this stuff, this is called a fincan. Is it a fincan? Yeah, a fincan. And it's a very small little cup, the historic version of what you now get in a Turkish restaurant if you have a Turkish coffee at the end of a meal. So very small. From that, then we begin to hear things about coffee being used as a medicine, sold by apothecaries, so you could be prescribed coffee. Sophie, would you take a prescription of coffee? It doesn't sound like you would do any good. I feel like it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't do good stuff for me. But I...

to take it like not medicinally but functionally to like the medicine to get you through your essay crisis I wanted to ask you actually Sophie do you know where the name cappuccino comes from? It comes from a tiny wooden boy who used to lie all the time Pretty sure that's not where it comes from Cappuccino

I, yeah, I can't. No, I'm going to stick with lying puppet boy. Strong guess. I also think that's, I wish I was like a grime MC or something because cappuccino is the best thing I've ever said. What's the root? What's the etymological? It comes from, so we have, I guess in our typical language, we have two words for cappuccino. One would be a type of monkey. Oh, yeah. The other one would be a type of monk. So it's named after the monks. It's named after the Italian cappuccino friars.

who wore brown robes. And so cappuccino is named after the type of brown robes that they wore. This is a fun one because people kind of look at a cappuccino today and think it looks like a monk because it's got the white on the top, so it must be the bald-shaved monk, right? And then it's got a little bit of brown on the outside. But actually, it originates from Vienna and it's cappuccino.

And really what it is, is the amount of milk I want in my coffee to make it the colour of the robes that Capuchins wear. Because actually Capuchins don't do tonsure. Yes. So a bit more boring than the myth. No, I love a bit more boring. That's very much over here. But that has brought us on to the idea of Catholicism and coffee. So we've already mentioned Islam and their kind of big debate over those sort of theological questions of can you have this as a licit or illicit drink?

How do you think the Pope, Pope Clement VIII, where do you think he stood on the moral question of coffee in the 1600s? I feel like maybe he was pro. Because I feel like coffee as a beverage is kind of like God's squad. It's very like, I think it gives you fervour, more diligent as well. And I think as like an alternative to maybe like alcohol, it feels maybe it's like...

a relatively new thing in Europe that could give people vim and vigour. I guess Sophie's right, although I suppose... She's right with the one problem that Pope Clement never...

as far as we know actually really did this. Oh really? Everyone tells us this is all over the internet blah de blah I'm sorry to say I've never ever managed to find any documentary proof or any evidence that this ever happened but it is a brilliant marketing story so the story goes that they took him the coffee and he sort of sips it and says this devil's drink is delicious and

We're going to baptize it. We're going to make it a good Christian thing. So we think that contextually what he's doing is claiming coffee for Christianity. In other words, what he's doing is getting away from his fear that it will be perceived as a Muslim pleasure. Okay. Except he never did. He never did. Okay.

That's a shame, though, because the line, this devil's drink is delicious, is a really good line. It's a good one. Stick that on a T-shirt. I feel like Clooney could really... Yeah, exactly. Someone phone up Mespresso and say, we've got a new marketing line for you. So we've seen in the Ottoman world that the idea of the coffeehouse could be seditious and dangerous, but also there would be intellectual activity there. People gathering, discussing, debating political ideas. Does the same thing happen in Europe? Do we see...

the sudden arrival of a kind of coffee culture that is philosophical and enlightened and scientific? In a way, yes, we do. I mean, what we certainly see is the spread of the notion of the coffee house as well as the spread of coffee. So coffee slightly predates the coffee house in the sense we have coffee in Europe in the first half of the century. In the second half of the century, we begin to see really the coffee house taking off as an institution.

Actually, this is Britain's greatest contribution to coffee in my personal view because once you kind of really go into it, actually the date suggests that the first thing that is definitively a coffee house, i.e. a place that you go, get served coffee, sit around, drink it, have a chat, is here in London in 1652 to 54 because we have a guy called Pasquare Rose who

who sets this up. There are people who talk about coffee houses being present in Italy, but when you look at those, they look more like places that sell coffee beans. So Pasquaro Rosé comes over. He is recruited by a local businessman here, comes over as his manservant, then opens his coffee house under his patronage near St. Michael's Church in Cornhill, just by the Bank of England. And with two years, he's actually got a proper coffee house.

By 1663, we've got 82 coffee houses in London. So the explosion in London is enormous. By 1735, we've got about 530 of them. Why England is quite interesting because I think the actual answer to that is because the guilds in England are quite weak. So whereas in France, there's quite a strong action about, well, which guild would be allowed to sell coffee and it takes them quite a while to work it out. In England, you know, the guilds don't have any real powers.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught...

She's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Esquerose, Greek Orthodox was it? Yeah, exactly. Immigrant to London. He published an advert for his coffee shop, which he listed coffee as having many health benefits, Sophie. He said it aided digestion, prevents drowsiness, prevents miscarriages, helps sore eyes and headaches, cures coughs, consumption, which is tuberculosis, scurvy, dropsy and gout.

What's modern? I mean, it's a wonder drug, clearly, in the 17th century. How would you market coffee now if you were going to add extra things it does for your patients? What's your additional claims? I can't think of a genuine health benefit. I mean, it does help digestion in that it makes me feel like I'm going to crack my pants. And it does help headaches and sore eyes in the sense that it aids me in achieving those.

I'm not anti-coffee. I do like it, but I think it makes stuff taste good. We'll settle on that. It's not a ringing endorsement, but we'll settle for that, Jonathan. OK, so we've heard health benefits and claims being advertised by Pascua Rose, who opens the first coffee house in London in 1652. And we get this intellectual culture in coffee houses. You know, they become places of...

More than just socialization, is that right? Yeah, that is right. I mean, there are, as you can imagine, there are different kinds of coffee houses for different kinds of people. But a lot of the coffee houses become places where people are transacting, as it were, some form of business. I'm going to mention Jonathan's because, after all, I should. And Jonathan's is really the sort of the origin of the London Stock Exchange.

traders meeting there, trading bonds, etc. Lloyds. Lloyds is a coffeehouse. So hang on, Lloyds of London. Lloyds of London. The insuring firm. The insuring firm. The stock exchange that powers the City of London and the insurance industry both start in coffeehouses. Correct.

That's quite impressive. That is quite, yeah. It feels like a very compatible, I was going to say drug, but I'm not sure it is. It's a stimulant. Stimulant. A very compatible stimulant. But then you get other ones where you kind of bring together, you know, your clientele comes together and they're a very particular kind. So you would have people who were interested in science as in science as was understood then. It's a natural philosophy at the time. Yeah, exactly. Who would come together to debate things. You would get people who are interested in politics.

who come together to debate politics. One of the origins of the ballot box is supposed to be that, you know, a ballot box was invented for holding debates in coffee houses because you then have to go around and get everyone to vote. So you get them to throw their ballot into a box. Oh, really? Yeah, absolutely.

And we also get some quite famous names from the 1600s showing up in these coffee houses to have some big, big old chats. Isaac Newton. Oh, yeah. And Edmund Halley, famous for his comet spotting abilities. They were founding members of the Royal Society of Science. They met and did a public demonstration in London's Grecian coffee house. What did they demonstrate, Sophie? What did they do? Oh, wow.

Newton and Halley. I mean, yeah, I'm thinking of like comets and gravity. I just want it to be like a sort of thumb war, but I feel like it's probably got more important than that. If I say to you dissection, what animal do you think they might be dissecting live in a coffee house?

A frog. Frog. Frog is the classic. Maybe it's a, like a, I'm going to go with... Think water. Think wet. Think aquatic. A fish? No, that's boring. Bigger. A seal. Bigger. Oh my God, they're dissecting a whale. Nearly. Jonathan? Dolphin. A dolphin!

A live dissection of a dolphin in a coffee house. Wow. Would you go? I would absolutely go. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. How do they transport the dolphin? I suspect they fished it out of the tent, would be my guess. Oh, boy. We also need to talk about Voltaire. You studied French. Yes, I did. So you know who Voltaire is. I do know who Voltaire is. No. Yeah, no, I do know who Voltaire is. He enjoyed his coffee. How many cups a day do you think he drank?

Oh, I think that he drank, let's say six. That's a lot of coffee. A lot of coffee. That is a lot of coffee. Jonathan, how many cups a day? 50. Whoa. Five zero. Is that? Oh yeah, you know because you're the expert. I'm like, what? 50 cups of coffee. They're small cups. Are they small cups? They are small cups. So those kind of demi, whatever, demi-tas type thing. But that's a lot of caffeine. It's still a lot of caffeine.

He did like them quite a lot. They turned him from being, what did he say? They turned him from violent anger to sweet joy. A lot of the people in this early period drank coffee as a kind of a stimulus, as a kind of muse. So you'd find musicians doing it, poets doing it, this kind of thing. It's very much a part of their process. So the intellectual revolution was, you know, the Royal Society, powered by coffee, the insurance industry, the economic industry. I mean, coffee is powering everything. And I suppose the interesting question is, this is an import from the...

The Arab world via the Ottoman Empire, who sometimes are the enemy, right? In the 17th century, we have these huge wars between Christianity and Islam. So the Turkish are the enemy, and yet this is a Turkish drink. I mean, is there a rebranding? Is there a sort of awkwardness there? There are both of those things, I think. I mean, there's a fascination and a repulsion, and they both come into it in the sense that, you know, you get this thing that, well, you know, when the Turks come...

and visit, usually in delegations. They might bring their coffee with them. People get very turned on, as it were, to the Turkish way of life and the things that they do. I mean, the great example is in France where there's this sort of story, and we're not quite sure how it happened, but sort of somebody comes. The idea is that they're going to be the emiracy, the emiracy, the emiracy?

to Louis XIV. Yeah. And they essentially tell Louis XIV that, yes, they're actually from this absolutely grand sultan.

And Louis XIV says, no one's more grand than me, mate. Go away. And so he stays there for a year. Now, exactly how this works, but they set up a whole kind of Turkish house for this delegation. And they start hosting members of the French nobility and the French court and plying them with coffee and other sort of Turkish delicacies. And this creates this whole phenomenon of what they call Turkomania. And that sort of does, in one hand, fuel the sort of the start of coffee.

And it's that sort of trendy thing. But then on the other, there's this thing about, well, what do we do with this coffee? Yeah. How do we kind of make it a little bit more us? The answer to that is, well, we'll throw in milk.

Our milk. So Café au lait. So Café au lait. So it's a French compromise. They are willing to accept an exotic foreign import, but they have to find a way to... Yeah, to kind of Frenchify it. We need to talk about the darker side of this coffee boom. Where do these things originate from? We've heard they came from Ethiopia, then Yemen, then the wider Islamic world. But by the 1600s and definitely 1700s, we're getting coffee plantations everywhere.

So really by the very end of the 1600s, the 1700s really. So what has happened is that the Ottomans have really kind of controlled the trade in coffee. It's all done through the port of Almacare or what we call Mocha.

And so, yeah, absolutely. And they're very careful to try and protect that and make it a monopoly. And of course, as coffee becomes more popular in Europe, so the European trading companies, A, start calling into Mocha to pick up coffee. But B, are thinking, well, how do we make our supply a bit more secure? Because it's actually very difficult to get coffee in Yemen. You can wait literally a year to fill up your ship. Eventually, the Dutch managed to get hold of some coffee.

which they find actually growing in India. They take it to Indonesia. They plant it on the island of Java originally. So that's the first time that coffee is really grown outside of its sort of indigenous areas. Then also the French get hold of it, the other European powers. And the place that they then take it, the French take it to the Isle of Bourbon.

which is now Réunion of Africa. But really the big place is the Caribbean. Sure. They go to the Caribbean, plant coffee in a variety of places. The Dutch plant it on Suriname. The French plant it in what was then their colony called Saint-Domingue, which becomes Haiti. So by the 1780s, 80% of the world's coffee supply comes from the Caribbean. Right.

Just to make this absolutely explicit, that is plantation coffee grown by enslaved people. Right. Yeah. So that's the key thing. Right. Okay. So where does Britain muscle in to this history? So the Brits, they're sort of one period, but they really get into coffee when they take over the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from the Dutch. Yeah. They're going to Ceylon and...

The overthrow, actually, there's an area called the Kingdom of Kandy. It's kind of indigenous sort of areas rule in the kind of interior. They then kind of clear down the forests and

and want to sort of introduce production. And what they think is the ideal crop is coffee. It's a pretty destructive process. So they kill off a lot of the wildlife, kill off 60% of the salon's elephants. Oh, no. No, really bad. They also bring over to work this a lot of workers from Tamil Nadu, Tamils from India, on a kind of, you know, indentured labor type schemes. Right.

I think the easiest way to say these people are not well treated. Lots of them die. I mean, this is totally new territory for them. They're marched all the way up into the island. So it is not a great scenario. So this is 1815, this deforestation and plantation. Yeah, exactly. If you think about Sri Lanka now, we think about Sri Lanka and tea. Yeah. And indeed, when you think about Britain, you think about tea. That's where a lot of our tea came from.

But actually what happened is in the 1860s, really 1869 was the beginning of this disease called coffee leaf rust disease.

And that absolutely destroys the plantations. And so rather than replant with coffee, which would probably get diseased again, they replant with tea. And the other thing to say is that that coffee leaf rust does not stop in Sri Lanka. That destroys pretty much most of the production in the whole of Asia. You know, you've had probably about a third of coffee production was in Asia in the sort of 1860s. And by the 1900s, it's probably about...

a 20th. Okay, so we've had some pretty horrible history there. Let's try and be a little cheerier. Sophie, when do you think America fell in love with their cup of joe, the US? What do you think their kind of inciting moment is where they go, hang on a second, we're coffee drinkers?

I feel like maybe the late 1900s. Oh, you've gone late? No, no, no. The late 19th century. You've gone, okay, so you're like 1880s. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. 1880 is what came into my head. It's too late, isn't it? It is quite late, yeah. I think we can go earlier than that. Okay, fine. If I say to you Boston Tea Party. No. You just reject that outright. No. The early 17th century? No.

So you've gone too early now, I think. Maybe you haven't. Jonathan, the Boston Tea Party is obviously in the 1770s. Yes. So actually, no, in one sense. I think Sophie's right both times, which is quite an achievement given that she put two different centuries in there. Thank you.

Because, you know, yeah, there's coffee in America being sold in America. I mean, there's a first person's license to sell coffee, something called Dorothy Jones, and that's in 1670. So, I mean, it's in colonial America. Well done, Sophie. You can take the point. There is a big legend that goes, you know, the Boston Tea Party is the moment in which, you know, Americans stop drinking tea and start drinking coffee despite the Brits. As a patriotic act. As a patriotic act. It's one of those things that

doesn't really stand up. Come on. I'm sorry about that. But basically what they won't do after that is drink anything British. What does really kick off coffee in the States, I think, is really two events. One key one is the Civil War. And the Civil War, if you like, there is almost an explanation of the Civil War that goes one side has coffee and the other doesn't.

and the side that has coffee, which is actually the north, win.

Because they give their troops coffee, enough coffee to probably serve maybe even 10 cups of coffee a day. So they have a coffee ration. Which is one fifth of Voltaire's daily intake. So it's barely anything. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So this is why they only fired guns rather than write poetry. You've got to get the balance right. Yeah, exactly. There's only so much. But they recognise that, you know, the generals recognise coffee is kind of comforting. It's warm. It's very easy to do. And it's a stimulant. And it's a stimulant. Yeah.

And that kind of creates a class of people who then want to drink coffee thereafter. And then at the same time, and this goes back to your point about the 1880s, right? That's the point of obviously mass immigration into America from Europe. So getting coffee is kind of a proof of arriving in America and having made America. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, okay. It's an aspirational thing in Europe. You get to America, you can probably drink coffee because the coffee is more easily obtained. And

So the American Civil War was in the 1860s, obviously. And we've, I mean, this extraordinary thing, soldiers' diaries mention the word coffee more than the word bullet or rifle. We also have a soldier called Lieutenant, well, Lieutenant Colonel Walter King. It's a soldier in Missouri Cavalry Regiment who designs a rifle which has got an inbuilt coffee grinder. If you can install a coffee grinder into any everyday item, what would you go for?

Put you on the spot. I feel like it has...

an item came to mind, which was, it's not appropriate for the... Is that not a Radio 4 joke? It's not a Radio 4 joke, but I feel like I was thinking of like a humming, like about the noise that grinding would... I see. And I was also thinking about how sleepy you get sometimes after certain activities. So I think it would be a good dual function. I feel I know what you're going with this. But...

Moving on. Thank you for your contribution, Sophie. Okay. We also get, Jonathan, at this time, customers buying loose green coffee beans. They're roasting them at home. So you can now make coffee at home. We get mechanical improvements too, don't we? Jabez Burns is important.

Yeah, he is the guy who patences, in fact, a self-emptying roaster, as they call it. So basically, instead of having to stop everything and pull your coffee out from whatever way that you can, that this thing sort of chucks its coffee out and you then load the next load in.

So what we're really seeing is the development of a coffee industry in itself rather than if you like originally you had grocers for selling a few green beans that yes you might take home and roast in a pan or whatever. Now we're seeing people who are producing coffee, roasting it, packaging it. There's a famous brand Arbuckles who produced the first kind of branded coffee called Ariosa.

In the USA. In the USA, this is, yeah, which also is kind of used a lot by people who are going on sort of the wagon trails, going out into the homestead and so forth. You buy a coffee from Arbuckle's and you get coupons, which you can redeem for tools, guns, razors and wedding rings. Wow. It's like a sort of happy meal. Oh no, it's a coupon, so you trade it in elsewhere. You trade it in, yeah. When does coffee granule show up? When is it, you know, something that comes in a little pack, you spoon it out and you stir it in the bottom of the cup?

Yeah. So there are attempts at doing this sort of, you know, soluble coffees from about the 1900s. And indeed, some of them are developed. The First World War, we see the American soldiers get some sort of supposedly instant coffee.

But actually, what we understand as instant coffee is really a product more of the Second World War. Just before then, we see the invention of, as it were, Nescafe or the creation of Nescafe, which is really the first of those sort of instant brands. And that sort of then, ironically, is brought back into Europe by the Americans because the work has to be done over in the States because it can't be done in Europe because it's in the middle of conflict. They bring it back on their backpack.

Right. Essentially. And so this becomes then sort of the takeoff of instant coffee after the Second World War, becomes part of the range of the big American roasters in America, but it actually becomes really big.

in Europe, particularly in those sort of non-traditional coffee drinking countries like the UK. Interesting. There's one thing we should mention, actually. There was a sort of second backlash. We've already talked about one backlash in the kind of Islamic world in the 1500s where there's a debate about, is this, can we have this within the rules of our faith? There's a second backlash in the 19th century, Sophie. Do you know why this one might have kicked off in America, in the UK? Yeah.

Is it about food regulations, about whether it is actually good for you? That's a good guess. So you think it's health related? I think it's health related. I can't, I don't, I mean, I can't think of why there would be a moral thing about drinking coffee at that time. I think you're spot on with the health thing. It's sort of linked to the rise of, I guess, mass psychology, psychiatry. We get the idea that coffee leads to...

Yeah, exactly. I think people have identified caffeine and then essentially that looks like, you know, if you get the caffeine shakes, that looks like a nervous disorder. Right. So there are two elements. I mean, it's sort of on the one hand, you've got some elements still in the church, you know, some temperance movements in particular who are big advocates for coffee. So coffee inns, etc., etc.

But you've also got some quite savvy people doing marketing who realize that if they have a pop at coffee for being essentially, you know, this thing that might be bad for you. And advertising regulations are not that difficult to get around at that time. Then, you know, you can put something else in there. So there's a guy called Post who produces a weird cereal drink called Postum. Yeah.

Oh, that's... Exactly. And all of this kind of centres on the fact coffee must be bad for you. Coffee will make you blind. Coffee will do this kind of nervous disorder stuff. So the temperance movement is kind of the 19th century, particularly later 19th century, when there's sort of a lot of worry about alcohol consumption. And then...

But you get this other thing about, you know, caffeine and the effects of caffeine, what that might do to you. I have a question. Yeah, go for it. Was there like a, was there or does there emerge a sort of gendered narrative about coffee, about women not drinking coffee because they'll get nervous or shaky or start trying to get the vote? There's actually been that narrative for some time. Actually, right back to the introduction of coffee in Britain. I mean, it's very much a male thing. Coffee is the male drink. Tea is the female drink, etc.,

And then there's, you know, the whole thing about women really not being in coffee houses at that time. But I think also the interesting thing with these kind of, you know, the use of advertising is another way around where people write ads that are basically about, are you a good enough wife? Do you know how to make your husband's coffee just right? And there's some quite violent ads.

that gather around in the 50s, which involve all kinds of, you know, throwing coffee in your wife's face because it's bad tasting. It's clearly the wife's fault. Oh, boy. So it's pretty funny. That's gross. We should just say very quickly, by the late 19th century,

The Americans are getting their coffee from South America now. We've talked before about Asia, but Brazil becomes a huge coffee producing nation, doesn't it? Yeah, Brazil becomes the dominant coffee producer in the late 19th century and it still is the largest coffee producer in the world.

Brazil basically, I suppose, you know, it's a big country, obviously, but what happens is that the Brazilians start by using the usual sources of slave labor, etc. But really the big breakthrough for Brazil comes in the late 19th century. They start bringing in immigrants to work land and they kind of keep walking back along what they might call the coffee frontier. So pushing into unused land,

burning down the forest, planting coffee. And they have railways. And railways, of course, change the whole game because then you can transport all this all the way back to a port. The port is Santos, which is just outside Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo and the paulistas, the coffee barons of Sao Paulo, become so powerful that actually when the Portuguese, when Brazilians imperialized,

family, which is an offshoot of the Portuguese royal family, too complicated to get into. But when they get thrown out, it's these paulistas who really take over the running of the country. So the coffee barons take over the country? The coffee barons take over the country, help the coffee grow, help the country grow its coffee to the point that, well, the key date is perhaps by 1906. 1906, they produce over

80, 85% of the world's coffee. The world's coffee? The world's coffee. Wow. And I have to say 70%

of that 85% then get shipped into the States, which is the world's big coffee market. So that's the way that it works. And by the 1920s, Colombia, Central American countries, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, are also producing. Are also beginning to get into this. And the world starts to become familiar to us now. The coffee, the labels, the names on our packets, we start to go, hang on, yeah, I know that. And we also get the rise of Robusta. Robusta's a different species? So Robusta is a different species and it is...

somewhat more tolerant and it's resistant to rust. And so Robusta comes... Hence Robusta, it's robust. Yeah, it's common. I mean, the technical name is Canaphera, but it was always called Robusta.

It gets replanted in Asia and it gets replanted in those new, particularly West African states. And as a result of that, you know, Africa again becomes quite a powerful producer of coffee from about the 1970s. Okay. Yeah. So both West Africa and East Africa where it originated in the first beginning of our episode. Okay. So we're into the 20th century and I think you've alluded to this already, Jonathan, but we have to flag it up. Sophie, what big fad came in in the 1950s related to coffee here in the UK? Yeah.

Like coffee, coffee parties, coffee. Not far off, yeah, the coffee bar. Coffee bar. The idea of, so it's different to a coffee house. Yeah, a coffee bar, particularly in Britain, I mean, was more about kind of frothy coffee, but it's really about teen culture. Okay. Teen, young people culture.

Essentially, I'd say what we had is, you know, this is the appearance of the teenager as their own kind of, you know, self-identified thing. A lot of the coffee bars appeal to that. What you really need for a coffee bar is not coffee. You need a jukebox.

Some kind of jukebox. Or a duker box if you're Sophie Duke. Indeed, a duker box. And if you're really lucky, then maybe you can get a skiffle band in on a Saturday night and do a bit of dance. Or a Sophie Duke of... No, sorry. There you go. Wow. People like, you know, the very young Cliff Richard, big star in coffee bars.

You heard it here first. There you go. It sounds made up. I don't even know what a skiffle band is. Skiffle? Skiffle, yeah, that's how the Beatles started. It's a genre of music. It's a genre of music before rock and roll in the UK. Yeah, it's charming. Can I say I've never felt so old? LAUGHTER

And so we get a distinct coffee culture here in the UK where the teenagers are drinking it. They're knocking it back. They're listening to rock and roll on the jukebox. But also Germany, Scandinavia, Finland, Italy, they're all starting to develop their own coffee. Yeah, I think the big thing here is really the Italian one, which is in a way what drives the British sort of coffee bar scene as well. So the Italians basically have been developing espresso.

And in the 50s, the new espresso... You make it sound like a super weapon. The Italians will be developing espressos. This is one of the greatest things that Italy has ever invented. I'm sorry. And so the kind of the new version of espresso uses much more high pressure machines. So this is Achille Gadger & Co.,

They produce this sort of high quality, you know, high pressure, small shot coffee. And this is the time that Italy is industrializing. And so as a result of that and urbanizing, and so you get the upshot of lots of little neighborhood coffee bars serving this espresso. People kind of using the neighborhood coffee bar as a place to drop in, say, hi, Greg, knock this espresso, go back. You know, so it becomes like the place that you meet people very quickly. So it's a key moment, really.

And other countries are developing their own sorts of coffee culture around that. So you're kind of going to do a very old person's reference, right? If you think about there's this film called something like, if this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium. And there's this sort of, you could do that with coffee at that point. You know, if this is the coffee, then we must be in Germany. I see. Okay. Okay. And Finland gets their own coffee culture, which is quite interesting because they'd already had coffee culture of a sort, but it was linked to the Sami people.

Yeah. So, I mean, there's a thing with the Scandinavians generally. I mean, they drink enormous amounts of coffee per person. They are the leading coffee consumers per capita. It's very dark. It's very cold. It's very dark. It's very cold. And also, they were quite often taken by the temperance thing as well. So, that drives it. It's quite strong in Scandinavia, isn't it? Yeah. And, you know, if you've ever tried to buy a drink in Scandinavia, you'll know that there are issues.

But with the Sami, one of the things that's interesting, even by the 20th century, for example, the Sami indigenous people in the north of Scandinavia are actually incorporating coffee into their normal eating and drinking habits. It just became sort of integral into their socialization. At the end of the day, you'd go off hunting, you come back, everyone whips out the coffee.

And so they were by the 50s using coffee enormously and kind of, you know, using it alongside traditional drinks, traditional drinks, traditional things like reindeer broth or whatever. So it's one of those things where you use the coffee as a total accompaniment. So it's coffee with your meal as well as coffee after your meal. It's coffee when you go out to hunt and coffee when you come back from hunting. It's...

I mean, it's cold out there. Coffee round the clock. Coffee round the clock with reindeer broth. Can we tempt you into the reindeer broth? Yeah, I'd do it. I'd feel like rather than a bit of British milk. Oh, sorry, French milk. Thank you. Sorry, just a coffee with a sort of like a pickle back. It's like a little, yeah. I'd try reindeer broth and coffee. Yeah.

Feels like it would be savoury, though. Yeah, it's going to. I don't think a sweet. It's going to be warming, isn't it? It's going to be a warm thing. OK. And then by 1971, we get a major moment in global history, globalisation history. We get the founding of which coffee shop in Seattle, Sophie?

In Seattle, it's going to be Starbucks. It is Starbucks. And this is important, I suppose, for economic reasons, for corporate reasons, but also just the sort of taste reasons in terms of the idea of speciality coffees, the idea of coffee as something you can enjoy, almost like you can enjoy red wine.

Yeah. And I think one of the things you say about the original Starbucks is actually the original Starbucks just sells coffee beans. And what it's doing is selling a whole different sets of varieties of coffee beans. So what it's saying is it's not just coffee. There are all these different kinds of coffees. They have all these different kinds of flavors and processes, etc. And you should pick one that you like.

And it's this sort of speciality coffee idea is that this is therefore not ordinary coffee. It's not the stuff that you're getting in the supermarket, but it's something quite distinctive. So you're like, it's like wine, it's like whiskey or whatever. It's this sort of differentiated product, if you like, making coffee a premium product. And the actual sort of meaning of specialty coffee has gone through various phases since then. But that's the kind of the focus of it is that the focus is on the coffee itself and how that coffee is distinctive from others.

ordinary commodity coffee. So there we go, Sif. We've done a lot of latte history. We've gone around the world. We've seen coffee was religious, medical, political, colonial, cultural, industrial. Does it change your view of, are you more tempted to go out and drink a coffee now or are you less tempted? I think it feels like I want to be in on the party. I felt sort of maybe like a psychosomatic reaction to talk about coffee so long. Like I feel quite hyped up.

like it's not been a relaxing chat sorry because I think even hearing it I'm like maybe it's my associations with coffee have been mainly as a sort of wonder drug to finish an essay and less about a sort of salon culture yeah we've heard a lot today about people getting together and being together and socialising chatting communing it

Yeah, I think maybe like I'm trying to think about what the modern equivalent is or what the young upstart is. And I feel like it's probably either like bubble tea or creams milkshakes. And that's where that's the hotbed of political dissent today. The nuance window.

This is where Sophie and I sit silently and sip our moccas for two minutes while Professor Jonathan tells us something we need to know about the history of coffee. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Jonathan. OK, well, I'm going to start with the risen old farmer who has proudly showed us around his beautiful coffee red cherries drying on the patio outside his house in the province of Lampung in Sumatra. And so I asked him who he's going to sell those to. And he said, no one. Those are the best quality. I'm keeping them for myself.

And I can't tell you how much that answer made me happy and moved me, because the coffee trade has long continued to reproduce the structures of its colonial past. A crop that indigenous peoples were forced to cultivate by foreign fiat, that was often tended by unfree labor, enabling the price to consumers in, as it were, the global north to be kept low at the expense of producers in the global south. Unsurprisingly then, very few producer countries adopted coffee drinking into their own culture.

Post-independence, many former colonies continued to actively prevent coffee being consumed within the country in order to garner precious foreign exchange reserves. It's still not unusual to meet farmers who have never tasted any form of coffee, let alone sampled their own coffee.

When I first began my research into coffee in the early 2000s, the trade appeared to be in somewhat of an existential crisis. For four consecutive years, the benchmark price for commodity coffee was below that of the cost of production, leading literally to starvation among families that depended upon it for their livelihood. The price collapse was caused by an excess of global production over demand, particularly as Brazil and Vietnam upped their output and sought to undercut their competitors.

Paradoxically, this coincided with the explosion of the modern coffee shop format exemplified by Starbucks. Today, the picture looks very different. Prices are at their highest since the 1970s. While some of that is due to the impact of climate volatility on supply, an underpinning factor is the growth of demand in new markets, including that of producer countries themselves. Asia is driving this, with more coffee shops per capita in Seoul than in Seattle.

China has increased its green coffee imports by 50% in the last five years, much of it from Vietnam, while Indonesia itself now consumes 40% of its coffee. The transnational culture of coffee consumption that has taken off offers both a sustainable future for the global coffee industry and a way out of those colonial hangos of the past.

Wonderful. Thank you. Sophie, any thoughts on that? That was very, I mean, I like that there's like a sort of glimmer of hope or like a kind of like retaken of the coffee narrative from, yeah, those producer countries just sort of being entirely beholden to the whims of the global north.

So, yeah, I was just like, OK, I'm cancelling the beans. The beans are cancelled. But I think it's quite cool and it's quite cool to see like a kind of renaissance in cultural coffee consumption and how that fits into different places. So what do you know now?

It's time now for So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Sophie to see how much she has learned. We have fired a huge amount of history at you across the globe. You're one of our quiz queens, however. You are notoriously good at this. Are you feeling the pressure? I am feeling the pressure, but I believe in the bean. Amazing. OK, I've got 10 questions for you here.

Here we go. Question one. A man named Kaldi allegedly discovered coffee beans when dancing with which over-caffeinated animals? It was a goat. It was his goats. They were enjoying the bean. Question two. Which Arab country was at the centre of the first coffee trade?

Oh, it was... My instinct is to say Yemen. It was Yemen. Well done. Question three. Why did Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent close coffee shops in 1565? Because he thought that they were sites of licentiousness and banter.

Bad talk. Absolutely well done. Question four. What did Pope Clement VIII never do but allegedly call coffee? Pope Clement allegedly called coffee delicious. The devil's drink is delicious. Very good. That's right. He never actually said it, but we like it so much it's in the quiz. Question five. What patriotic coffee drink was invented in France in the 18th century? Café au lait. Café au lait. Question six.

What did Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley get up to in London's Grecian coffee house? They cut up a dolphin! They did, for science, man, for science! Hashtag free the willy. LAUGHTER

It's not. Wee Willie's not a dolphin. It doesn't work. But I said it. Flipper. Flipper. Flipper. Question seven. Can you name two supposed health benefits of coffee according to Pascual Rose's 1652 advert? It stops miscarriages. Yeah, it does. And it also aids your digestion. Very good. That's two. That's good. Very good. You could add sore eyes, dropsy, gout, scurvy, drowsiness. It does everything. Of course, it doesn't.

Question eight. What ingenious coffee-related device was invented by a soldier during the American Civil War? I feel like this was Mr King, one of the Mr Kings. And he put a grinder... No, maybe not Walter King, put a grinder in his rifle. He did put a grinder in his rifle. Well done. Question nine. What didn't the original Starbucks sell?

It did actually sell ground coffee. It sold and it got people's names right. But then it changed. It didn't sell drinks. It just sold the beans. Yeah, I'll let you have that. And this for a perfect 10 out of 10. How many cups of coffee did French philosopher Voltaire allegedly drink per day? Oh, 50. It was 50 cups of very small but very intense coffee. 10 out of 10. Sophie Duker, never, ever in doubt.

Well done. Are you pleased? I'm so relieved. Never miss. Never miss. Well, I mean, it's been extraordinary history. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thank you, Sophie. OK, listener, if you want to double down on Duca, you can check out our episodes on Benedetta Carlini, Ashanti Garner, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges, if you want some musical history. And for more foodie historical stuff, we have episodes on the history of chocolate, on the history of ice cream, and on celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, which is one of my favourite episodes. That's a very fun one.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the episodes one month before other platforms. Lucky you. Make sure also to have your notifications switched on so you never miss an episode. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had

the coffee historian himself, Professor Jonathan Morris from the University of Hertfordshire. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Greg, and enjoy your coffee. I will. I will give it my best. And in Comedy Corner, we had the ever-sensational Sophie Duker. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you so much. Thank you. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we savour another historical delight. But for now, I'm off to try and convince the Pope to sanction my debilitating hot chocolate habit. Bye! Bye!

This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Matt Ryan. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoose and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoose and our executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Best medicine, dissecting funny and fascinating medicine. I think pain management is the best medicine. Bibliotherapy. Therapy by books. Sleep. Median. Celebrating medicine's past, present and future. I think transplantation is the best medicine because it can completely change someone's life. Defibrillation. Oh, defibrillation, okay. Amazing machines, that much is clear. Sorry, clear.

That's the new series of Best Medicine from Radio 4 with me, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, available now on BBC Sounds. I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent, she will work undercover and if she is caught...

She's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.