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

Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Jonathan Morris and comedian Sophie Duker to learn all about the bittersweet history of coffee. Coffee is undoubtedly one of the most popular drinks worldwide, and we consume an estimated 95 million cups of the stuff everyday in the UK alone. But where does coffee come from, and when did we start enjoying its caffeinated effects? From its origins in medieval Ethiopia and Yemen, through the coffeehouses of the Middle East and Europe, to its central importance to soldiers during the American Civil War, this episode traces the complex history of our favourite beverage. Along the way, it explores the uses people have had for coffee over the years, in religious rituals, as a stimulant to intellectual exchange, and even as a medicine. We also debunk some of the myths that have been brewed up about coffee’s history. Did the Pope really call it ‘the devil’s brew’? Was it discovered by an Ethiopian goatherd? And did a Dutch man really have to smuggle coffee trees out of Yemen? Listen to find out! If you’re a fan of delicious disputes over food, wild medical treatments from centuries past and murky historical myths, you’ll love our episode on the history of coffee. If you want more from Sophie Duker, check out our episodes on Benedetta Carlini or the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. And for more on culinary creations of the past, listen to our episodes on the history of chocolate and ice cream. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Matt Ryan Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

• 1:14Greg Jenner?

  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. Lovely to have you here and in Comedy Corner. She's an award-winning comedian and writer. You will recognise her from loads of TV, including her glorious victory on Taskmaster.

• 1:59Greg Jenner?

  Maybe you've seen her new stand-up show, But Daddy, I Love Her. It's fantastic. And of course, you'll remember her from our back catalogue, including recent episodes on naughty nun Benedetta Carlini and The Legend of Atlantis. It's Sophie Dujca. Welcome back for a sixth appearance, Sophie.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm actually fuming because I heard that you tried to get Sabrina Carpenter for this episode.

• 2:17Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. She was busy doing the Grammys or something.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was busy watching the Grammys, so actually.

• 2:25Greg Jenner?

  A key, important question here. I'm relying on you. Do you drink coffee?

• 2:29Speaker 05

  I restrict my coffee intake because I like the smell of coffee.

• 2:35Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  And I like it as a sort of cultural, a sort of a cultural concept. It makes me feel like I want to die.

• 2:44Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 2:47Greg Jenner?

  Perfect guest for the podcast.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:55Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  And sometimes people don't know that it causes such a reaction of 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.

• 3:10Greg Jenner?

  I don't drink coffee at all. I don't know anything about coffee.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 3:14Greg Jenner?

  So Jonathan, I'm assuming you're a coffee drinker?

• 3:16Speaker 06

  I am a coffee drinker. I'm beginning to think it's also a murder weapon within the context of this studio.

• 3:22Greg Jenner?

  All right. And you're going to, you're going to talk us through the history of coffee. So we're going to learn plenty today. So what do you know?

• 3:33Greg Jenner?

  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 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 Nest Cafe 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 twenty," he shouts.

• 4:18Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  That is correct. They do not.

• 4:34Greg Jenner?

  Good.

• 4:34Speaker 06

  No.

• 4:35Greg Jenner?

  So what is coffee in the wild?

• 4:38Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:03Greg Jenner?

  And there's caffeine in those seeds, beans?

• 5:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:16Greg Jenner?

  Ah.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  Oh, that's very wholesome.

• 5:19Greg Jenner?

  Sophie, maybe you're being enchanted, like a bee.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  I'm being enchanted. I want to take some Joe back to the hive.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  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.

• 5:34Greg Jenner?

  Where in the world do these beans, trees, shrubs, whatever they are, grow? Where is their natural habitat?

• 5:39Speaker 06

  So the natural habitat is really in Ethiopia, South West 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.

• 5:53Greg Jenner?

  Lovely. There is a story. There's 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?

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Oh, do I get any clues on the animal?

• 6:08Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  Is it a big animal?

• 6:09Greg Jenner?

  No, medium sized.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Okay, I feel from context clues of being in this room earlier, you said goat?

• 6:16Greg Jenner?

  I did say goats.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  And I feel it might have been a goat?

• 6:19Greg Jenner?

  It is a goat, so tell me the story. Recount for me this fabled myth.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  Okay, so there's like a goat.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  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 realizes that his goat is acting like really unconventionally.

• 6:38Greg Jenner?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  It's an old goat, but he's acting more like a kid, you know?

• 6:40Greg Jenner?

  Nice.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  He's got like, he's got a spring in his step.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  He's fighting trolls. He's got loads of energy and he's like.

• 6:48Greg Jenner?

  Fighting trolls is a lovely reference, thank you.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  So much. We go deep into the fairy tale lore. Uh, and he's like, what's going on? My goat's mad. My goat's been cursed by a witch. Yeah, is it, is it like unconventional goat behavior?

• 7:01Greg Jenner?

  I think that's pretty good.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  Herder?

• 7:03Speaker 06

  I think Sophie should be writing the origin myth. Definitely an improvement. The real origin myth, it's just real origin myth. It's not real. It's really about the goat herd, a guy called Caldi, and he sees his goats and they're dancing away.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  I, I said that.

• 7:17Speaker 06

  And he's thinking, what's going on? And he's seeing that they're eating these red berries and then they're starting to dance. Caldi 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.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  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.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, wow.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Of how coffee is formed.

• 7:52Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 7:53Greg Jenner?

  And that's an Ethiopian heritage.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  It's an Ethiopian heritage. It's really from the sort of the southwest of Ethiopia. There are a few other stories.

• 8:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, there's one involving, um, Solomon, King Solomon?

• 8:04Speaker 06

  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, et cetera.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  I love that. Like animals getting intoxicated is our gateway into like medicine. And like, how, 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.

• 8:28Greg Jenner?

  That's right, yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  Rutting at the trees and getting pissed.

• 8:31Greg Jenner?

  That's right.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  And you just have some really intense goats having like really deep conversations.

• 8:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Very fast.

• 8:36Greg Jenner?

  That's our kind of mythic origins, but what about an actual historical reference, Jonathan? Have we got something that we can, we can say this is the first mention of coffee?

• 8:45Speaker 06

  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 in, 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.

• 9:15Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  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.

• 9:37Greg Jenner?

  But it may have been older, that's just our earliest reference.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  That's our earliest reference, there's bits in the famous physician who we used to call Avishana, who kind of 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 the, obviously the indigenous people in southwest Ethiopia, in Kaffa in particular, were probably using coffee for a variety of things, but foraging the coffee, not growing it.

• 10:06Greg Jenner?

  Ethiopia to Yemen crosses across, across the straits and into Yemen, so we're into the Arab world. From Yemen, do we get it then spreading out through those sort of trade routes out through the Middle East?

• 10:16Speaker 06

  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. Next stage is, in a sense, at a certain point, the eminence start growing the coffee themselves.

• 10:30Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:37Greg Jenner?

  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 a skeptic, but could I just drink it? When does it become a beverage?

• 10:51Speaker 06

  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, is coffee licit to drink? Is coffee intoxicating? Because if it is, you shouldn't be drinking it.

• 11:05Greg Jenner?

  Right, okay.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:21Greg Jenner?

  So it's within the rules of Islam, you can drink coffee?

• 11:24Speaker 06

  Well, this becomes a very challenging thing, right? So it kind of goes to a debate, almost goes to trial. You know, 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.

• 11:45Greg Jenner?

  Ooh, Sophie, this pasha, which means governor really, he is called, I think, Kaya Beg. Why do you think he wants to ban coffee? What do you think is a problem about it?

• 11:53Speaker 05

  I think it's interesting. I think maybe I sort of think it leads to licentiousness. I think people mainly become more annoying when they're on coffee.

• 12:03Greg Jenner?

  When they're caffeinated, yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 12:14Greg Jenner?

  Control?

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Control. Yeah, I think that's usually why substances are banned.

• 12:18Greg Jenner?

  I think there's a good instance. I mean, that's probably about right, I think, Jonathan?

• 12:22Speaker 06

  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 sky field Kai Begfell 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.

• 12:44Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  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, et cetera. 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.

• 13:08Greg Jenner?

  How would that work?

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Yes, gosh.

• 13:10Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  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 there are things that he thinks or articulates are wrong with coffee houses.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  And then there's the underlying assumption that we have that again, is Suleiman a bit worried that people might be going around saying he's not so magnificent?

• 14:13Greg Jenner?

  Ah, I see. Okay, by the 1600s, I think we find coffee in Europe. So how does it come into Europe, Jonathan?

• 14:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it comes in a little bit before. And 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 Bidolf, writes a letter from Aleppo in 1600 describing coffee or describing, you know, the common drink called koffa, which is a black kind of drink made of a common pulse like peas called kava, 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.

• 14:59Greg Jenner?

  He was murdered, right?

• 15:00Speaker 06

  He was murdered.

• 15:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he didn't just die, he was killed.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  So they had an investigation, so obviously 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.

• 15:16Greg Jenner?

  That's interesting.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  And, 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

• 15:23Greg Jenner?

  And this stuff, this is called a fincan, is it a fincan?

• 15:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think finjan.

• 15:27Greg Jenner?

  Finjan, okay.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:44Greg Jenner?

  Sophie, would you take a prescription of coffee? It doesn't sound like it would do you any good.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  I feel like it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't do good stuff for me. But I, just like, not medicinally, but functionally. So like, the medicine to get you through your essay crisis.

• 15:57Greg Jenner?

  I wanted to ask you, actually, Sophie, do you know where the name cappuccino comes from?

• 16:02Speaker 05

  It comes from tiny wooden boy who used to lie all the time.

• 16:09Greg Jenner?

  Pretty sure that's not where it comes from, but.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Um, cappuccino. I, yeah, I can't, no, I'm gonna stick with, with a lying puppet boy. I

• 16:22Greg Jenner?

  Strong guess.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  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, what's the, like, what's the root, what's the etymological?

• 16:31Greg Jenner?

  It comes from, so we have, I guess in our typical language, we have two words for cappuccin. One would be a type of monkey.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:37Greg Jenner?

  The other one will be a type of monk. So it's named after the monks. It's named after the Italian cappuccin friars who wore brown robes. And so cappuccino is named after the type of brown robes that they wore.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  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 capatina. And really what it is, is the amount of milk I want in my coffee to make it the colour of the robes that cappuccins wear. Because actually, cappuccins don't do tonsia.

• 17:12Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 17:12Speaker 06

  So a bit more Boring than it.

• 17:14Greg Jenner?

  No, I love a bit more boring. That's very much our 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, you know, those sort of theological questions of can you have this as a licit or illicit drink? How do you think the Pope, Pope Clement the Eighth, where do you think he stood on the moral question of coffee in the 1600s?

• 17:39Speaker 05

  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 fervor, more diligent as well. And I think as like an alternative to maybe like alcohol, it feels maybe it's like a new, a relatively new thing in Europe that could give people vim and vigour.

• 18:02Greg Jenner?

  I guess Sophie's right, although I suppose.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  She's right with the one problem that Pope Clement never, as far as we know, actually really did this.

• 18:11Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 18:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 18:20Greg Jenner?

  Fascinating.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  Or any evidence that this ever happened, but it is a brilliant marketing story. So the story goes.

• 18:25Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  That they took him the coffee and he sort of sips it and says, this devil's drink's delicious. 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.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Except he never did.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  He never did.

• 18:51Greg Jenner?

  That's a shame though, because the line, this devil's drink is delicious, is a really good, stick that on a T-shirt.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  I feel like Clooney could really.

• 18:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, exactly. Someone phoned up Nespresso, they've got a new marketing line for you. So we've seen in the Ottoman world that the idea of the coffee house 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?

• 19:25Speaker 06

  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 that we have coffee in Europe in the first half of the century.

• 19:36Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 19:46Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 19:46Speaker 06

  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.

• 20:03Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  In sixteen fifty-two to fifty-four, because we have a guy called Pasquale Rosé, 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 Pasquale 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 sixteen sixty-three, we've got eighty-two coffee houses in London. So the explosion in London is enormous. By seventeen thirty-five, we've got about five hundred and thirty of

• 20:47Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November third at Whole Foods Market.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat with flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment. Get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 23:29Greg Jenner?

  Squaroze, Greek Orthodox, was it? Yeah, exactly. Immigrant to London, he published an advert for his coffee shop, which he listed coffee as having many, 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. What, how would you market coffee now if you were gonna add extra things it does for patients? What's your medicinal claims?

• 24:04Speaker 05

  I can't think of like a genuine health benefit. I mean, it does help digestion in that it makes me feel like I'm gonna crap 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.

• 24:21Greg Jenner?

  We'll settle on that. It's not a ringing endorsement, but we'll settle for that, Jonathan. Okay, so we've heard health benefits and claims being advertised by Pasquale 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 socialisation, is that right?

• 24:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is right. I mean, there are ads, 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.

• 24:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  I'm going to mention Jonathan's because after all, I should.

• 24:56Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  And Jonathan's is really the sort of the origin of the London Stock Exchange. Traders meeting there, trading bonds, et cetera. Lloyds, Lloyds is a coffee house.

• 25:06Greg Jenner?

  So hang on, Lloyds of London.

• 25:08Speaker 06

  Lloyds of London.

• 25:09Greg Jenner?

  The insuring firm, the insurance.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  The insuring firm.

• 25:11Greg Jenner?

  The stock exchange that powers the City of London and the insurance industry both start in coffee houses.

• 25:15Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 25:17Greg Jenner?

  That's quite impressive.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  That is quite, yeah. It feels like, it feels like a very compatible, I was going to say drug, but I'm not sure it is a.

• 25:23Greg Jenner?

  It's a stimulant.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Stimulant, a very compatible stimulant.

• 25:27Speaker 06

  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.

• 25:39Greg Jenner?

  It's a natural philosophy at the time.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  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.

• 26:00Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 26:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 26:02Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:10Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Oh, Newton and Halley.

• 26:29Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm, yeah, I'm thinking of like comets and gravity.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  I just want it to be like a sort of thumb war, but I feel like it's probably got more important than that.

• 26:39Greg Jenner?

  If I say to you dissection, what animal do you think they might be dissecting? Live in a coffee house?

• 26:45Speaker 05

  A frog.

• 26:45Greg Jenner?

  Frog?

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Frog is the classic. Maybe it's a, like a, I'm going to go with.

• 26:50Greg Jenner?

  Think water, think wet, think aquatic.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  A fish? No, that's.

• 26:55Greg Jenner?

  Bigger.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  A seal.

• 26:57Greg Jenner?

  Bigger.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Oh my God, they're dissecting a whale.

• 27:00Greg Jenner?

  Nearly. Jonathan?

• 27:02Speaker 06

  Dolphin.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  A dolphin?

• 27:05Greg Jenner?

  A live, live dissection of a dolphin in a coffee house.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 27:09Greg Jenner?

  Would you go?

• 27:09Speaker 05

  I would absolutely go.

• 27:11Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh my God, how do they transport the dolphin?

• 27:14Speaker 06

  I, I suspect they've fished it out of the tent would be my guess, but.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Boy.

• 27:19Greg Jenner?

  We also need to talk about Voltaire. You studied French.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  Yes, I did.

• 27:24Greg Jenner?

  You know who Voltaire is?

• 27:25Speaker 05

  I do know who Voltaire is. No. Yeah, no, I do know who Voltaire is.

• 27:29Greg Jenner?

  He enjoyed his coffee. How many cups a day do you think he drank?

• 27:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I think that he drank, let's say, six.

• 27:37Greg Jenner?

  That's a, that's a lot of coffee, a lot of coffee.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  That is a lot of coffee.

• 27:40Greg Jenner?

  Jonathan, how many cups a day?

• 27:41Speaker 06

  Fifty.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 27:43Greg Jenner?

  Five, zero.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Is that how much? Oh yeah, you know, because you're the expert. I'm like, what?

• 27:49Speaker 05

  Fifty cups of coffee? Are they so, are they sources?

• 27:52Speaker 06

  So those kind of, they're the kind of demi, demi, whatever demi-tasse type thing.

• 27:57Greg Jenner?

  But that's a lot of caffeine.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  It's still a lot of caffeine. He did like them quite a lot.

• 28:02Greg Jenner?

  I'm sure.

• 28:02Speaker 06

  They turned him from being, what do they, he said, you know, 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.

• 28:18Greg Jenner?

  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? We were some, in the 17th century. We have these huge wars between Christianity and Islam. We have, so the Turkish are the enemy and yet this is a Turkish drink. I mean, what is there a rebranding? Is there a sort of awkwardness there?

• 28:47Speaker 06

  There are both of those things, I think. I mean, there's a fascination and a repulsion and they both come into it.

• 28:53Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  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, you know, the Turkish way of life and the things that they do. And 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 emeracy, the emeracy to Louis XIV. Yeah. And they essentially tell Louis XIV that, yes, they're actually from this absolutely grand Sultan. And Louis XIV is, no one's more grand than me, mate, go away. And so they stay, he stays there for a year.

• 29:35Speaker 06

  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 turcomania. 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?

• 30:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 30:13Greg Jenner?

  So cafe au lait?

• 30:14Speaker 06

  So cafe au lait.

• 30:15Greg Jenner?

  So it's a, it's a French compromise. They, they are willing to accept an exotic foreign import, but they have to find a way to.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, to, to kind of Frenchify it.

• 30:24Greg Jenner?

  We need to talk about the darker side of this coffee boom. You know, 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 the 1700s, we're getting coffee plantations.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  So really by the, it's at the very end of the sixteen hundreds, the seventeen hundreds, 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 Al-Makair, or what we call Mokka.

• 30:56Greg Jenner?

  Ah, really?

• 30:58Speaker 06

  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 in to Mokka to pick up coffee.

• 31:09Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  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.

• 31:30Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  So that's the first time that coffee is really grown outside of its 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.

• 31:46Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 31:47Speaker 06

  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 Stade de Mang, which becomes Haiti.

• 32:00Greg Jenner?

  So by the seventeen eighties, eighty percent of the world's coffee supply comes from the Caribbean?

• 32:04Speaker 06

  Just to make this absolutely explicit.

• 32:06Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  That is plantation coffee grown by enslaved people.

• 32:09Greg Jenner?

  Right, okay.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that's the key thing.

• 32:12Greg Jenner?

  Right, okay. So where does Britain muscle in to this history?

• 32:16Speaker 06

  So the Brits, they're sort of one period that they really get into coffee, when they take over the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

• 32:25Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 06

  From the Dutch, yeah. They go into Ceylon, and the overthrow, actually, there's an area called the Kingdom of Candy. It's kind of indigenous areas rule in the interior. They then kind of clear down the forests. 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, they kill off sixty percent of the salon's elephants.

• 32:53Greg Jenner?

  Oh, no.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 32:54Speaker 06

  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 labour type schemes.

• 33:04Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 33:05Speaker 06

  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.

• 33:18Greg Jenner?

  So this is eighteen fifteen, this deforestation and plantation.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Exactly. If you think about, you know, Sri Lanka now, we think about Sri Lanka and tea.

• 33:26Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  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 eighteen sixties, really eighteen sixty nine, was the beginning of this disease called coffee leaf rust. And that absolutely destroys the plantations.

• 33:43Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 06

  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 eighteen sixties. And by the nineteen hundreds, it's probably about a twentieth.

• 34:09Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so we've had some pretty horrible history there. We've had, let's try and be a little cheerier.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 34:15Greg Jenner?

  Sophie, when do you think America fell in love with their cup of joe, the US?

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 34:21Greg Jenner?

  What do you think their kind of inciting moment is where they go, hang on a second, we're coffee drinkers?

• 34:26Speaker 05

  I feel like maybe the late nineteen hundred?

• 34:29Greg Jenner?

  Oh, you've gone late?

• 34:31Speaker 05

  No, no, no, the late nineteenth century.

• 34:33Greg Jenner?

  You've gone, okay, so you're like eighteen eighty something like that?

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I've, that's eighteen eighty is what came into my head. It's too late, isn't it?

• 34:39Greg Jenner?

  It is quite late, yeah. I think we can go earlier than that.

• 34:41Speaker 05

  Okay, fine.

• 34:42Greg Jenner?

  If I say to you, Boston Tea Party.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  No.

• 34:46Greg Jenner?

  You'll just reject that outright. No.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  The early seventeenth century?

• 34:51Greg Jenner?

  So you've gone too early now, I think, maybe, or maybe you haven't, Jonathan? The Boston Tea Party is obviously in the seventeen seventies.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  Yes, so actually, no, in one sense, I think Sophie's right both times, which is quite an achievement.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Thank you, take three branding.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  Because, you know, yeah, there's coffee in America, being sold in America, I mean, there's a first person that's licensed to sell coffee, somebody called Dorothy Jones, and that's in sixteen seventy. So I mean, it's in colonial America.

• 35:18Greg Jenner?

  Well done, Sophie.

• 35:18Speaker 06

  You can, you can take the point.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Thank you, yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  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.

• 35:28Greg Jenner?

  As a patriotic act.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  As a patriotic act. It's one of those things that doesn't really stand up.

• 35:34Greg Jenner?

  Ah, not so, come on, detailed schme tales.

• 35:37Speaker 06

  Sorry about that, but basically what they won't do after that is drink anything British. What does really kick off coffee in the, in the States, I think is really two events. One key one is the Civil War.

• 35:52Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 35:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 36:02Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 36:03Speaker 06

  Win.

• 36:04Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  Because they give their troops coffee, enough coffee to probably serve maybe even ten cups of coffee a day. So they have a coffee ration.

• 36:11Greg Jenner?

  Which is one fifth of Voltaire's daily intake, so it's barely anything.

• 36:15Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah, yeah. So this is why they only fired guns rather than write poetry for them.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  You've got to get the balance right.

• 36:22Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly, yeah, there's, there's only so much, but they, they recognise that, you know, the generals recognise coffee is kind of comforting, it's warm, it's very easy to do.

• 36:31Greg Jenner?

  And it's a stim.

• 36:31Speaker 06

  And it's a stimulant. 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 eighteen eighties, 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?

• 36:49Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay.

• 36:50Speaker 06

  It's an aspirational thing in Europe, you get to America, you can probably drink coffee.

• 36:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  Because the coffee is more easily obtained.

• 36:58Greg Jenner?

  So the American Civil War is in the 1860s, obviously.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:02Greg Jenner?

  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 Caval Regiment who designs a rifle which has got an inbuilt coffee grinder.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 37:20Greg Jenner?

  If you could install a coffee grinder into any everyday item, what would you go for?

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 37:27Greg Jenner?

  Put you on the spot.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Um, I feel like it has

• 37:32Speaker 05

  an item came to mind which was, is not appropriate for the

• 37:38Greg Jenner?

  Is that not a Radio 4 joke?

• 37:39Speaker 05

  It's not a Radio, 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.

• 37:45Greg Jenner?

  I see.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I was also thinking about how sleepy you get sometimes after certain activities, so I think it would be a good dual function.

• 37:53Greg Jenner?

  I feel I know what you're going with this, okay.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Um, but.

• 37:56Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 38:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, he is the guy who patents, 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, you know, grocers who are 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.

• 38:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 06

  Roasting it, packaging it. There's a famous brand, Arbuckles, who produced the first kind of, you know, branded coffee called Ariosa.

• 38:51Greg Jenner?

  In the USA.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:00Greg Jenner?

  You buy your coffee from Arbuckles and you get coupons which you can redeem for tools, guns, razors and wedding rings.

• 39:06Speaker 05

  Wow, it's like a, a sort of Happy Meal. Oh no, it's a coupon, so you trade it in elsewhere.

• 39:11Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. When does, when do coffee granules show up? When can you, 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?

• 39:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there are attempts at doing this sort of soluble coffees from about the nineteen hundreds. 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 backpacks.

• 40:00Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  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.

• 40:20Greg Jenner?

  Interesting. There's one thing we should mention, actually, that there was a sort of second backlash. We've already talked about one backlash in the Islamic world in the fifteen hundreds, 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 nineteenth century, Sophie. Do you know why this one might have kicked off in America, in the UK?

• 40:39Speaker 05

  At war. Is it about food regulations, about whether it is actually good for you?

• 40:44Greg Jenner?

  That's a good guess. So you think it's health related?

• 40:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 40:55Greg Jenner?

  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 nervous disorders?

• 41:05Speaker 06

  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.

• 41:14Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  So there are 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, et cetera. But you've also got some quite savvy people doing marketing who realise 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.

• 41:55Speaker 06

  And all of that, exactly. And all of this kind of is 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 the the effects of caffeine, what that might do to you.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  I have a question.

• 42:22Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 42:23Speaker 05

  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?

• 42:33Speaker 06

  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, et cetera. 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 with these kind of, you know, the use of advertising is it's 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 got 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.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 43:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's pretty funny.

• 43:16Greg Jenner?

  That's gross. Okay. We should just say very quickly, by the late 19th century, the Americans are getting their coffee from South America now. Before about Asia, but Brazil becomes a huge coffee producing nation, doesn't it?

• 43:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, Brazil becomes the dominant coffee producer in the late 19th century and it still is the largest coffee producer in the world.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  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, et cetera, 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.

• 44:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 06

  Port, it's 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, well, when Brazilians imperial 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.

• 44:39Greg Jenner?

  The coffee barons take over the country?

• 44:40Speaker 06

  The coffee barons take over the country, help the coffee grow, it's helped the country grow its coffee to the point that, well, the key date is perhaps by 1906, 1906, they produce over eighty, eighty-five percent of the world's coffee.

• 44:55Greg Jenner?

  The world's coffee?

• 44:56Speaker 06

  The world's coffee.

• 44:57Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  And I have to say, seventy percent of that eighty-five percent then gets shipped into the States, which is the world's big coffee market. So that's the way that it works.

• 45:08Greg Jenner?

  And by the 1920s, Colombia, Central American countries, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala are also.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  Are also beginning to get into this.

• 45:14Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, so and the world starts to become familiar to us now, the coffee, the labels, the names on our packets, we start to go, I know that. And we also get the rise of robusta. Robusta is a different species?

• 45:25Speaker 06

  So robusta is a different species and it is somewhat more tolerant and it's resistant to rust. And so. Robusta comes.

• 45:35Greg Jenner?

  Hence, robusta, it's robust.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  It hence, yeah, it's common, I mean, the, the technical name is canaffera, 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.

• 45:55Greg Jenner?

  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, we sort of flag it up, Sophie. What big fad came in, in the 1950s, related to coffee here in the UK?

• 46:12Speaker 05

  Uh, like coffee, coffee parties, coffee.

• 46:16Greg Jenner?

  Not far off, yeah, the coffee bar.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  Coffee bar.

• 46:19Greg Jenner?

  Coffee bar, the idea of, so it's different to a coffee house?

• 46:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, a coffee bar, particularly in Britain, I mean, was more about kind of frothy coffee, but it's really about teen culture.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  Uh, teen, young people culture. Essentially, I'd say what we had is, you know, this is the, this is the appearance of the teenager as their own kind of, you know, self-identified thing.

• 46:39Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  A lot of the coffee bars appeal to that. The, what, what you really need for a coffee bar is not coffee, you need a jukebox.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 46:47Speaker 06

  Some kind of jukebox, and then if you're really lucky.

• 46:50Greg Jenner?

  Or a jukebox, if you're Sophie Juker.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  Indeed, a jukebox would, yeah. And, um, if you're really lucky, then maybe you can get a skiffle band in on a Saturday night and do a bit of dance.

• 46:59Greg Jenner?

  Or a Sophie Juker sk- no, that doesn't work, no, I'm sorry.

• 47:02Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Um, wow.

• 47:03Speaker 06

  People like, you know, the very young Cliff Richard, big star in coffee bars.

• 47:08Greg Jenner?

  You heard it here first.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  It sounds made up. I don't even know where a skiffle band is. Skiffle?

• 47:14Greg Jenner?

  Skiffle, yeah, that's how the Beatles started. It's, it's like.

• 47:16Speaker 05

  It's a genre of music.

• 47:17Greg Jenner?

  It's a genre of music before rock and roll in the UK. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's charming.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Can I say I've never felt so old.

• 47:25Greg Jenner?

  And so we get 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.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think the big thing here is really the Italian one, which is in a way what drives the, the, the British sort of coffee bar scene as well. So the Italians basically have been developing espresso. And in the 50s, the new espresso.

• 47:50Greg Jenner?

  You make it sound like a super weapon. The Italians are developing espressos.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  This is one of the greatest things that Italy has ever invented, I'm sorry. And so the, the kind of, the new version of espresso uses much more high pressure machines. So this is Akila Gadja and 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 the espresso, go back, you know. So it becomes like the place that you meet people very quickly.

• 48:28Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 48:29Speaker 06

  So it's, it's a key moment really. And other countries are developing their own sorts of coffee culture around that, you know. So you're kind of in, 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.

• 48:49Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 48:57Speaker 06

  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.

• 49:07Greg Jenner?

  It's very dark, it's very cold.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  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.

• 49:16Greg Jenner?

  It's quite strong in Scandinavia, isn't it?

• 49:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and, and, you know, if you've ever tried to buy a drink in Scandinavia, you'll know that there are, 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. Drinking habits. It just became sort of integral into their socialisation. 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

• 49:57Speaker 06

  as a 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 generally, I mean, it's cold.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Coffee round the clock.

• 50:07Greg Jenner?

  Coffee round the clock with reindeer broth. Can we tempt, can we tempt you into the reindeer broth?

• 50:11Speaker 05

  I, yeah, I I'd do it. I'd I'd feel like rather than a bit of British milk, oh, sorry, French milk.

• 50:16Greg Jenner?

  French, thank you, thank you.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry. Just a coffee with a, it's sort of like a pickleback. It's like a little, yeah. I'd I'd try reindeer broth and coffee.

• 50:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  Feels like it would be savoury, though.

• 50:27Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's gonna, yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 05

  I don't think a sweet.

• 50:29Greg Jenner?

  But it's gonna be warming, isn't it? It's gonna be a warming thing. Okay. 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?

• 50:41Speaker 05

  In Seattle, it's going to be Starbucks.

• 50:45Greg Jenner?

  It is Starbucks. And this is important, I suppose, for economic reasons, for for corporate reasons, but also just to 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.

• 51:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And I think 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 flavours and processes, et cetera, and you should pick one that you you 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, you know, differentiated product, if you like, making coffee a premium product.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  And, you know, 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. Ordinary commodity coffee.

• 51:55Greg Jenner?

  So there we go, Sophie. 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?

• 52:08Speaker 05

  I, I, I think it feels like I want to be in on the party. I felt sort of maybe like a psychosomatic reaction to talking about coffee so long, like I feel quite hyped up. Like it's not been a relaxing chat.

• 52:23Greg Jenner?

  Sorry.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 52:33Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, we've heard a lot today about people getting together and being together and socialising, chatting, communing, it's...

• 52:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think maybe like, I'm trying to think about what the modern equivalent is, or what the like 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.

• 52:53Greg Jenner?

  The nuance window!

• 52:59Greg Jenner?

  This is where Sophie and I sit silently and sip our mockers 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.

• 53:09Speaker 06

  Okay, 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's 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 labour, 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

• 53:53Speaker 06

  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 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

• 54:34Speaker 06

  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's 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.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  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 hangars of the past.

• 55:26Greg Jenner?

  Wonderful. Thank you. Sophie, any thoughts on that?

• 55:30Speaker 05

  That was very, I mean, I like that there's like a sort of glimmer of hope or like a kind of like retake 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, okay, 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.

• 55:56Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know now?

• 56:03Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 56:17Speaker 05

  I am feeling the pressure, but I'm, I believe in the bean.

• 56:22Greg Jenner?

  Amazing, okay, I've got 10 questions for you. Here we go. Question one. A man named Caldi allegedly discovered coffee beans when dancing with which over-caffeinated animals?

• 56:32Speaker 05

  It was a goat!

• 56:33Greg Jenner?

  It was his goats. They were enjoying the bean. Question two. Which Arab country was at the centre of the first coffee trade?

• 56:41Speaker 05

  Oh, it was... My instinct is to say Yemen.

• 56:46Greg Jenner?

  It was Yemen, well done. Question three. Why did Ottoman Sultan Sulaiman the Magnificent close coffee shops in 1565?

• 56:55Speaker 05

  Because he thought that they were sites of licentiousness and bad talk.

• 57:00Greg Jenner?

  Absolutely, well done. Question four. What did Pope Clement VIII never do but allegedly call coffee?

• 57:06Speaker 05

  Pope Clement allegedly called coffee delicious, the devil's drink is delicious.

• 57:10Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 57:20Speaker 05

  Caffeau.

• 57:21Greg Jenner?

  Caffeau. Question six. What did Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley get up to in London's Grecian Coffee House?

• 57:29Speaker 05

  They cut up a dolphin!

• 57:30Greg Jenner?

  They did, for science, man, for science!

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Hashtag free the willy. It's not... Wee willy's not a dolphin, it doesn't work. But I said it.

• 57:38Greg Jenner?

  Flipper, flipper.

• 57:38Speaker 05

  Flipper.

• 57:39Greg Jenner?

  Question seven. Can you name two supposed health benefits of coffee according to Pasquale Rosé's 1652 advert?

• 57:46Speaker 05

  It stops miscarriages.

• 57:48Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it does.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  And it also aids your digestion.

• 57:51Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 58:04Speaker 05

  I feel like this was Mr. King, one of the Mr. Kings. And he put a grind... No, maybe not Walter King, put a grinder in his rifle.

• 58:10Greg Jenner?

  He did put a grinder in his rifle, well done. Question nine. What didn't the original Starbucks sell?

• 58:16Speaker 05

  It did actually sell ground coffee. It sold, and it got people's names right, but then it would change.

• 58:21Greg Jenner?

  That's right, it didn't sell drinks, it just sounded 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?

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Oh, 100.

• 58:32Greg Jenner?

  It was 50 cups of very small but very intense coffee. 10 out of 10, Sophie Chukka, never, ever in doubt. Well done, are you pleased?

• 58:41Speaker 05

  I'm so, I'm so relieved. Never miss, never miss.

• 58:46Greg Jenner?

  Well, I mean, it's been extraordinary history. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thank you, Sophie. Okay, listener, if you want to double down on Duca, you can check out our episodes on Benedetta Carlini, Ashanti Ghana, The Chevalier de Saint George, 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 Soye, 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.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  Thank you, Greg, and enjoy your coffee.

• 59:31Greg Jenner?

  I will. I will give it my best. And in comedy corner, we had the ever sensational Sophie Duca. Thank you, Sophie.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  Thank you so much. Thank you.

• 59:38Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 59:50Greg Jenner?

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

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Best Medicine: dissecting funny and fascinating medicine. I think pain management is the best medicine. Bibliotherapy. Therapy by books. Sleep. Well, spot the comedian. Celebrating medicine's past, present and future.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  I think transplantation is the best medicine because it can completely change someone's life. Defibrillation.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Oh, defibrillation, okay. Amazing machines, that much is clear. Sorry, clear.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  That's a new series of Best Medicine from Radio 4 with me, Kieran Pritchard-McLean, available now on BBC Sounds.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth

• 1:01:05Speaker 06

  Fighting.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation.

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  And its production is an extraordinary story in itself.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead.

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  Join me, Misha Glennie, and three expert guests for a special live edition of In Our Time, where we discuss Casablanca. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.