Coffee

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Coffee

"‘How important was it that coffee was non alcoholic?’

‘It was very important, although, of course, even more important back in the Ottoman Empire, and Arabia. It was important because, until that point, really in terms of sociable drinking, that would all have to be conducted over some form of alcohol. So once there was a drink that was actually doing the wakeful as opposed to the sleeping, that obviously enabled it to be used in settings such as work practices, such as places where people were negotiating trading and so forth. And that becomes the basis really, of the early coffee houses’...

Some of the stuff that was written about the coffee houses in the early days was satire on it or promotion of the coffee house. There's a famous pamphlet in which the women were inveighing against the men for attending coffee houses and becoming feminized. They gossiped like women, and then when they came home, they're *cough* like shotten herring, no good for anything... They're impotent. Yes. Coffee houses made men impotent. But they also sharpened men's wits. So there were coffee houses associated with particular wits like the greats dramatist and poet John Dryden held court in in Will’s coffee house in Covent Garden...

So coffee had always had its detractors from when it, when it first arrived. This strange black hot, bitter drink. So it was an obvious sort of subject for satirical attacks and criticism. It had, critics of its physiological effects as well that we've been hearing about. I mean, medically people accused it of being both an intoxicant and an aphrodisiac, but also causing impotence and obstructing the bowels and things like that. And then people also accused it of wasting people's time, hanging around in coffee houses, talking to each other, keeping talking because that's the effect that coffee has long into the night, when they should have been, people should have been working. So apprentices and law students are particularly accused of spending far too much time in the coffee house.

People also accuse it of being an exotic luxury, you know, wasting the nation's hard currency for product which has no nutritional value. And so, this sort of connection between physiological fear of the effects that coffee was having on, on British masculinity as it were, on British men and the social effects that coffee has, becomes a sort of vector for hostility to coffee into coffee houses…

In the middle of the 18th century the royal family took to tea drinking and coffee was no longer quite such the, the buzzy drink. Tea became more refined. Tea was also something that you could drink at home so it could be more widespread. Coffee was something you drank in a coffee house, all men. Tea, you could drink at home. The lady of the house could preside over the tea table. Also the because of the Dutch East India Company doing so well with coffee trade, the British East India Company, I think put more of its effort into tea drinking. So there's a big commercial pressure to keep producing tea and making tea more saleable... it declined seriously and has never fully recovered even in the current coffee boom…

America is really the first mass market for coffee. And what we see is obviously a gradual increase over the 19th century where we see big growth immediately after the Civil War. And that's probably because in terms of the armies of the Civil War, the Confederate Army consumed a large amount of coffee. Coffee obviously has psychoactive properties, which we've discussed, that was seen as a good thing by the generals to keep their soldiers alert. Their soldiers became very keen on coffee and were drinking coffee, as they put it between meals, with meals, after meals. On every route march we have to have coffee before we start and so forth. So the coffee ration that was actually given to each soldier probably would have supported making 10 cups of coffee a day. Obviously, once those people are demobilized, that's quite a latent demand for coffee...

[On Brazil using slave labour to produce coffee and accounting for an overwhelming proportion of global supply due to it, and being the last to abolish slavery] It's still by far the largest producer. I think about somewhere between a third and a half of the global production is Brazil… after slavery was abolished, and this, the people who have previously been slaves were unwilling to work on on the plantations, as you can imagine, and they tried indentured labor, especially from from Southern Europe and from Japan, which accounts for the large, partly accounts for the large populations of Japanese and Italian immigrants and in Brazil, and they mechanized more of the, more of the production so that it didn't require as much labour when slave labour is not available. Then the next step is steam driven...

‘I think if we look at the way coffee consumption is going today, it seems to me to set out two quite radical alternatives for the world. One is the world of corporate coffee, the coffee chains existing on a low wage economy. So you have that kind of mass coffee market on the one hand. On the other hand, do you have these micro lot esstates, fair trade coffee, the sort of hipster coffee which is as varied and as interesting as as fine wines. And it's made in an artisanal way and designed to be consumed by a kind of small self selecting, perhaps. But it's a very different model of how to live’

‘Well, I, I'm going to start by disagreeing a little bit because the corporate chains that you're referring to actually created that market for the specialty coffee. And in fact, I think the big division we have to think about is really the division between coffee being drunk as coffee in the coffee shop, and the kind of mass coffee that we have as coffee products, most of which is drunk in the home or used in other ways in the home’…

‘As the Swiss government stockpiles essential foodstocks in case of new nuclear wars… they have a huge stockpile of tons and tons of coffee, and I thought this isn't really an essential, you know, and it's taking up room that could be taken up with lithium ion batteries or whatever, which is more essential, sardines or soy or whatever. But the Swiss people rose up and said, No, we must have, coffee is an essential. We've got to keep it...

In Algeria in the 19th and 20th centuries when the French colonized Algeria, there was a thriving Algerian coffee culture, which is very like the Oriental culture. Men drinking in the afternoon, chatting on tonight, drinking that kind of coffee. The French brought coffee with them as a colonizing force. And they couldn't really understand, they rather looked down on this local coffee culture. They thought that these people were... the gossip and the idleness, they're wasting their time sitting around gossiping, whereas the French are drinking their kind of coffee at the right times of the day, first thing in the morning, and after dinner, were able to be fit, alert, intelligent and efficient, whereas these natives were drinking coffee in a way which rendered them luxurious and idle’

‘It's an interesting reflection on that is that actually coffee growing and coffee growing countries generally as we said, drink very little coffee. And part of the reason for that is that actually their own governments or their own rulers have prevented them from so doing, not least, for example, say Kenya had a rule that you couldn't roast coffee in the country. And that was in place up until the 2000s. What we do see is actually that where coffee is consumed in those economies, it is standard instant style coffee. So we have the irony that these coffee growing countries are drinking coffee in ways that are very much the, you know, the ways that we have developed to actually sort of compress and, frankly, reduce the quality of the coffee and the time that goes into it’…

‘Italy is, has obviously is very proud of its coffee culture. Really that coffee culture although as we said Italy's the entry point for coffee into Europe, it really becomes developed with the distinctiveness of espresso. Espresso is a way of it, of basically preparing coffee. And the essence of it is using pressure to speed up the time of extraction. Beginning of the century, you see these first wonderful big, huge vertical coffee machines with big steam boilers making things that they call espresso because they're making coffee expressly for each individual customer. They're making it up by expressing, using a certain amount of steam pressure, to put the water through the coffee, and they're making it much quicker, though for that pirate it's about 40 seconds.

When we start thinking about espresso is really with the revolution that comes immediately after the Second World War with Gaggia, Achille Gaggia, who produced the lever machine which actually is kind of a spring coiled machine. And consequently using that piston is able to push water through at much higher, much higher pressures about sort of nine to 12 bars. Once that standardized with the application of electricity and so forth, and Italy at that time again is urbanizing very rapidly and also *something* electricity, we have the development of the Italian coffee bar.

Fast coffee, short, short shots delivered quickly. And we also have the Italian coffee culture. Standing up drinking the coffee. Going in, going out very quickly. Part of that is because the Italians have a law that enabled them to put a maximum price on coffee, but it was a cup of coffee served without service, if that makes sense. So it had to be a cup of coffee just passed across the bar. And as a result, that coffee prices kept very low. Everyone takes their coffee standing up.

One of the reasons why only now do we have in the last couple of years a Starbucks opening in Italy is because there was no market for that, because basically the prices would have been far too high to generate any real demand amongst the Italian people’...

Austerity means that actually the fascists don't really approve of coffee. Coffee imports kind of  decline during the whole of fascism. Because they regard it exactly as Martin was saying. It's, you know, it's a drink that is a luxury because it's imported. So as early as 1926, espresso machines, the installation of espresso machines is temporarily outlawed in Fascist Italy in order to stop people drinking luxurious coffee. So the real take off of all of that machine is really in the 50s"