Coffee - Philosophy for Everyone

Grounds for Debate

Fritz Allhoff

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781444337129
• eBook ISBN: 9781444393378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Offering philosophical insights into the popular morning brew, Coffee -- Philosophy for Everyone kick starts the day with an entertaining but critical discussion of the ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and culture of coffee.

• Matt Lounsbury of pioneering business Stumptown Coffee discusses just how good coffee can be
• Caffeine-related chapters cover the ethics of the coffee trade, the metaphysics of coffee and the centrality of the coffee house to the public sphere
• Includes a foreword by Donald Schoenholt, President at Gillies Coffee Company

PART 1
THE FIRST CUP: COFFEE AND METAPHYSICS

MARK PENDERGRAST

CHAPTER 1
COFFEE

Black Puddle Water or Panacea?

Throughout coffee’s history, critics have accused the drink of causing horrendous health problems, while those who love the brew have espoused its almost miraculous curative powers. This extreme devotion and condemnation continues today.

Coffee grows wild on the mountainsides of Ethiopia. It is likely that the seeds of bunn, as coffee was called there, were at first ground and mixed with animal fat for a quick-energy snack, while the leaves were brewed to make a weakly caffeinated brew. Tribesmen made wine out of the fermented pulp as well as a sweet beverage called kisher out of the lightly roasted husks of the coffee cherry. At some point during the fifteenth century, someone roasted the beans, ground them, and made an infusion. Coffee as we know it finally came into being.

At first, coffee was apparently used primarily by Sufi monks in Ethiopia and across the Red Sea in Yemen, where coffee trees were cultivated by the fifteenth century. The drink helped them stay awake for midnight prayers, and it added zest to the whirling dance of the mystic dervishes. The drink became a kind of communion wine for the Islamic Sufis, for whom alcoholic beverages were forbidden. In Yemen, the monks sometimes recited the traditional ratib, the repetition 116 times of the phrase “Ya Qawi” (“O possessor of all strength”), while sharing ritual cups of coffee. The reference was to Allah, but coffee itself was also seen as possessing much strength. The word “coffee” probably derives not from Qawi but from qahwa, the Arab word for wine, since coffee similarly seemed to possess some kind of stimulating drug.

The Sufis carried coffee beans throughout the Arab world, including Mecca. The beverage quickly spread beyond the monasteries and into secular use. Thus, while coffee was at first considered a medicine or religious aid, it soon enough became an everyday habit. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes, reserved only for ceremonial imbibing. For those who did not have such private largesse, coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, sprang up. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item.

As the drink gained in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking social brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. “The patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes,” Ralph Hattox notes in his history of the Arab coffeehouses, “ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.”¹

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

The ban lasted only until the Cairo sultan, a habitual coffee drinker, heard about it and reversed the edict. Other Arab rulers and religious leaders, however, also denounced coffee during the course of the 1500s and into the next century. The Grand Vizier Kuprili of Constantinople, fearing sedition during a war, closed the city’s coffeehouses in 1633. Anyone caught drinking coffee was soundly cudgeled. Offenders found imbibing a second time were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the Bosphorus. Even so, many continued to drink coffee in secret, and eventually the ban was withdrawn.

Why did coffee drinking persist in the face of persecution in these early Arab societies? The addictive nature of caffeine provides one answer, of course; yet there is more to it. Coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects.

Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry, and irreverence in equal measure. So important did the brew become in Turkey that a lack of sufficient coffee provided grounds for a woman to seek a divorce. “O Coffee!” wrote an Arab poet in 1511 (the same year the drink was banned briefly in Mecca), “Thou dost dispel all care, thou are the object of desire to the scholar. This is the beverage of the friends of God.”² Even though Mohammed (ca. 570–632) never drank coffee, a myth arose that the Prophet had proclaimed that under the invigorating influence of coffee he could “unhorse forty men and possess forty women.”³

Europeans Discover Coffee

At first Europeans didn’t quite know what to make of the strange new brew. German physician Leonhard Rauwolf published Travels in the Orient in 1582, describing “a very good drink, by them called Chaube that is almost as black as ink, and very good in illness, chiefly that of the stomach; of this they drink in the morning early … as hot as they can; they put it often to their lips but drink but little at a time, and let it go round as they sit.”⁴

The Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini wrote disapprovingly in 1585 about the “time sunk in idleness” in drinking coffee in Constantinople. “They continually sit about, and for entertainment they are in the habit of drinking in public in shops and in the streets, a black liquid, boiling [as hot] as they can stand it, which is extracted from a seed they call Caveé … [that] is said to have the property of keeping a man awake.”⁵

In 1610 British poet Sir George Sandys noted that the Turks sat “chatting most of the day” over their coffee, which he described as “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.” He added, however, that it “helpeth, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacrity.”⁶

In a book published in Germany in 1656, Adam Olearius, an astronomer and surveyor who had traveled to Persia, wrote about coffee, warning that “if you partake to excess of such kahave water, it completely extinguishes all pleasures of the flesh.”⁷ He claimed that coffee had rendered a Sultan Mahmed Kasnin impotent. His book, translated and published in France in 1666, helped fuel anti-coffee sentiment there.

By the time Olearius’s book was published, Europeans were already discovering coffee. Pope Clement VIII, who died in 1605, supposedly tasted the Moslem drink at the behest of his priests, who wanted him to ban it. “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious,” he reputedly exclaimed, “that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”⁸

In the first half of the seventeenth century, coffee was still an exotic beverage, and like other such rare substances as sugar, cocoa, and tea, initially was used primarily as an expensive medicine by the upper classes. Over the next fifty years, however, Europeans were to discover the social as well as medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink.

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

French doctors, threatened by the medicinal claims made for coffee, went on the counterattack in Marseilles in 1679, no doubt encouraged by French winemakers: “We note with horror that this beverage … has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine.”⁹ Then, in a fine burst of pseudoscience, a young medical student named Colomb blasted coffee, asserting that it “dries up the cerebrospinal fluid and the convolutions … the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence.”¹⁰

Six years later, however, Sylvestre Dufour, another French physician, wrote a book strongly defending coffee, claiming that it relieved kidney stones, gout, and scurvy, while it also helped mitigate migraine headaches. “Coffee banishes languor and anxiety, gives to those who drink it, a pleasing sensation of their own well-being and diffuses through their whole frame, a vivifying and delightful warmth.”¹¹ By 1696 one Paris doctor was prescribing coffee enemas to “sweeten” the lower bowel and freshen the complexion.

The French historian Michelet described the advent of coffee as “the auspicious revolution of the times, the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament.”¹² Certainly coffee lessened the intake of alcohol while the cafés provided a wonderful intellectual stew that ultimately spawned the French Revolution. The coffeehouses of continental Europe were egalitarian meeting places where, as the food writer Margaret Visser notes, “men and women could, without impropriety, consort as they had never done before. They could meet in public places and talk.”¹³

Coffee and coffeehouses reached Germany in the 1670s. By 1721 there were coffeehouses in most major German cities. For quite a while the coffee habit remained the province of the upper classes. Many physicians warned that it caused sterility or stillbirths. In 1732 the drink had become controversial (and popular) enough to inspire Johann Sebastian Bach to write his humorous Coffee Cantata, in which a daughter begs her stern father to allow her this favorite vice: “Dear father, do not be so strict! If I can’t have my little demitasse of coffee three times a day, I’m just like a dried-up piece of roast goat! Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee.”¹⁴ Later in the century, coffee-obsessed Ludwig van Beethoven ground precisely sixty beans to brew a cup.

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

Every other European country also discovered coffee during the same period. Nowhere did coffee have such a dynamic and immediate impact, however, as in England.

The British Invasion

Like a liquid black torrent the coffee rage drenched England, beginning at Oxford University in 1650, where Jacobs, a Lebanese Jew, opened the first coffeehouse for “some who delighted in noveltie.”¹⁵ Two years later in London, Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, opened a coffeehouse and printed the first coffee advertisement, a broadside touting “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink,” described as “a simple innocent thing, composed into a Drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water.”¹⁶ Rosée’s ad asserted that coffee would aid digestion, cure headaches, coughs, consumption, dropsy, gout, and scurvy, and prevent miscarriages. More practically, he wrote: “It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch; and therefore you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.”¹⁷

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

Before the advent of coffee the British imbibed alcohol, often in Falstaffian proportions. In 1774 one observer noted that “coffee-drinking hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations; for whereas formerly Apprentices and Clerks with others, used to take their mornings’ draught in Ale, Beer or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakefull and civill drink.”¹⁸

Not that most coffeehouses were universally uplifting places; rather, they were chaotic, smelly, wildly energetic, and capitalistic. “There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheese-store,”¹⁹ one contemporary noted. “Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking, some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge.”²⁰

The strongest blast against the London coffeehouses came from women, who unlike their Continental counterparts were excluded from this all-male society (unless they were the proprietors). In 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee asked, “[Why do our men] trifle away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty bitter stinking, nauseous Puddle water?”²¹ The women were convinced that the drink was emasculating their mates. “We find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour.… Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.”²² This condition was all due to “the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called Coffee, which … has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind gallants.… They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.”²³

The Women’s Petition revealed that a typical male day involved spending the morning in a tavern “till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves sober.” Then they were off to the tavern again, only to “stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee.”²⁴ In response, the men defended their beverage in their own broadside publication. Far fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication-I
• Dedication-II
• Foreword
• Editors' Introduction
• PART 1: THE FIRST CUP: COFFEE AND METAPHYSICS
• PART 2: GROUNDS FOR DEBATE: COFFEE CULTURE
• PART 3: THE WONDERFUL AROMA OF BEAN: COFFEE AESTHETICS
• PART 4: TO ROAST OR NOT TO ROAST: THE ETHICS OF COFFEE
• How to Make it in Hollywood by Writing an Afterword!
• Notes on Contributors