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

Summary

You’re Dead to Me – Episode Summary: "History of Coffee: From Devil’s Brew to Our Favourite Beverage"

Release Date: April 4, 2025 | Host: Greg Jenner | Guests: Professor Jonathan Morris & Sophie Duker

In this engaging episode of BBC Radio 4's "You’re Dead to Me," host Greg Jenner delves deep into the rich and complex history of coffee with the assistance of two distinguished guests: Professor Jonathan Morris, a renowned historian of consumption, and Sophie Duker, an award-winning comedian. Together, they explore coffee’s journey from its mythical origins to its pivotal role in modern society, blending rigorous historical analysis with comedic insights.

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1. The Origins of Coffee: Myths and Realities

The episode kicks off with the legendary tale of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee when his goats exhibited unusual energy after consuming red berries. Sophie Duker humorously embellishes the myth, imagining Kaldi's goats "fighting trolls" before Greg Jenner clarifies the authentic story:

[06:47] Greg Jenner: “It's really about the goatherd guy called Kaldi. And he sees his goats, and they're dancing away. Kaldi thinks hmm, red berries. Let's see what I can do.”

Professor Morris adds depth by referencing the earliest documented use of coffee in a 15th-century Arabic manuscript, highlighting its initial use among Sufi mystics in Yemen to aid in maintaining wakefulness during devotions.

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2. Coffee’s Spread Through the Middle East

Coffee's journey from Ethiopia to Yemen marks the beginning of its widespread cultivation. Professor Morris explains how coffee transitioned from a wild forage plant to a cultivated crop, enabling its expansion along Middle Eastern trade routes:

[10:00] Professor Jonathan Morris: “The natural habitat is really in Ethiopia, Southwest Ethiopia. And from there, they have spread around the world.”

The discussion touches on the pivotal role of coffee in Sufi practices, allowing practitioners to stay awake longer during mystical rituals, thus cementing coffee’s significance in spiritual and social contexts.

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3. The Rise of Coffee Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Europe

Coffee houses emerged as central hubs of intellectual and social activity. Professor Morris recounts the initial acceptance and subsequent opposition by Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who feared the seditious potential of these gatherings:

[12:15] Professor Jonathan Morris: “The Ottomans have really kind of controlled the trade. Coffee is all done through the port of Al Makr.”

Sophie speculates humorously on the pasha’s motives:

[11:24] Sophie Duker: “I think it's interesting. I think maybe I sort of think it leads to licentiousness.”

Despite closures, coffee house culture thrived, particularly in London, where by 1663, there were 82 coffee houses, proliferating to 530 by 1735. These establishments became breeding grounds for the burgeoning stock and insurance industries, with institutions like Lloyd’s of London tracing their origins back to coffee houses.

[22:39] Professor Jonathan Morris: “Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley were founding members of the Royal Society of Science. They met and did a public demonstration in London's Grecian Coffee House.”

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4. Coffee’s Introduction to Europe and Religious Debates

As coffee made its way into Europe, it sparked debates akin to those in the Islamic world regarding its permissibility. A notable anecdote involves Pope Clement VIII, who, according to legend, blessed coffee by declaring it "a good Christian thing," although historical evidence for this remains elusive.

[17:09] Sophie Duker: “Cause I think there is a legend about the discovery of palm wine.”

[18:25] Greg Jenner: “We think that contextually, what he's doing is claiming coffee for Christianity.”

This narrative underscores the cultural negotiations surrounding coffee’s acceptance and integration into European society.

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5. Colonialism and the Expansion of Coffee Plantations

The quest to secure coffee supplies led European powers to establish plantations in the Caribbean, South America, and Asia, often relying on slave labor and exploitative practices. Professor Morris details the devastating impact on indigenous populations and ecosystems:

[28:21] Greg Jenner: “Just to make this absolutely explicit, that is plantation coffee grown by enslaved people.”

The shift to regions like Brazil solidified colonial dominance over coffee production, with Brazil eventually becoming the world's largest coffee producer by the early 20th century.

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6. Coffee's Adoption in America and the Civil War

Coffee's entrenched presence in America was significantly influenced by the Civil War, where the Union's provision of coffee rations to troops bolstered its popularity. Greg Jenner humorously contrasts the soldiers’ reliance on coffee with their wartime activities:

[33:55] Greg Jenner: “There's only so much. But they recognize that, you know, the generals recognize. Coffee is kind of comforting. It's warm, it's very easy to do.”

This period marked coffee's emergence as a staple in American culture, superseding tea, especially post the Boston Tea Party—a shift more gradual than anecdotal legends suggest.

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7. Industrialization, Instant Coffee, and Modern Developments

The industrial revolution brought about significant advancements in coffee production and consumption. Innovations like Jabez Burns' self-emptying roaster streamlined the process, while the advent of instant coffee during the World Wars revolutionized accessibility:

[37:02] Greg Jenner: “They're the kind of demi, whatever, demi Tass type thing.”

Post-WWII, brands like Nescafé popularized instant coffee, making it a household staple globally.

The establishment of Starbucks in 1971 marked a new era of coffee culture, emphasizing specialty coffee akin to fine wines:

[48:23] Sophie Duker: “It's going to be Starbucks.”

[49:38] Professor Jonathan Morris: “So you're like. It's like wine. It's like whiskey or whatever.”

This shift elevated coffee from a commodity to a premium product, fostering a global café culture.

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8. Contemporary Issues and Future of Coffee

The episode concludes with a poignant reflection on the modern coffee industry's challenges and potential for sustainable development. Professor Morris highlights the paradox of coffee producers often lacking access to their own produce due to historical and economic constraints. However, recent trends show promise as producer countries increasingly adopt coffee consumption themselves, driven by rising demand in Asia:

[53:10] Professor Jonathan Morris: “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 hangers of the past.”

Sophie Duker echoes the hopeful tone, emphasizing a shift towards a more equitable coffee narrative:

[53:39] Sophie Duker: “It's quite cool to see like a kind of renaissance in cultural coffee consumption and how that fits into different places.”

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Notable Quotes

• Sophie Duker on Coffee’s Cultural Role:

  “I feel like maybe it's my associations with coffee have been mainly as a sort of wonder drug to finish an essay and less about the sort of salon culture.”
  [49:53]

• Greg Jenner on Starbucks:

  “The focus of it is that the focus is on the coffee itself and how that coffee is distinctive from ordinary commodity coffee.”
  [49:38]

• Professor Jonathan Morris on Sustainable Future:

  “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 hangers of the past.”
  [53:10]

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Conclusion

This episode of "You’re Dead to Me" masterfully intertwines historical scholarship with comedic banter, offering listeners a comprehensive and entertaining exploration of coffee’s multifaceted history. From its mythical discovery and religious significance to its role in colonialism, industrialization, and modern globalization, coffee emerges not just as a beloved beverage but as a powerful cultural and economic force shaping societies worldwide.

Listeners are left with a nuanced understanding of coffee’s past and a hopeful outlook on its future, appreciating the complexities behind every cup they savor.

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Notable Highlights:

• Myth vs. Reality: Debunking the Kaldi goat myth while acknowledging its cultural significance.
• Religious Debates: Navigating coffee’s acceptance within Islamic and Christian contexts.
• Economic Impact: Tracing the roots of major financial institutions like Lloyd’s back to coffee houses.
• Colonial Exploitation: Addressing the dark legacy of coffee plantations and slave labor.
• Modern Coffee Culture: The rise of specialty coffee and global brands like Starbucks transforming consumption patterns.
• Sustainable Future: Optimism about former producer countries embracing coffee consumption and redefining the industry’s dynamics.

This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of the podcast episode, ensuring that both history enthusiasts and casual listeners gain valuable insights into the fascinating journey of coffee.

Transcript

[Greg Jenner]

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I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes.

[Unknown]

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[Helena Bonham Carter]

Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Hello and welcome to youo'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 A Global History or listened to his podcast series A History of Coffee. It's Professor Jonathan Morris. Welcome, Jonathan.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you, Greg.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Lovely to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award winning comedian and writer. You will recognize her from loads of tv including her glorious victory on Taskmaster. Maybe you've seen her new stand up show. But Daddy, I love her. It's fantastic. And of course you remember her from our back catalog including recent episodes on Naughty Nun, Benedetta Carlini and the Legend of Atlantis. It's Sophie Duker. Welcome back for a sixth appearance, Sophie.

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah, second choice. Yeah, she was busy doing the Grammys or something.

[Sophie Duker]

Yeah, I was busy watching the Grammys.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So actually key important question here. I'm relying on you.

[Greg Jenner]

Do.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Do you drink coffee?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right.

[Sophie Duker]

And I like it as a sort of cultural. A sort of a cultural concept. It makes me feel like I want to die. But I perfect guest for the podcast, but I do. I'm sort of like inoculizing. That's not a word. I'm sort of building up my tolerance to coffee and sometimes people don't know that it causes such a reaction on me. So if I'm feeling, 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

Ooh.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

I am a coffee drinker.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

I'm beginning to think it's also a murder happening within the context of this studio.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

All right? And you're gonna talk us through the history of coffee, so we're gonna learn plenty today. So what do. 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 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 and Gilmour Girls. You've got Will Ferrell enjoying the best cup of coffee in the world in Elf Gile from Buffy, featuring in the sexy Nescafe adverts from the 90s. You've got Sabrina Carpenter, already mentioned by Sophie the Espresso summertime hit. And my personal fave would be Paul Rudd ranting in Role Models about the stupidly inconsistent name of all the different coffee sizes. Venti means 20. He shouts but what about the history of coffee? How did it become the world's favourite beverage? And what do goats have to do with it? Let's find out. Right, Professor Jonathan, can we start with the basics? I'm pretty sure Nespresso pods do not grow on trees.

[Greg Jenner]

That is correct.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Good.

[Greg Jenner]

They do not.

[Sophie Duker]

Good.

[Greg Jenner]

No.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So what is coffee in the wild?

[Greg Jenner]

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 8ft tall. Something like that 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And there's caffeine in those seeds. Beans.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Sophie Duker]

Ah, that's very wholesome.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Sophie, maybe you're being enchanted.

[Sophie Duker]

Enchanted. I want to take some joe back to the hive.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

So the natural habitat is really in Ethiopia, Southwest Ethiopia. And from there, they have spread around the world. There are about 120 species of coffee, but the one that we use the most, which is called arabica, is, of course, from Ethiopia.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Lovely. There is a story, There is a sort of lovely myth that people like to talk about that the first time people got hooked on caffeine in these wild coffee plants involved an animal. Sophie, do you want to guess what the animal was and what the story was?

[Sophie Duker]

Oh, do I get any clues on the animal?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Sure.

[Sophie Duker]

Is it a big animal?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

No, medium sized.

[Sophie Duker]

Okay. I feel from context clues of being in this room earlier, you said goats.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I did say goats, and I feel.

[Sophie Duker]

It might have been a goat.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

Okay, so there's, like, a goat. He's just a guy, but he's also a goat, and he lives on a farm. There's a farmer who's called Guy. He has a goat, and then he realizes that his goat is acting, like, really unconventionally. It's an old goat, but he's acting more like a kid. You know, he's got a spring in his step. He's fighting trolls. He's got loads of energy, and he's.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Like, fighting trolls is a lovely reference.

[Sophie Duker]

Thank you so much. We go deep into the fairy tale lore, and he's like, my goat's mad. My goat's been cursed by a witch. Yeah. Is it, like, unconventional goat behavior?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I think that's pretty good.

[Sophie Duker]

Herder.

[Greg Jenner]

I think Sophie should be writing the origin myth from now on. This is definitely an improvement. The real origin myth is just real origin myth. It's not real. It's really about the goatherd guy called Kaldi. And he sees his goats, and they're dancing away.

[Sophie Duker]

I see that.

[Greg Jenner]

And he's saying, what's going on? And he's seeing that they're eating these red berries, and then they're starting to dance. Kaldi thinks hmm, red berries. Let's see what I can do. Takes a few berries on himself, throws some very good moves, decides to take these back, goes to the kind of scholar in his local village, and the guy tries them, doesn't like them, throws them on the fire. Somehow or other smells that smell that you really liked, and says, oh, we should take these, grind them down, make a coffee beverage with it. And that is the story of how coffee is formed.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay. And that's an Ethiopian.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah, there's one involving Solomon. King Solomon.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Sophie Duker]

I love that, like, animals getting intoxicated is our gateway into, like, medicine and, like, health. Cause I think there is a legend about the discovery of palm wine. And it's because that's why I asked if it was a big animal, because apparently elephants would be like, sort of rutting at the trees and getting pissed.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

That's right.

[Sophie Duker]

And you just have some really intense goats having, like really deep conversations. Yeah, very fast.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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?

[Greg Jenner]

I think what we can best say is we've got the first Arabic manuscript that mentions coffee that we can definitively say mentions coffee. And that's written in about 15, written by a guy with a very long name that ends in Al Jazari. It concentrates and tells his version of the story of coffee. And in it he highlights that another sort of Sufi mystic, a man called Al Dubani, said that the Sufis should bring over coffee to Yemen from Ethiopia to consume in place of khat, 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 devotion. 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

That's our earliest reference. There's Bitzin, the famous physician, who we used to call Avicenna, 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 obviously the indigenous people in south wa west Ethiopia, in kafir in particular, were probably using coffee for a variety of things, but foraging the coffee, not growing it.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Ethiopia to Yemen, crosses across the straits and into Yemen. So we're into the part of the world. Exactly. From Yemen. Do we get it, then spreading out through those sort of trade routes out through the middle east?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Essentially, coffee kind of circulates through the middle east, up the red sea. That kind of diaspora, really. The kind of sort of Islamic diaspora around there. The big next stage is, in a sense, at a certain point, the Emily start growing the coffee themselves.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Sure.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Gotcha. And so it spreads through trade routes. So you've got Mecca, Jeddah, Medina, Cairo, these big, big cities in the Islamic world. At what point do people go, but it tastes nice. And I'm not. But could I just drink it? When does it become a beverage?

[Greg Jenner]

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? Cause if it is, you shouldn't be drinking it.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right, okay.

[Greg Jenner]

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 gonna start socializing around it. So it creates the possibility, as it were, to move beyond the religious and start actually meeting up to drink coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Well, this becomes a very challenged thing. Right. So it kind of, to a debate, almost goes to trial. Can you drink coffee? And it's occasioned by this pasha in Mecca who basically sees people drinking coffee outside the mosque and then kind of arrests them and stages a trial of whether it's legitimate to drink coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Ooh, Sophie. This pasha, which means governor, really, he's called, I think, kayeh beg. Why do you think he wants to ban coffee? What do you think is a problem about it?

[Sophie Duker]

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, when they're caffeinated, Rather than sort of like. More like inspiring, like, libertine tendencies. I think maybe he thought it made People distracted and less sort of easy to control. Control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's usually why substances are banned.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. I'm finding Sophie's inherent knowledge of coffee is very impressive here. Yeah, I. That is, I think what we really know, because I think what they're actually trying to ban, what certainly the Skyfield Kai Begfeld threatens about is are these people saying things that we don't want them saying to each other? Are they passing on ideas, doing things, you know? Exactly.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

The upshot of this is that actually for a while, public gatherings around coffee are brand, but coffee drinking is not. But the end practice result is that actually it becomes something that people do socialize with and this moves into the creation of the coffee house, etc. 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. But students in the 15th century, how would that work?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yes, yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Gosh.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So students of 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 coffeehouse culture starts to thrive.

[Greg Jenner]

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 Damasc 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 they're things that he thinks or articulates are wrong with coffee houses. And then there's the underlying assumption that we have that again, is Suleiman worried that people might be going around saying he's not so magnificent?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it comes in a little bit before. I mean, we have the usual thing of travelers in the sort of the Middle Eastern regions reporting back on coffee. There's a clergyman from England, William Biddulph, writes a letter from Aleppo in 1600 describing coffee, or describing the common drink called coffee, 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 sort of Turkish merchants in there. One of them died in Venice in about 1575.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

He was murdered, right?

[Greg Jenner]

He was murdered, yeah.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

He didn't just die, he was killed.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Interesting.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And this stuff is. This is called a fin can. Is it fincan?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, a finjan. 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't do good stuff for me, but I took it, like, not medicinally, but functionally to like the medicine. To get you through your essay crisis.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Pretty sure that's not where it comes from.

[Sophie Duker]

Cappuccino. I. Yeah, I can't. No. I'm gonna stick with lying puppet boy.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Strong guess.

[Sophie Duker]

I also think that's. I wish I was like a grime MC or something. Cause cappuccino is the best thing I've ever said. What's the root? What's the etymological it comes from?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So we have. I guess in our typical language, we have two words for capuchin. One would be a type of monkey.

[Sophie Duker]

Oh, yeah.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's a bit more boring than it.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I love a bit more boring. That's very much our over here. But that has brought us onto 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 viii, where do you think he stood on the moral question of coffee in the 1600s?

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like maybe he was pro.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Mm.

[Sophie Duker]

Because I feel like coffee as a beverage is kind of like God 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 relatively new thing in Europe that could give people vim and vigor.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I guess Sophie's right.

[Greg Jenner]

Although I suppose she's right with the one problem that Pope Clement never, as far as we know, actually really did this. 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 fascinating or any evidence that this ever happened. But it is a brilliant marketing story. So the story goes that they took him the coffee, and he sort of sips it and says, this devil's drink's delicious. We're gonna baptize it. We're gonna 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.

[Sophie Duker]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Except he never did.

[Sophie Duker]

He never did.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

That's a shame, though. Cause the line, this devil's drink is delicious is a really good one.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a good one.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Stick that on a T shirt.

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like Clooney could really.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah. Ex someone phone at Nespresso. We'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?

[Greg Jenner]

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. In the second half of the century, we begin to see really the coffee house taking off as an institution. Actually, this is Britain's greatest contribution to coffee, in my personal view, because once you kind of really go into it, actually the date suggests that the first thing that is definitively a coffee house, that is a place that you go, get served coffee, sit around, drink it, have a chat, is here, here in London in 1652-54, because we have a guy called Pascara Rose 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 Pascra Rose comes over, he is recruited by a local businessman here, comes over as his man servant, then opens his coffee house under his patronage near St. Michael's Church in Cornhill, just by the bank of eng. And with two years, he's actually got a proper coffee house. By 1663, we've got 82 coffee houses in London. So the explosion in London is enormous. By 1735, we've got about 530 of them. Why England is quite interesting because I think the actual answer to that is because the guilds in England are quite weak. So whereas in France there's quite a strong action about, well, which guild would be allowed to sell coffee. And it takes them quite a while to work it out. In England, you know, the guilds don't have. Have any real powers.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Esquire, Rose, Greek Orthodox physics.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay. 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. How would you market coffee now if you were going to add extra things? It does for what's your claims?

[Sophie Duker]

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 going to crap my pants. And it does help headaches and sore eyes in the sense that it aids me in achieving those. Not anti coffee. I do like it, but I think it makes stuff taste good.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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 Pasqua Rose, who opens the first coffee house in London in 1652. And we get this intellectual culture in coffee houses. You know, they become places of more than just socialization. Is that right?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, that is right. I mean, there are, as you can imagine, there are different kinds of coffee houses for different kinds of people. But a lot of the coffee houses become places where people are transacting, as it were, some form of business. I'm going to mention Jonathan's because after all, I should.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So hang on. Lloyds of London.

[Greg Jenner]

Lloyds of London, the insuring firm, the insurance.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

The stock exchange that powers the city of London and the insurance industry, both starting coffee houses.

[Greg Jenner]

Correct.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

That's quite impressive.

[Sophie Duker]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It is a stimulant.

[Sophie Duker]

Stimulant. A very compatible stimulant.

[Greg Jenner]

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 with. Or was understood then.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It's a natural philosophy at the time.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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.

[Sophie Duker]

Oh, yeah.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And Edmond 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?

[Sophie Duker]

Oh, Newton and Halley. I mean, yeah, I'm thinking of, like, comets and gravity. I just want it to be like a sort of thumb war, but I feel like it's probably a lot more important than that.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

A frog. Frog. Frog is the classic. Maybe it's a. Like a. I'm going to go with.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Think water, think wet, think aquatic.

[Sophie Duker]

A fish. No, that's frog. A seal. Bigger. Oh, my God. They're dissecting a whale. Nearly.

[Greg Jenner]

Jonathan Dolphin.

[Sophie Duker]

A dolphin.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Live dissection of a dolphin in a coffee house.

[Sophie Duker]

Wow.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Would you go?

[Sophie Duker]

I would absolutely go. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. How do they transport the dolphin?

[Greg Jenner]

I suspect they fished it out of the Thames would be my guess, but, boy.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

Yes, I did, Sophie, I did.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

You know who Voltaire is?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

That's a. That's a lot of coffee. A lot of coffee.

[Sophie Duker]

That is a lot of coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Jonathan, how many cups a day?

[Greg Jenner]

50.

[Sophie Duker]

Whoa.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

5. 0.

[Sophie Duker]

Is that how much? Oh, yeah. You know, because you're the expert. I'm like, what, 50 cups of coffee? Are they small cups?

[Greg Jenner]

So those kind of. They're the kind of demi, whatever, demi Tass type thing.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

But that's a lot of caffeine.

[Greg Jenner]

It's still a lot of caffeine. He did like them quite a lot. I mean, they turned him from being. What do they say? 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 they'd find musicians doing it, poets doing it, this kind of thing. It's very much a part of their process.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So the intellectual revolution was, you know, the Royal Society, powered by coffee, Powered by coffee. The insurance industry, the economic industry. I mean, coffee is powering everything. And I suppose the interesting question is this is import from the Arab world via the Ottoman Empire, who sometimes are the enemy. Right. In the 17th century, we have these huge wars between Christianity and Islam. So the Turkish are the enemy. And yet this is a Turkish drink. I mean, what is there a rebranding? Is there a sort of awkwardness?

[Greg Jenner]

There are both of those things, I think. I mean, there's a fascination and a repulsion, and they both come into it in the sense that you get this thing that 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 emiracy, the emerser e to Louis xiv. Yeah. And they essentially tell Louis XIV that, yes, they're actually from this absolutely. Grand Sultan and Louis xiv. No one's more grand than me. Mate, go away. And so he stays there for a year. Now, exactly how this works. But they set up a whole kind of Turkish house for this delegation, and they start hosting members of the French nobility and the French court and plying them with coffee and other sort of Turkish delicacies. And this creates this whole phenomenon of what they call Turkomane. And that sort of does, in one hand, fuel the sort of the starter 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?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So cafe au lait.

[Greg Jenner]

So cafe au lait.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

A way to kind of Frenchify it.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

So really, by the. It's at the very end of the 1600s, the 1700s, really. So what has happened is that the Ottomans have really kind of controlled the trade. Coffee. It's all done through the port of Al Makr or what we call Mokka. So, yeah, absolutely. And they're very careful to try and protect that and make it a monopoly. And of course, as coffee becomes more popular in Europe, so the European trading companies, A, start calling into mokka to pick up coffee, but B, are thinking, well, how do we make our supply a bit more secure? Because it's actually very difficult to get coffee in Yemen. You can wait literally a year to fill up your ship. Eventually, the Dutch manage to get hold of some coffee which they find actually growing in India. They take it to Indonesia, they plant it on the island of Java originally. So that's the first time that coffee has really grown outside of its sort of indigenous areas. Then also the French get hold of it, the other European powers. And the place that they then take it, the French take it to the Isle of Bourbon, which is now Reunion off Africa. But really the big place is the Caribbean. They go to the Caribbean, plant coffee in a variety of places. The Dutch plant it on Suriname. The French plant it in what was then their colony called Saint Domingue, which becomes Haiti.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So by the 1780s, 80% of the world's coffee supply comes from the Caribbean.

[Greg Jenner]

Just to make this absolutely explicit, that is plantation coffee grown by enslaved people.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right, okay.

[Greg Jenner]

So that's the key thing.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

So the Brits, they're sort of one period, but they really get into coffee when they take over the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from the Dutch. Yeah, they go into Ceylon and they overthrow. Actually, there's an area called the Kingdom of Kandy. It's kind of indigenous sort of areas rule in the kind of 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, kill off 60% of the Ceylon's elephants. Oh, no, no, really bad. They also bring over to work this a lot of workers from Tamil Nadu, Tamils from India on a kind of, you know, indentured labor type schemes.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

I think the easiest way to say these people are not well treated, lots of them die. I mean, this is totally new territor for them. They're marched all the way up into the highlands. So it is not a great scenario.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So this is 1815, this deforestation and plantation.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly. If you think about, you know, Sri Lanka, now we think about Sri Lanka and tea. Yeah, yeah. And indeed, when you think about Britain, you think about Tea. That's where a lot of our tea came from. But actually what happened is in the 1860s, really, 1869 onwards, the beginning of this disease called coffee leaf rust, and that absolutely destroys the plantations. And so rather than replant with coffee, which would probably get diseased again, they replant with tea. And the other thing to say is that that coffee leaf rust does not stop in Sri Lanka. That destroys pretty much most of the production in the whole of Asia. You know, you've had probably about a third of coffee production was in Asia in the sort of 1860s, and by the 1900s, it's probably about a 20.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay, so we've had some pretty horrible history there. We've had. Let's try and be a little cheerier. Hey, Sophie, when do you think America fell in love with their cup of Joe? The usa? Oh, what do you think their kind of inciting moment is where they go, hang on a second, we're coffee drinkers.

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like maybe the late 1900s.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Oh, you've gone late.

[Sophie Duker]

No, the late 19th century, you've gone.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay, so you're like 1880, something like that.

[Sophie Duker]

Yeah, that's what I'm. That's 1880 is what came into my head. It's too late, isn't it?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It is quite late. Yeah. I think we can go early.

[Sophie Duker]

Okay, fine.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

If I say to you Boston Tea Party.

[Sophie Duker]

No.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

You just reject that outright.

[Sophie Duker]

No, the early 17th century.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So you've gone too early now. I think maybe. Or maybe you haven't. Jonathan. The Boston Tea Party is obviously in the 1770s.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Sophie Duker]

Thank you. That she put two centuries in there.

[Greg Jenner]

Because, you know, ye. 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 1670. So I mean, it's in colonial.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Well done, Sophie.

[Greg Jenner]

You can take the point. There is a big legend that goes, you know, the Boston Tea Party is the moment in which, you know, Americans stop drinking tea and start drinking coffee, despite the Brits.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

As a patriotic act.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Come on. Detailed, shmeete haze.

[Greg Jenner]

Sorry about that. But basically what they won't do after that is drink anything British. What does really kick off coffee in the States, I think is really two events. One key one is the Civil War. And the Civil War, if you like. There is almost an explanation of the Civil War that goes, one side has coffee and the other doesn't. And the side that has coffee, which is actually the north, win. And because they give their troops coffee, enough coffee to probably serve maybe even 10 cups of coffee a day. So they have a coffee ration which.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Is one fifth of Voltaire's daily intake. So barely anything.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So this is why they only fired guns rather than write poetry. Presumably people get the balance right.

[Sophie Duker]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

There's only so much. But they recognize that, you know, the generals recognise. Coffee is kind of comforting. It's warm, it's very easy to do.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And it's a stimulant.

[Greg Jenner]

And it's a stimulant. And that kind of creates a class of people who. Who then want to drink coffee thereafter. And then at the same time. And this goes back to your point about the 1880s, right. That's the point of obviously mass immigration into America from Europe. So getting coffee is kind of a proof of arriving in America and having made America. Do you see what I mean?

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah. Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

It's an aspirational thing. In Europe, you get to America, you can probably drink coffee because the coffee is more easily obtained.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So the American Civil War is in the 1860s, obviously. And we've. I mean, this extraordinary thing. Soldiers diaries mentioned the word coffee more than the word bullet or rifle. We also have a soldier called Lieutenant Colonel. Well, Lieutenant Colonel Walter King. It's a soldier in Missouri Cavalry Regiment who designs a rifle which has got an inbuilt coffee grinder.

[Greg Jenner]

Aw.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

If you can install a coffee grinder into any everyday item, what would you go for? Put you on the spot.

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like it has an item came to mind which was it's not appropriate for the.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Is that not a Radio 4 joke? Are we supposed to.

[Sophie Duker]

It's not a Radio 4 joke, but I feel like I was thinking of like a humming like about noise that grinding wood.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I see.

[Sophie Duker]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I feel I know where you're going with. Okay. But moving on. Thank you for your contribution, Sophie. Okay. 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.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, he is. The guy who patents is 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. Like originally you had grocers who are selling a few green beans that, yes, you might take home roast in a pan or whatever. Now we're seeing people who are producing coffee, roasting it, packaging it. There's a famous brand, Arbuckle, who produced the first kind of branded coffee called Ariosa in the usa. In the usa. This is. Yeah. Which also is kind of used a lot by people who. Going on sort of the wagon trails, going out into the homesteads and so forth.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

You buy a coffee from Arbuckles and you get coupons which you could redeem for tools, guns, razors and wedding rings. So far.

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

You trade it in. Yeah. When do coffee granules show up? When is it, you know, something that comes in a little pack, you spoon it out and you stir it in the bottom of the cup.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So there are attempts at doing this sort of, you know, soluble coffees from about the 1900s, and indeed some of them are developed the First World War. We see the American soldiers get some sort of supposedly instant coffee. But actually what we understand as instant coffee is really a product more of the Second World War. Just before then, we see the invention of, as it were, Nescafe or the creation of Nescafe, which is really the first of those sort of instant brands. And that sort of then ironically is brought back into Europe by the Americans because the work has to be done over in the States, because it can't be done in Europe because it's in the middle of conflict. They bring it back on their backpacks.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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 kind of Islamic world in the 1500s where there's a debate about is this, can we have this within the rules of our faith? There's a second backlash in the 19th century. Sophie, do you know why this one might have kicked off in America. In the uk.

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

I think it's health related. I mean, I can't think of why there would be a moral thing about drinking coffee at that time.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

So there are two elements. I mean, it's sort of on the one hand, you've got some elements still in the church, you know, some temperance movements in particular who are big advocates for coffee, so coffee inns, et cetera. But you've also got some quite savvy people doing marketing who realize that if they have a pop at coffee for being essentially, you know, this thing that might be bad for you, and advertising regulations are not that difficult to get around at that time, then, you know, you can put something else in there. So there's a guy called Post who prod produces a weird cereal drink called Postum and all of that. Exactly. And all of this kind of is centers 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's kind of the 19th century, particularly later 19th century, when there's sort of a lot of worry about alcohol consumption and then. But you get this other thing about, you know, caffeine and the effects of caffeine, what that might do to you.

[Sophie Duker]

I have a question.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, go for it.

[Sophie Duker]

Was there like a. 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?

[Greg Jenner]

It'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 the whole thing about women really not being in coffee houses at that time. But I think also the interesting thing with these kind of, you know, the use of advertising is another way around where people write ads that are basically about, are you a good enough wife? Do you know how to make your husband's coffee just right? And there's some quite violent ads that Go around in the 50s, which involve all kinds of, you know, throwing coffee in your wife's face. Cause it's bad tasting, it's clearly the wife's fault.

[Sophie Duker]

Oh boy.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's pretty fine.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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 we've talked before about Asia, but Brazil becomes a huge coffee producing nation, doesn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Brazil becomes the dominant coffee producer in the late 19th century and it still is the largest coffee producer in the world. Brazil, basically, I suppose, you know, it's a big country obviously, but what happens is that the Brazilians start by using the US 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 working 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. Port is Santos, which is just outside 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So the coffee barons take over the country.

[Greg Jenner]

The coffee barons take over the country. Help the coffee grow, it's got. Help the country grow its coffee to the point that, well, the key date is perhaps by 1906. 1906, they produce over 80, 85% of the world's coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

The world's coffee.

[Greg Jenner]

The world's coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

And I have to say 70% of that 85% then get shipped into the States, which is the world's big coffee market. So that's the way that it works.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Also, are also beginning to get into this and get.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And the world starts to become familiar to us. Now, the coffee, the labels, names in our packets, we start to go, hang on, yeah, I know that. And we also get the rise of robusta. Robusta is a different species.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It's robusta, it's robust, it.

[Greg Jenner]

Hence, yeah, it's common. I mean, the technical name is Conifera, 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay. Yeah. So Both West Africa and East Africa, where it originated in the first beginning of our episode. Okay, so we're into the 20th century and I think you've alluded to this already, Jonathan, but we have to flag it up. Sophie, what big fad came in the 1950s related to coffee here in the UK?

[Sophie Duker]

Like coffee. Coffee. Coffee parties. Coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Not far off. Yeah, the coffee bar.

[Sophie Duker]

Coffee bar.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

The idea of. So it's different to a coffee house.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Sophie Duker]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

A lot of the coffee bars appeal to that. What you really need for a coffee bar is not coffee. You need a jukebox, some kind of jukebox. And then if you're really lucky, juker box.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

If you're Sophie Duker.

[Greg Jenner]

Indeed a Duker box would be. Yeah. And if you're really lucky, then maybe you can get a skiffle band in on a Saturday night and do a bit of dance.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Or a Sophie Duker. No, sorry.

[Sophie Duker]

There you go. Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

You heard it here first.

[Greg Jenner]

There you go.

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Skiffle, yeah. That's how the Beatles started.

[Sophie Duker]

It's a genre of music.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Can I say, I've never felt so old.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

And so we get a distinct coffee culture here in the uk, where the teenagers are drinking it, they're knocking it back, they're listening to rock and roll on the jukebox. But also Germany, Scandinavia, Finland, Italy, they're all starting to develop their own coffee.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Espresso, you make it sound like a super weapon. The Italians have been developing espresso.

[Greg Jenner]

This is one of the greatest things that Italy has ever invented. I'm sorry. And so the new version of espresso uses much more high pressure machines. So this is Akila Gadgia and co. They produce this sort of high pressure, 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

So 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 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I see. Okay. Okay. And Finland gets their own coffee culture, which is quite interesting because they'd already had coffee culture resort, but it was linked to the Sami people.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So I mean, there's a thing with the Scandinavians generally. I, I mean, they drink enormous amounts of coffee per person. They are the leading coffee consumers per capita.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Very dark, it's very cold. And also they were quite often taken by the temperance thing as well. So that's the problem.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And you know, if you've ever tried to buy a drink in Scandinavia, you'll know that there are issues. But with the Sami, one of the things that's interesting, Even by the 20th century, for example, the Sami indigenous people in the north of Scandinavia are actually incorporating coffee into their normal eating and drinking habits. It just became sort of the integral into their socialization. At the end of the day, you'd go off hunting, you come back, everyone whips out the coffee. And so they were by the 50s, using coffee enormously and kind of, you know, using it alongside traditional drinks. The traditional drinks, traditional things like reindeer broth or whatever. So it's one of those things where you use the coffee, coffee 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 coffee around the clock.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Coffee around the clock with reindeer broth. Can we. Can we tempt you into the reindeer broth?

[Sophie Duker]

I. Yeah, I'd do it. I feel like. Rather than a bit of British milk. Oh, sorry. French milk. French milk.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah.

[Sophie Duker]

Feels like it would be savory, though.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Yeah, it's gonna.

[Sophie Duker]

Yeah, don't think a sweet.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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, globalization history. We get the founding of which coffee shop in Seattle?

[Sophie Duker]

Sophie, in Seattle. It's going to be Starbucks.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It is Starbucks. And this is important, I suppose, for economic reasons, for corporate reasons, but also just the sort of taste reasons in terms of the ide coffees. The idea of coffee is something you can enjoy almost like you can enjoy red wine.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah. And I think. I think one of the things to 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 kind of coffees. They have all these different kinds of flavors and processes, et cetera, and you should pick one that you like. And it's this sort of speciality coffee idea is that this is therefore not ordinary coffee. It's not the stuff that you're getting in the supermarket, but it's something quite distinctive. So you're like. It's like wine. It's like whiskey or whatever. It's this sort of, you know, differentiated product, if you like, making coffee a premium product. 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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?

[Sophie Duker]

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 relapsing chat.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Sorry.

[Sophie Duker]

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 the sort of salon culture of like.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

We've heard a lot today about people getting together and being together and socializing, chatting, communing. It's.

[Sophie Duker]

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, the nuance window.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Professor Jonathan 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 Lamb in Sumatra. And so I asked him who he's going to sell those to. And he said, no one. Those are the best quality. I'm keeping them for myself. And I can't tell you how much that answer made me happy and move 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 countries adopted coffee drinking into their own culture. Post independence, many former colonies continued to actively prevent coffee being consumed within the country in order to garner precious foreign exchange reserves. It's still not unusual to meet farmers who have never tasted any form of coffee, let alone sampled their own coffee. When I first began my research into coffee in the early 2000s, the trade appeared to be in somewhat of an existential crisis. For four consecutive years, the benchmark price for commodity coffee was below that of the cost of production, leading literally to starvation among families that depended upon it for their livelihood. The price collapse was caused by an excess of global production over demand, particularly as Brazil and Vietnam upped their output and sought to undercut their competitors. Paradoxically, this coincided with the explosion of the modern coffee shop format exemplified by Star Starbucks. Today, the picture looks very different Prices are at their highest since the 1970s. While some of that is due to the impact of climate volatility on supply, an underpinning factor is the growth of demand in new markets, including that of producer countries themselves. Asia is driving this with more coffee shops per capita in Seoul than in Seattle. China has increased its green coffee imports by 50% in the last five years, much of it from the. While Indonesia itself now consumes 40% of its coffee. The transnational culture of coffee consumption that has taken off offers both a sustainable future for the global coffee industry and a way out of those colonial hangers of the past.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So what do you know now? It's time. Time now for 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?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[Sophie Duker]

It was a goat.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It was his goats Enjoying the bean. Question 2. Which Arab country was at the centre of the first coffee trade?

[Sophie Duker]

It was. My instinct is to say Yemen.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

It was Yemen. Well done. Why did Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent close coffee shops in 1565?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Absolutely. Well done. Question. Question 4. What did Pope Clement VIII never do but allegedly call coffee?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Very good. That's right. He never actually said it, but we like it so much it's in the quiz. Question 5. What patriotic coffee drink was invented in France in the 18th century?

[Sophie Duker]

Cafe au lait.

[Greg Jenner]

Cafe au lait.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Question 6. What did Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley get up to in London's Grecian coffee house?

[Sophie Duker]

They cut up a dolphin.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

They did. For science, man. For science.

[Sophie Duker]

Hashtag freethew Willy. It's not wee. Willy's not a dolphin. It doesn't work, but I say it.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Flipper. Flipper, flipper. Question 7. Can you name two supposed health benefits of coffee? According to Pasquale Rose's 1652 advert, it stops miscarriages. Yeah, it does.

[Sophie Duker]

And it also aids your digestion.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Very good. That's two. That's good. Very good. You could have sore eyes, dropsy, gout, scurvy, drowsiness. It does everything. Of course, it doesn't. Question 8. What ingenious coffee related device was invented by a soldier during the American Civil War?

[Sophie Duker]

I feel like this. 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.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

He did put a grinder in his rifle. Well done. What? Didn't the original Starbucks sell?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Greg Jenner]

That's right.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

So 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?

[Sophie Duker]

Oh, it was 50 cups of very.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Small but very intense coffee. 10 out of 10. Sophie. Juka. Never, ever in doubt. Well done. Are you pleased?

[Sophie Duker]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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 St. Georges, if you want some musical history. And for more foodie historical stuff, we have episodes on the history of chocolate, on the history of ice, and on celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, which is one of my favorite episodes. That's a very fun one. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to youo'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.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you, Greg. And enjoy your coffee.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

I will. I will give it my best. And in Comedy Corner, we had the ever sensational Sophie Duker thank you, Sophie.

[Sophie Duker]

Thank you so much. Thank you.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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.

[Sophie Duker]

Bye.

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

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

[F]

Best Medicine. Dissecting funny and fascinating medicine.

[Sophie Duker]

I think pain management is the best medicine.

[Greg Jenner]

Bibliotherapy therapy by books.

[Sophie Duker]

Sleep well.

[F]

Spot the comedian celebrating medicine's past, present and future.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Professor Jonathan Morris]

Defibrillation.

[F]

Oh, defibrillators. Okay. Amazing machines. That much is clear. Sorry. Clear. That's the new series of Best medicine from Radio 4 with me, Kiri Pritchard Maclean, available now on BBC Sounds.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes.

[Unknown]

And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught, she's going to be shot.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from world war ii. Subscribe to History's Secret heroes wherever you get your podcasts.