Archive: Coffee

28:25This was the news of the town. This is where you got your news. This is where things developed in a way they had not developed before. They really hadn't developed in this way before because political news was largely concentrated and distributed in a kind of need-to-know basis. So it was people... And one of the reasons why Charles II wanted to shut down the coffeehouses is because people who weren't courtiers and politicians were discussing politics. How dare they enter into political debate and think that they could have something to say about the future of the country? Jonathan Morris, what's happening with the production of coffee and how is it produced and how much labour is involved?

29:06And what do you have to say about that? Right. Well, I think what we need to think about is that at this point, as coffee spreads into more general use in Europe, So virtually all of those imperial countries start creating colonies or start planting into their colonies coffee and creating plantations to cultivate it. Probably the largest coffee suppliers are the French. The French take coffee to the Caribbean. They take it to Martinique, but most of all they plant in what is then called Saint-Domingue, what we now refer to as Haiti. By the 1760s, 1770s, that has well over half of the world's coffee is being produced there.

29:52All of that production is carried out using slave production. Is that okay, or is there a ripple beginning to turn into a flood that that's not okay? So what happens particularly in San Domingue is that with the outbreak of the, as it were, the development of Enlightenment ideas and the outbreak of the French Revolution in Paris itself, that those ideas also penetrate into Saint-Domingue. And they begin to agitate for their rights. This ultimately coincides in the creation of what becomes the Haitian Revolution, in which both, as it were, Jean de Colleur, pushing for the emancipation of slaves, and the slaves themselves become involved.

30:34That ultimately leads to, as we know, the creation of the first black republic in Haiti, which unfortunately also leads to pretty much the destruction of the coffee system in Haiti. So about a thousand plantations are destroyed. Interesting, quite a few of the leaders of the revolution, not least Toussaint Liberture himself, were in some way coffee producers. So we have this sort of very confused situation, but at the end of it what we end up with is the destruction of first the coffee industry in Haiti And then once the Haitian Republic is established, its inability to re-enter into the trade because of the refusal of many of the rest of the world to do business with the black republic.

31:18Mark Manellis, what criticisms were there of the new coffee culture, both the slavery side and the idea of these rampaging associations in London, that sort of thing? So coffee had always had its detractors from when it first arrived, this strange, black, hot, bitter drink. So it was an obvious sort of subject for satirical attacks and criticism. It had critics of its physiological effects as well that we've been hearing about. I mean, medically, people accused it of being both an intoxicant and an aphrodisiac, but also causing impotence and obstructing the bowels and things like that. And then people also accused it of wasting people's time, hanging around in coffee houses, talking to each other, keeping talking because that's the effect that coffee has long into the night when people should have been working.

32:09So apprentices and law students are particularly accused of spending far too much time in the coffee house. People also accuse it of being an exotic luxury, wasting the nation's hard currency for a product which has no nutritional value. and so this sort of connection between physiological fear of the effects that coffee was having on British masculinity as it were, on British men and the social effects that coffee having becomes a sort of vector for hostility to coffee and to coffee houses. Judith Hawley, the coffee drinking, coffee trade declined in the 19th century. How was that? A number of reasons.

33:00I think cultural, commercial, geographical changes happened over the course of about 50 years. In the middle of the 18th century, the royal family took to tea drinking. And coffee was no longer quite such the buzzy drink. Tea became more refined. Tea was also something that you could drink at home. So it could be more widespread. Coffee was something you drank in a coffee house. All men, tea, you could drink at home. The lady at the house could preside over the tea table. Also, because of the Dutch East India Company doing so well with coffee trade, the British East India Company, I think, put more of its effort into tea drinking.

33:40So there's a big commercial pressure to keep producing tea and making tea more saleable. and Markman's also described how the coffee houses became kind of clubs and closed shops some of them commercially shut themselves off to new members some of the more fashionable ones around St James's like Whites became members only clubs they became elite institution and became associated with gambling also when city merchants started to move out of the City of London and didn't live there anymore these premises couldn't really keep going because if all the merchants were living above the shop they could go to the coffee house several times a day and Peeps describes going to the coffee house three or four times a day but once you're no longer living in the city it became more of a working class drink in the 19th century so there were coffee shacks and carts like the sort of little street carts that you get still in London you get all over New York that is a cheap quick drink to perk you up and the temperance movement sponsored coffee taverns to try to wean working men off going to the pub for lunch.

34:46So it moved. It declined seriously and has never fully recovered, even in the current coffee boom. Jonathan Morris, how did coffee become so very popular in America? Well, America is really the first mass market for coffee. And what we see is obviously a gradual increase over the 19th century, but we see a big growth immediately after the Civil War. And that's probably because in terms of the armies of the Civil War, the Confederate army consumed a large amount of coffee. Coffee obviously has psychoactive properties, which we've discussed. That was seen as a good thing by the generals to keep their soldiers alert.

35:25Their soldiers became very keen on coffee and were drinking coffee, as they put it, between meals, with meals, after meals. On every route march, we have to have coffee before we start and so forth. So the coffee ration that was actually given to each soldier probably would have supported about making 10 cups of coffee a day. Obviously, once those people are demobilized, that's quite a latent demand for coffee. And they're also then demobilized into the society at the time of the great expansion of moving out westwards, moving out on the ranches, the cowboys, etc. And that creates a further demand for coffee to support that.

36:03And we see that being then addressed through technological discoveries, most of all through the creation of an industrial coffee roasting plant and industrial coffee roasting as a business. So by 1873, we have the first branded coffee. It's called Ariosa, very much marketed at people making that restaurant move and marketed by a company called Arbuckles in Philadelphia. and from there that we see by 1913 that basically about 85 % of American consumption is of branded coffee so there has been the creation of this market for an industrial commodity. Thank you. Markman Ellis, let's turn to Brazil which at one stage was the biggest producer is it still?

36:53Anyway, the biggest producer of coffee in the world 70 % I think of the world's coffee produced in Brazil 80 % of the 70 % went to America. Can you tell us how that happened? Yeah, so the demand, which Jonathan's just been describing, that grows in America in the 19th century, had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't America. And Brazil grows in importance in the coffee trade. So coffee had first been taken to Brazil in 1727, in the beginning of the 18th century, but it's not really until the beginning of the 19th century that the plantations really take off. In Brazil, they're particularly on the Atlantic seaboard around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

37:31They expand in size. Coffee plantations in Brazil are massive compared to other places. The labor that's used on them is slave labor, far later than anywhere else. From what? From inside Brazil? No, again, from Africa, imported from Africa. and the slave trade wasn't abolished in Brazil until 1850 and the slavery itself wasn't abolished until 1888, which is a long time after anywhere else. So these are big industrialised slave-driven coffee plantations. In a fertile country, using forms of quite destructive agriculture, which deforested the Atlantic seaboard of Brazil and produced large quantities of coffee relatively cheaply.

38:27So the demand in America is growing and in Europe, and Brazil was able to supply cheap but also relatively high-quality coffee in huge quantities. So from the period from 1870 through to 1950, Brazil supplied more than 50 % some years as up to 70 % of the world's global supply of coffee and it's still by far the largest producer I think about somewhere between a third and a half of the global production is Brazil Given the slaves have gone, how does it produce it now? So after slavery was abolished and the people who had previously been slaves were unwilling to work on the plantations as you can imagine they tried indentured labour especially from Southern Europe and from Japan, which partly accounts for the large populations of Japanese and Italian immigrants in Brazil.

39:23And they mechanised more of the production so that it didn't require as much labour. When slave labour is not available, then the next step is steam-driven. How big was this trade? I mean, compared to other trades that were going on, cotton and all the rest of it, Was this a big deal? Well, in terms of Brazil, it's the biggest deal, without a doubt. So for Brazil, that's the number one agricultural commodity at that time. So the Brazilian economy is based on that right up until really the middle of the 20th century. Judith, do we know that the taste of coffee, the making of coffee has changed?

40:01Has it changed? How radically has it changed? Are we drinking the same stuff? I think we're drinking very different stuff. Mark Winn actually has a very good phrase for this. I think he calls it the ugo of surreverence. It has the goo, the taste, the ugo of surreverence, which means excrements. The introduction of milk, the gradual control of the roasting process, so you could roast coffee beans at different temperatures and in a more stable way, the removal of impurities. That all improved coffee, But at the same time, some much worse coffee was coming on the market. So in the late 19th century, there was a terrible disease of the coffee plant that wiped out over the course of about 30 years most of the coffee plantations in the West Indies.

40:53The Dutch managed to source a different type of coffee called Robusta in the Congo. And Robusta is the coffee which now is produced, a lot of it is produced in Brazil, but also in Vietnam. and it's a cheaper, nastier, burnt rubber sort of taste. So therefore we're talking about addiction if people are going to keep swallowing this. Is that right, Markman? Well, I mean, so the caffeine theory of coffee's victory over our taste buds would suggest that it's the addictiveness which keeps us drinking. But I mean, I think that coffee has a complicated array of effects and the idea that it's a sort of social drug, a thinking drug is also really important the way we approach coffee.

41:38Do I have evidence for that?

41:42That's a thinking drug. Only my own experience. I mean, there's propaganda for it. Oh, well, you've got your own experience. Oh, and that's useful. What does it do to you? Well, I mean, the morning doesn't work until I've had my coffee. Same for Voltaire. Same for Balzac. Voltaire wrote the Enlightenment on 40 cups of coffee a day. Balzac kind of invented France in a way. he invented Paris in his amazing novels by drinking coffee all night. Well, that's good enough for Balzac. It's certainly good enough for Balzac. That was probably, well, 50 cups of coffee a day strikes me as a little bit excessive.

42:19But I would say coffee, it's addictive, but that addiction is quite a mild addiction. And in fact, coffee is very much like alcohol, really. We each process our coffee in different ways. as a half-life in our body, we can probably take a certain amount of coffee without becoming addicted to craving the next couple of coffee. To go around the table, how in your view has coffee changed society? It's a small question to ask you all, starting with you. Well, I think coffee puts people in a place where they can be more sociable, be together more often, in a way which is reflective and philosophical and maybe sociable and discursive.

43:06So it adds to the way in which we suffer each other when we live closely together in cities. Thank you. That was Mark and Malice. I didn't introduce him at the beginning of my question. Now, Judith. I think if we look at the way coffee consumption is going today, it seems to me to set out two quite radical alternatives for the world. One is the world of corporate coffee, the coffee chains existing on a low wage economy. So you have that kind of mass coffee market on the one hand. On the other hand, you have these micro lot estates, fair trade coffee, the sort of hipster coffee, which is as varied and as interesting as fine wines and is made in an artisanal way and designed to be consumed by a kind of small self-selecting, perhaps.

44:00But it's a very different model of how to live. And Jonathan? Well, I'm going to start by disagreeing a little bit because the corporate chains that you're referring to actually created that market for the specialty coffee. And in fact, I think the big division we have to think about is really the division between coffee being drunk as coffee in the coffee shop and the kind of mass coffee that we have as coffee products, most of which is drunk in the home or used in other ways in the home. And that actually reflects back into the coffee market, because if I was going to make a difference, it would be between the kind of mechanised large-scale farming that Markman's been talking about in Brazil and the vast majority of coffee in the world, which is grown by smallholders across Africa and Asia, where they have very small amounts of land and are growing as a subsistence crop.

44:48And the problem that we have, and if you like the problem coming out of history, is that because labour has always been historically very lowly compensated in the coffee industry, the price that goes back and gets back to those smallholders is very, very low and consequently very frequently does not actually affect the labour that they put in to the point that they may actually, if this is priced out correctly, be losing money by growing coffee for us to consume. Well that's a rather bleak ending but none the worse for that thank you very much thank you very much Jonathan, Jonathan Morris Markman Ellis and Judith Hawley next week stop all the clocks cut off the telephone as we'll be discussing W.H.

45:34Auden and his poetry from the dark days of the 1930s thank you very much for listening And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests I came across two very interesting facts about coffee recently. When Jonathan was talking about the importance of coffee to American soldiers, I came across a fact which sort of tallies with that that the Swiss government stockpiles essential food stocks in case of nuclear wars. And I presume and rather hope that other governments do too. And they have a huge stockpile of tons and tons of coffee and they thought this isn't really an essential.

46:15and it's taking up room that could be taken up with lithium-ion batteries or whatever they thought was more essential, sardines or soya or whatever. But the Swiss people rose up and said no, coffee is an essential we've got to keep it. The other thing I came across recently which surprised me a lot and somehow brings together the two ends of our history, the kind of the Arabian Oriental history and the modern European history and that is that in Algeria in the 19th and 20th centuries when the French colonised Algeria, there was a thriving Algerian coffee culture, which is very like the Oriental culture, men drinking in the afternoon, chatting along tonight, drinking that kind of coffee.

47:00The French brought coffee with them as a colonising force and they couldn't really understand, they rather looked down on this local coffee culture. They thought that these people were, as Markman was talking about the gossip and the idleness. They're wasting their time sitting around gossiping, whereas the French who are drinking their kind of coffee at the right times of the day, first thing in the morning and after dinner, were able to be fit, alert, intelligent and efficient, whereas these natives were drinking coffee in a way which rendered them luxurious and idle. It's an interesting reflection on that, is that actually coffee growing and coffee growing countries generally, as we said, drink very little coffee.

47:41and part of the reason for that is that actually their own governments or their own rulers have prevented them from so doing not least for example say kenya had a rule that you couldn't roast coffee in the country and that was in place up until the 2000s what we do see is actually that where coffee is consumed in those economies it is standard instant style coffee so we have the irony that these coffee growing countries are drinking coffee in ways that are very much the the ways that we have developed to actually sort of compress and frankly reduce the quality of the coffee and the time that goes into it.

48:21Given that it was early thought that coffee kept the workers awake to do the real work of that time, which was prayer, why didn't they think coffee kept workers awake to do the essential work, which is picking coffee beans? That's an interesting question. I think that the answer would probably be A, because of the time that it takes to prepare from scratch, because you'd have to roast your own beans on the site to start doing that. And also because tea is the usual drink there. And tea, obviously, you know, your leaves are right there. So you can take the tea leaves and create an infusion straight away to do that.

48:58Coffee is very much an urban drink. And we're beginning to see the growth of coffee in, as it were, non-traditional markets, precisely as they urbanize. so including markets like say China, Asia including now markets like Africa South and a little bit like South America so as we see increased urbanisation we actually see people leaving the coffee fields going into the cities and taking up the coffee habit What about Italy? We missed out Italy I'm going to claim Italy because that really is my thing I'm going to claim Italy What would you like to know about Italy? Everything you have in mind Well, but briefly, succinctly, point of view and written, that'll be fine.

49:40Okay, well, Italy is, obviously, is very proud of its coffee culture. Really, that coffee culture, although we've said Italy is the entry point of coffee into Europe, it really becomes developed with the distinctiveness of espresso. Espresso is a way of basically preparing coffee, and the essence of it is using pressure to speed up the time of extraction. At the beginning of the century, you see these first wonderful, big, huge, vertical coffee machines with big steam boilers making things that they call espresso because they're making coffee expressly for each individual customer. They're making it by expressing, using a certain amount of steam pressure, the water through the coffee.

50:23And they're making it much quicker, though for that period it's about 40 seconds. When we start thinking about espresso, it's really with the revolution that comes immediately after the Second World War with Gaggia, Achille Gaggia, who produced the lever machine, which actually is kind of a spring-coiled machine, and consequently using that piston is able to push water through at much higher pressures, about sort of 9 to 12 bars. Once that's standardised with the application of electricity and so forth, and Italy at that time again is urbanising very rapidly and also venerating electricity, we have the development of the Italian coffee bar.

51:01Fast coffee, short shots delivered quickly and we also have the Italian coffee culture, standing up, drinking the coffee, going in, going out very quickly. Part of that is because the Italians had a law that enabled them to put a maximum price on coffee but it was a cup of coffee served without service, if that makes sense. So it had to be a cup of coffee just passed across the bar. And as a result, that coffee price is kept very low. Everyone takes their coffee standing up. One of the reasons why only now do we have, in the last couple of years, a Starbucks opening in Italy is because there was no market for that because basically the prices would have been far too high to generate any real demand amongst the Italian people.

51:48This is the Italian seminar we're going to. This is the Italian seminar. Yes, Martin has to write the things. So Britain had become a tea-drinking nation by the 1820s, and most of the British Empire was tea-drinking through the 19th and 20th century, and it's through post-war, the Italian coffee-making method, but also the idea of the Italian cafe, that coffee recolonises Britain and Australia and New Zealand, for example. So now we have in Britain many, many more coffee shops than we do tea shops. And people go out for coffee. They might drink tea, but they go out for coffee. And so the coffee has come back in Britain on the back of the Italian invention of reinventing the sociable space of drinking coffee.

52:43But there's another aspect to the Italian coffee culture, which I think of as a kind of fascistic, which has fascistic elements to it. And that's the introduction of the mocha stovetop coffee machine, which became very popular in the 1930s, was favored by fascism. And partly because the machines, these devices which you screw the two halves together, you put it on your stove, they're made of aluminium, which is this modernist, efficient metal. but also it was drunk in the home. You're bringing modernity into the domestic space and it's a wonderful combination. Some of the big espresso machines were modelled on steam engines.

53:23This little stovetop machine takes its inspiration from a washing machine. So it's kind of domestic and it's machine-made, it's external and it's internal all at the same time. It's definitely true that the Bialetti is created in the 30s and the reason, as you say, the use of aluminium is very important. there, it's a sort of austerity metal really, but the same austerity means that actually the fascists don't really approve of coffee, coffee imports kind of decline during the whole of fascism because they regard it exactly as what Martin was saying it's a drink that is a luxury because it's imported so as early as 1926 espresso machines, the installation of espresso machines is temporarily outlawed in fascist Italy in order to stop people drinking luxurious coffee so the real takeoff of that machine is really in the 50s the violetti that's when it kind of spreads across the whole household i think the the other just to go back to to markman's point about the sort of the spread of you know italian style coffee houses is also that of course those are all based on those milkified drinks yeah um so that we have that kind of again a sort of a weird thing whereby italy drinks 80 sort of black coffee and we drink 90 white coffee but it's Italian style coffee.

54:43But there are all those connotations again of class and to some extent gender. So the class one, you know, the whole notion of the latte liberal is a huge thing in the spread of the chain. If you look at the spread of Starbucks and mapped it against states that are red states and states that are blue states, everything will be blue states for the first sort of 20 years. And it's only much later that it really begins to penetrate into those kind of American heartland type states. And the same discourse you would still find today, you know, in the British press, if you want a quick designation for, you know, Guardian reading liberal, it will be latte sipping.

55:22Well, you know, sat over their cappuccino. We know what's actually implied when we hear that. Can you do all the newspapers like that? I could have a go for you. But I also think there's something rather infantilising about this spread of latte more than any other drink. the quantity of milk in that cup, the way in which people are drinking these disposable cups, these sort of sucky cups, they look like baby cups, and they're walking slowly down the street, sucking on their milky drinks. I think it's very different from standing at the bar and having your shot of manly espresso and then rushing off to do some important business.

56:00And the milk is largely unexamined. I mean, only very recently have people started worrying about whether or not the milk's organic and where it's sourced from. With soy milk. Or soy. So there's huge quantities of milk which are being consumed and there's usually in coffee houses very little talk of the milk. I mean, it's all about the romance of coffee, even though the coffee is a vanishingly small percentage of the actual drink. Where did the cognac go in your talk? I, for a while, when I was 17 and a half, worked in Paris with the Abbé Pierre and we went round in the morning collecting stuff from the back of big houses and such on these great lorries and the guys stopped and you nipped into a bar and they had coffee and cognac.

56:44It was a very startling way for a northern lad to start the day. Surprising enough, we were used to it. It was partly that the French cafe culture is rather different, partly because of the licensing laws. So when cafes were first opened in Paris, I think I'm right about this, that the vintners had a greater dominance in the era and so the coffee was only sold on licensed premises. So coffee was always sold alongside alcohol. Now, 18th century British coffee houses sometimes served alcohol, but they weren't primarily wine bars, restaurants, taverns and inns. They were designated coffee shops. I mean, I think this is the big thing, is that the Continental Cafe starts from that sort of guild restriction or rather the way that the coffee is assigned to a guild and it's assigned to the distiller's guild and they are given the licence to serve distills at table.

57:40I think your taste is about to be tested as the producer comes in. Simon? Just curious. Do you want tea or is it all coffee? Coffee. Coffee. I'm going to have to try your coffee, yeah. BBC coffee. I'll try it. It's another category entirely. Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making WhatsApp docs. You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis.

58:22All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and well-being, equipping ourselves and our listeners with the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even. And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We're most certainly not, son. We have a lot of new topics coming up from tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility. We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of What's Up Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds.

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