History of Coffee (Radio Edit)

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1:05BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are grinding our beans, popping on the kettle and plunging our cafetiere as we learn all about the history of coffee. And to help us get caffeinated and educated, we've invited over two very special coffee guests. In History Corner, he's a research professor in history at the University of Hertfordshire, where he's a historian of consumption, especially the history of coffee. Maybe you've read his book, Coffee, A Global History, or listened to his podcast series, A History of Coffee.

1:43It's Professor Jonathan Morris. Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you, Greg. Lovely to have you here and in Comedy Corner. She's an award-winning comedian and writer. You will recognise her from loads of TV, including her glorious victory on Taskmaster. Maybe you've seen her new stand-up show, but Daddy, I love her. It's fantastic. And of course, you'll remember her from our back catalogue, including recent episodes on Naughty Nun, Benedetta Carlini and The Legend of Atlantis. It's Sophie Duker. Welcome back for a sixth appearance, Sophie. Hey, I'm actually fuming because I heard that you tried to get Sabrina Carpenter for this episode.

2:13Yeah, yeah. She was busy doing the Grammys or something. I was busy watching the Grammys. So actually. Key important question here. I'm relying on you. Do you drink coffee? I restrict my coffee intake because I like the smell of coffee. Right. And I like it as a sort of cultural concept. It makes me feel like I want to die. Right. Perfect guest for the podcast. But I do, I am, I'm sort of like inoculising, that's not a word. I'm sort of building up my tolerance to coffee. And sometimes people don't know that it causes such a reaction on me. So if I'm feeling chaotic, I will occasionally order coffee.

2:58No 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. I don't drink coffee at all. I don't know anything about coffee. So Jonathan, I'm assuming you're a coffee drinker. I am a coffee drinker. I'm beginning to think it's also a murder wrapping within the context of this studio. All right. And you're going to talk us through the history of coffee. So we're going to learn plenty today. So what do you know?

3:28This 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. 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 Perkin Friends. You've got Luke's Diner and Gilmore Girls. You've got Will Ferrell enjoying the best cup of coffee in the world in Elf. Giles from Buffy, featuring in the sexy Nescafe adverts from the 90s.

4:00You'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, 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?

4:33Oh, do I get any clues on the animal? Sure. Is it a big animal? No, medium-sized. Okay. I feel from context clues of being in this room earlier, you said goats. I did say goats. And I feel it might have been a goat. It is a goat. So tell me the story. Recount for me this fabled myth. 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 realises that his goat is acting like really unconventionally. It's an old goat, but he's acting more like a kid, you know? Nice. He's got a spring in his step.

5:11I think Sophie should be writing the origin myth. Definitely an improvement. The real origin myth, it's just real origin myth. It's not real. It's really about the goat herd. A guy called Caldy and he sees his goats and they're dancing away. I see that. And he's saying, what's going on? And he's saying that they're eating these red berries and then they're starting to dance. Caldy 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.

5:54And that is the story of how coffee is formed. It's an Ethiopian heritage. It's really from the sort of the southwest of Ethiopia. Yeah. That's our kind of mythic origins. But what about an actual historical reference, Jonathan? Have we got something that we can say this is the first mention of coffee? 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 1515, written by a guy with a very long name that ends in Al-Jazari. It concentrates and tells his version of the story of coffee. and in it he highlights that another sort of Sufi mystic, a man called al-Dubani, said that the Sufis should bring over coffee to Yemen from Ethiopia to consume in place of kat, which was in short supply, because this would enable them to sort of stay awake and go into their trance-like state while they were carrying out their nightly devotions.

6:54So that seems to be the most viable option, as it were, for what we can say is the earliest clear use of coffee in that way. And what we can say is probably that obviously the indigenous people in southwest Ethiopia, in Kaffir in particular, were probably using coffee for a variety of things, but foraging the coffee, not growing it. Ethiopia to Yemen crosses across the Straits and into Yemen. So we're into the Arab world. From Yemen, do we get it then spreading out through those sort of trade routes out through the Middle East? 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.

7:33The big next stage is in a sense at a certain point, the Yemenis start growing the coffee themselves. Sure. 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. Gotcha. And so it spreads through trade routes. You've got Mecca, Jeddah, Medina, Cairo, these big, big cities in the Islamic world. At what point do people go, but it tastes nice and I'm rather so futuristic, but could I just drink it? When does it become a beverage? Yeah, so probably relatively quickly in the 1500s. The big question here and why this is so important in Islam is coffee intoxicating.

8:07intoxicating, because if it is, you shouldn't be drinking it. But if it is not intoxicating, then you could start drinking it. And if you could start drinking it, well, of course, then you're going to start socialising around it. And this moves into the creation of the coffeehouse, etc. So it begins to become at that point, a social drink. It's used a lot by students, for example. What a change that might be with students in the 15th century. How would that work? Yes. Gosh. And it's Suleiman the Magnificent. He closes down the coffeehouses in Istanbul and Aleppo and Damascus. And yet somehow, as you say, the coffeehouse culture starts to thrive.

8:40The Ottomans basically sort of take over influence in the peninsula. We can kind of trace the way that the coffeehouse moves up through Aleppo, Damascus, and eventually arrives into Istanbul. And Suleiman at first is very welcoming. And then 10 years later, he wants them all closed. The reason seems to be about, if you like, the fear of what might be going on in the coffeehouses. 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 are things that he thinks or articulates are wrong with coffee houses. And then there's the underlying assumption that we have that is Suleiman a bit worried that people might be going around saying he's not so magnificent.

9:23I see. OK. How do you think the Pope, Pope Clement VIII, where do you think he stood on the moral question of coffee in the 1600s? I feel like maybe he was pro 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 maybe it's like a relatively new thing in Europe that could give people vim and vigour 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've got to cheat the bevel. We're going to baptise it.

10:06We're going to make it a good Christian thing. Okay. Except he never did. He never did. That's a shame though, because the line, this devil's drink is delicious, is a really good one. It's a good one. Stick that on a T-shirt. I feel like Clooney could really... Yeah, exactly. By the 1600s, I think we find coffee in Europe. We know in Venice, which obviously was a port city, you'd have a lot of Turkish merchants in there. One of them died in Venice in about 1575. He was murdered, right? He was murdered. Yeah, he didn't just die, he was killed. So they had an investigation, so they obviously had to go and look at his stuff, and in it they found little coffee cups.

10:43So 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. That's interesting. From that, then we begin to hear things about coffee being used as a medicine, so you could be prescribed coffee. Sophie, would you take a prescription of coffee? It doesn't sound like it would do any good. I feel like it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't do good stuff for me, but not medicinally, but functionally. So like the medicine to get you through your essay crisis. 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.

11:15People gathering, discussing, debating political ideas. Does the same thing happen in Europe? This is Britain's greatest contribution to coffee. Oh. In my personal view, because once you kind of really go into it, actually, the date suggests that the first thing that is definitively a coffee house, i.e. a place that you go, get served coffee, sit around, drink it, have a chat, is here in London in 1652 to 54. Because we have a guy called Pasqueroze 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 plates that sell coffee beans.

11:57So Paschero Rosé comes over, he is recruited by a local businessman here, comes over as his manservant, then opens his coffee house under his patronage near St. Michael's Church in Cornhill, just by the Bank of England. And with two years, he's actually got a proper coffee house. 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. And Jonathan's is really the sort of the origin of the London Stock Exchange.

12:31Traders meeting their trading bonds, etc. But then you get other ones where you kind of bring together, you know, your clientele comes together. And they're a very particular kind. So you would have people who were interested in science, as in science as was understood then. It's a natural philosophy at the time. Yeah, exactly. Who'd 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.

13:04So you get them to throw their ballot into a box. Oh, really? Yeah, absolutely. We need to talk about the darker side of this coffee boom. Where do these things originate from? By the 1600s and definitely the 1700s, we're getting coffee plantations? So really by the very end of the 1600s, the 1700s, really. So what has happened is that the Ottomans have really kind of controlled the trade in coffee. It's all done through the port of Almacar or what we call Mocha. Ah, really? So, yeah, absolutely. And they're very careful to try and protect that and make it a monopoly. Eventually, the Dutch managed to get a hold of some coffee, which they find actually growing in India.

13:49They 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 a hold of it, the other European powers. and the place that they then take it, the French take it to the Isle of Bourbon, which is now Réunion 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. So by the 1780s, 80 % of the world's coffee supply comes from the Caribbean.

14:28Just to make this absolutely explicit, it, that is plantation coffee grown by enslaved people. So that's the key thing. Right. Okay. So where does Britain muscle in to this history? So the Brits, their sort of one period where they really get into coffee is when they take over the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from the Dutch. They go into Ceylon and they overthrow actually, there's an area called the Kingdom of Candy. 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.

15:10It's a pretty destructive process. So they kill off a lot of the wildlife, kill off 60 % of the salon'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 labour type schemes. Right. I think the easiest way to say these people are not well treated. Lots of them die. I mean, this is totally new territory for them. They're marched all the way up into the highlands. So it is not a great scenario. So this is 1815, this deforestation and plantation happens. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so we've had some pretty horrible history there.

15:50Let's try and be a little cheerier. Hey! Sophie! When do you think America fell in love with their cup of joe, the US? What do you think their kind of inciting moment is where they go, hang on a second, we're coffee drinkers? I feel like maybe the late 1900s. Oh, you've gone late? No, the late 19th century. You've gone, okay, so you're like 1880. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. 1880 is what came into my head. It's too late, isn't it? It is quite late, yeah. I think we can go early on that. Okay, fine. If I say to you, Boston Tea Party. No. So... You just reject that outright. No. The early 17th century?

16:28So you've gone too early now, I think, maybe. Or maybe you haven't. Jonathan? The Boston Tea Party is obviously in the 1770s. Yes. So actually, no, in one sense. I think Sophie's right both times, which is quite an achievement, given that she put two different centuries in there. Because, you know, yeah, there's coffee in America, being sold in America. I mean, there's a first person's licence to sell coffee, It was something called Dorothy Jones, and that's in 1670. So, I mean, it's in colonial America. Well done, Sophie. You can take the point. What does really kick off coffee in the States, I think, is really two events.

17:05One 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. because they give their troops coffee, enough coffee to probably serve maybe even 10 cups of coffee a day. But they recognize that, you know, the generals recognize coffee is kind of comforting, it's warm, it's very easy to do. And it's a stimulant. And it's a stimulant. And that kind of creates a class of people who then want to drink coffee thereafter. And then at the same time, and this goes back to your point about the 1880s, right, that's the point of obviously mass immigration into America from Europe.

17:46So getting coffee is kind of a proof of arriving in America and having made America. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, okay. It's an aspirational thing in Europe. You get to America, you can probably drink coffee because the coffee is more easily obtained. And so the American Civil War was 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.

18:21We 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. When does coffee granule show up? When is it something that comes in a little pack, you spoon it out and you stir it in the bottom of the cup? Yeah, so there are attempts at doing this sort of 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.

18:55Just 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, 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.

19:38Interesting. I have a question. Yeah, go for it. Was there like a, was there or does there emerge a sort of gendered narrative about coffee, about women not drinking coffee because they'll get nervous or shaky or start trying to get the vote? There's actually been that narrative for some time, actually right back to the introduction of coffee in Britain. I mean, it's very much a male thing. Coffee is the male drink, tea is the female drink, etc. And then there's, you know, the whole thing about women really not being in coffee houses at that time. But I think also the interesting thing with 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?

20:16Do you know how to make your husband's coffee just right? By the late 19th century, the Americans are getting their coffee from South America now. Brazil becomes a huge coffee producing nation, doesn't it? Yeah, Brazil becomes the dominant coffee producer in the late 19th century, and it still is the largest coffee producer in the world. Sao Paulo and the Paulistas, the coffee barons of Sao Paulo, become so powerful that actually when the Portuguese, 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.

20:56So the coffee barons take over the country. The coffee barons take over the country, 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. The world's coffee? The world's coffee. Wow. Wow. 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. And by the 1920s, Colombia, Central American countries, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala are also producing. Are also beginning to get into this. And the world starts to become familiar to us now.

21:35The coffee, the labels and names in our packets, we start to go, hang on, yeah, I know that. And we also get the rise of Robusta. Robusta's a different species? So Robusta is a different species, and it is somewhat more tolerant, 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. 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 then by 1971, we get a major moment in global history, globalization history.

22:14We get the founding of which coffee shop in Seattle, Sophie? In Seattle, it's going to be Starbucks. 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 idea of speciality coffees, the idea of coffee as something you can enjoy, almost like you can enjoy red wine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the things you say about the original Starbucks is actually the original Starbucks just sells coffee beans. And what it's doing is selling a whole different sets of varieties of coffee beans. So what it's saying is it's not just coffee.

22:53There are all these different kind of coffees. They have all these different kinds of flavors and processes, etc. 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 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? Are you more tempted to go out and drink a coffee now or are you less tempted?

23:21I think it feels like I want to be in on the party I felt sort of maybe like a psychosomatic reaction to talking about coffee so long like I feel quite hyped up like it's not been a relaxing chat sorry because I think even hearing it I'm like maybe it's my associations with coffee have been mainly as a sort of wonder drug to finish an essay and less about a sort of salon culture yeah we've heard a lot today about people getting together and being together and socialising chatting, communing. It's... Yeah, I think maybe like, I'm trying to think about what the modern equivalent is or what the young upstart is.

23:58And I feel like it's probably either like bubble tea or Cream's milkshakes. And that's where, that's the hotbed of political dissent today. The nuance window!

24:12This is where Sophie and I sit silently and sip our mockers for two minutes while Professor Jonathan tells us something we need to know about the history of coffee. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Jonathan. Okay, well, I'm going to start with the risen old farmer who has proudly showed us around his beautiful coffee red cherries drying on the patio outside his house in the province of Lampung in Sumatra. And so I asked him who he's going to sell those to. And he said, no one. Those are the best quality. I'm keeping them for myself. And I can't tell you how much that answer made me happy and moved me because the coffee trade has long continued to reproduce the structures of its colonial past, a crop that indigenous peoples were forced to cultivate by foreign fiat that was often tended by unfree labour, enabling the price to consumers in, as it were, the global north to be kept low at the expense of producers in the global south.