Coffee doesn't get you drunk, and that is exactly why it produced the modern commercial intelligence network
Coffee first supplied wakefulness for Sufi prayer; because it left drinkers sober rather than drunk, it left them talking, and the coffeehouse became an exchange for commercial intelligence, then reshaped the global economy through slave plantations and branding. Today's arguments about the latte are still written into these five hundred years of history.
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Coffee began as a stimulant for prayer, not as a drink
Coffee was not originally a drink at all; it was the berry, or cherry, of a shrub. In the legend, a goatherd noticed that his goats became unusually excited after eating the berries, and religious men — most likely Muslims — then ate them too and found the berries kept them awake through a whole night of prayer. Early uses were to steep the whole cherry in water, or to grind it into a paste mixed with animal fat and eat it as a high-protein snack. It served the night-time devotions of mystics such as the Sufis first, which is why coffee's origins are bound tightly to religious ritual rather than to leisure. Its spread ran along trade routes and pilgrimage routes in parallel.
The coffeehouse's real innovation was that it contained no alcohol
In the Ottoman Empire coffee moved from a religious drink to an everyday habit of hospitality. Drinking it became a complete ritual: how it was bought, how it was made, how it was carried and served all mattered. The coffeehouse became a place where men gathered in the afternoon to relax and talk, carrying out the social function of the modern cafe. The crucial difference was that it had no alcohol in it — until then sociable drinking had depended on alcohol almost without exception, whereas coffee kept people sober, so it could be used for work, for negotiation, and for long discussions. That setting of "sober sociability" paved the way for the European coffeehouse that followed.
To do business with the Levant trade you had to drink coffee
In 1652 Pasqua Rosée, servant of the Levant merchant Daniel Edwards, opened up selling coffee from a small shed beside the Royal Exchange in London; he eventually even moved the coffee business into a proper building. Ten years later there were already 83 coffeehouses inside the City of London alone. There were three reasons for the explosive growth: the Puritan regime restricted alcohol, coffee itself is habit-forming, and it was bound up with the Levant trading circle — if you wanted to do business with that circle you had to drink coffee, and once you started you could not stop. With that, the coffeehouse went from an exotic novelty to a standard fixture of urban commercial life.
Lloyd's exists because coffeehouses closed themselves into membership clubs
The coffeehouse offered a form of public discussion that neither the university nor the tavern provided: one long table, one newspaper, one penny for a coffee, and strangers could sit down and talk. It became a clearing house of information for merchants, lawyers and scientists. In the 1690s Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse specializing in marine insurance and printed a list of shipping movements — what became Lloyd's List. Whoever read that list first thing in the morning had commercial intelligence hours ahead of everyone else. By the later eighteenth century, brokers and underwriters had worked out that the information was worth more if it was walled off, so the coffeehouses went over to membership and evolved separately into the stock exchange and into Lloyd's. That path from open to closed explains how modern financial institutions were born.
— Markman EllisHaiti won its revolution and lost its place in world coffee
Once coffee became a mass consumer good in Europe, the empires planted it across their colonies. The largest supplier was France, which brought coffee to the Caribbean and above all to Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti; by the 1760s and 1770s it was producing more than half of all the coffee in the world, and every bit of that production depended on slave labour. After the French Revolution, ideas of liberty and equality seeped into the colony, black slaves and free people of colour rose up, and the first black republic was founded. The price was around 1,000 plantations destroyed and the collapse of the coffee system; worse, most countries in the world refused to trade with the Haitian republic, and it was never able to return to a leading place in the global coffee trade.
— Jonathan MorrisAmerica's mass coffee habit was drunk into existence by the Civil War
It was the United States that became coffee's first mass market. During the Civil War the Confederate armies consumed coffee in quantity, generals used caffeine to keep soldiers alert, and the soldiers themselves got hooked; each man's coffee ration was enough for roughly 10 cups a day. When the war ended, demobilized soldiers carried the habit out to the frontier of westward expansion, creating enormous demand. Industrial roasting technology followed, and in 1873 the first branded coffee appeared, Arioza, sold by the Philadelphia firm Arbuckles to settlers heading west. By 1913, about 85% of American coffee consumption was branded coffee. Coffee had gone from a bulk agricultural commodity to a modern industrial consumer product.
— Jonathan MorrisBrazil's coffee volumes rested on the slavery it abolished last
Someone had to meet America's fast-growing demand, and Brazil took on the role. Coffee only reached Brazil in 1727, and in the early nineteenth century large plantations formed around Rio and São Paulo on a scale far beyond anywhere else in the world. The labour there was enslaved, and used for longer than anywhere else: Brazil did not abolish the slave trade until 1850, and did not abolish slavery until 1888. The plantations used destructive agriculture, clearing the Atlantic coastal forest in exchange for large volumes of cheap coffee that was not of low quality. From 1870 to 1950 Brazil supplied more than half the world's coffee, and in some years as much as 70%; to this day it remains the largest producer in the world.
— Markman EllisChains are not specialty coffee's enemy; they are its market
On the modern coffee market the guests disagree. Judith argues that the world is splitting into two extremes: a "low-wage economy of corporate chains" and a "craft consumption of specialty micro-lots." Jonathan partly dissents: he thinks the chains are precisely what created the market for specialty coffee, and that the real structural split is between the coffee people drink in the chains and the mass-market coffee products consumed at home. Most of the world's coffee is in fact grown by smallholders in Africa and Asia, who have limited land and plant on a subsistence basis, yet because the coffee industry has paid so little for so long they frequently cannot even recover their inputs — growing coffee may actually be a loss-making business, which is the cruellest legacy coffee's history has left to the present.
— Jonathan MorrisItalian coffee culture only took its present shape after the Second World War
Italy claims to be the true home of coffee culture, but that culture only took shape after the Second World War. The Gaggia company introduced the lever machine, using a piston to force hot water through the grounds fast at roughly 9 to 12 atmospheres to extract espresso, arriving just in time for Italy's rapid postwar urbanization and the spread of the electricity grid. The Italian coffee bar emerged with it: people stood, drank in a minute or two, and left. Italian law set a price ceiling on "coffee served without service," which held prices down, so drinking standing up became the habit. After the war this culture of espresso and the Italian bar was exported again to Britain, Australia and elsewhere, so that coffee "colonized" Britain a second time — today Britain has more coffee shops than tea shops.
— Jonathan MorrisA latte is mostly milk, yet the argument is only ever about beans
The vehicle for Italian coffee's revival in Britain was almost entirely milk drinks rather than black espresso. Italians drink eighty percent black coffee, while British consumers drink ninety percent white. The latte became a marker of the middle-class liberal: in the United States, Starbucks' expansion long concentrated on blue states, and in Britain people say "latte-drinking Guardian reader" to stand in for a particular political group. Milk makes up the overwhelming majority of the drink, yet discussion of coffee always circles the "romantic" bean and rarely asks where the milk came from or whether it is organic. That disregard for milk is itself a question of class worth examining.
In their own words · checked verbatim
So the first time coffee was consumed. It was, as the fresh. Berry or cherry of the bush.
Lloyd started prin ting a list of shipping movements, for example, which becomes Lloyd's list, which still exists today.
Markman Ellis24:50
Coffee ration.That was actually given to each soldier probably would have supported about making 10 cups of coffee a day.
Jonathan Morris36:26
Well, I'm going to start by disagreeing a little bit because the the corporate chains that that you're referr ing to actually created that market for the specialty coffee.
Jonathan Morris44:46
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.
Jonathan Morris54:51
Figures
| Year London's first coffeehouse opened | 1652 | 14:39 |
| Coffeehouses inside the City of London ten years later | 83 | 14:39 |
| Share of coffee at the Amsterdam exchange coming from Java, late 1720s | about 90% | 22:25 |
| Saint-Domingue's share of world coffee production, and when | 1760s-70s, more than half | 30:29 |
| Coffee plantations destroyed in the Haitian Revolution | about 1,000 | 31:43 |
| Cups a US Civil War soldier's coffee ration would make | about 10 cups a day | 36:26 |
| Branded coffee as a share of US consumption | about 85% in 1913 | 37:38 |
| Brazil's share of world coffee supply | over 50% from 1870 to 1950, 70% in some years | 38:50 |
| Year Brazil abolished slavery | 1888 | 38:50 |
| Extraction pressure of the Gaggia lever machine | 9-12 bar | 51:23 |
Glossary
- Sufis
- A mystical branch of Islam, the first to use coffee to stay awake for night-time prayer.
- Levant Company
- The seventeenth-century English chartered company trading with the Ottoman Empire, which brought coffee into the English market.
- Lloyd's List
- A list of shipping movements that began in a coffeehouse and later grew into an institution of marine information and insurance.
- Robusta
- A disease-resistant, cheap coffee variety with a more bitter flavour, promoted from the late nineteenth century because of leaf disease.
- Moka pot
- A stovetop steam-pressure pot for home use, popular from the 1930s and once celebrated by fascist aesthetics.
- espresso
- Concentrated coffee extracted quickly under high-pressure steam, the core product of the postwar Italian coffee bar.
How to listen
Coffee brand founders, investors who care about fairness in supply chains, and anyone who wants to understand the history behind social platforms and commercial intelligence networks.