Some refused to accept this caffeinated future. “Everybody is using coffee,” grumbled Germany’s Frederick the Great in 1777. “If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer.” But the resistance quickly crumbled. Strangely enough, some of coffee’s biggest early boosters were religious conservatives. Many members of the clergy clamored for widespread coffee use because they were annoyed that so many parishioners fell asleep during their sermons. The Puritans in particular campaigned for coffee as a great soberer and as a promoter of the mental effort necessary to understand the Bible’s teachings. (As a bonus, they also thought it killed the libido.)

Horrible fates befell those who spurned coffee. Consider the following trend. What happened to Napoleon’s army once the diminutive emperor insisted that his people substitute chicory (which grew in France) for coffee (which they imported)? Defeat. During the Civil War, how did the Confederates fare after the Union blockade deprived them of their morning cup? Poorly. Nazi-occupied territories in World War II were so starved for coffee that, according to the coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, British Royal Air Force planes sometimes scattered tiny bags of it over towns to remind the locals just how awful life under Hitler was. Need we ask why the Germans really lost?

Once the thinkers of the Enlightenment caught on to the bean’s powers, the Western world’s rich tradition of tweaking on coffee began in earnest. Artists, writers, and intellectuals came to see the drink as the key to their success, and they treated it with a corresponding level of obsession. Every day, Beethoven counted out exactly sixty beans for his ideal cup. Voltaire threw mugs of it back by the dozen, and the French novelist Honoré de Balzac reputedly drank as many as sixty cups daily — a claim that sounds absurd until one reads his acid-trip account of coffee’s effect on his mental faculties: “Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. . . . Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink — for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water.”

These trembling, caffeine-addled thinkers needed a place to unleash the lightning bolts darting around their minds, and they found it in the coffeehouse culture of eighteenth-century London. Here, coffeehouses reached their pre-Starbucks pinnacle. In 1652, London harbored one solitary coffeehouse, but by 1700, the city claimed more than two thousand of them; they grew so popular that patrons often used a favorite coffeehouse as their mailing address. London’s coffeehouses were more than just places for heffed-up citizens to claw at the wallpaper and babble incoherently, however. This was important babble. The vibrant coffeehouse gossip industry ultimately spawned the world’s first modern newspapers — the Tatler and the Spectator, two compendiums of the juiciest hearsay. One coffeehouse birthed the first ballot box, which allowed patrons to air their views anonymously, without fear of the government spies who prowled the premises in search of traitors.

For their frenetic intellectual activity and egalitarian atmosphere, these establishments were called “Penny Universities,” because for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons could hear the latest news, participate in debate, or witness, say, Adam Smith writing his “Wealth of Nations.” If a Londoner was in the mood for science, he could wander over to a place like the Grecian Coffee House, where Isaac Newton, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the physician Hans Sloane once dissected a dolphin that had wandered into the Thames river. Edification came free with every purchase.

Historians disagree about why the Brits switched so abruptly to tea, terminating the London coffeehouse phenomenon, but one possible cause is this: the coffee tasted repulsive.* Since the government taxed coffee by the gallon, proprietors had to make it in advance — first roasting the beans in frying pans over a fire, which left them half scorched and half raw — and then reheat the brew later. Thus, the gastronomes of the day dubbed the beverage “syrup of soot” and “essence of old shoes” and called its flavor reminiscent of “Dog or Cats turd.” A few hundred years later, displeased Americans started making the same kinds of complaints.

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