It’s hard to imagine a world without coffee. It’s one of the most actively traded commodities in the world, and both the supply and demand are increasing. But the market is not only increasing – it’s changing in nature. Coffee has gone through four distinct waves.
“Coffee has gone through four distinctive waves…”
The First Wave
The first wave is largely speculation, as the origins of coffee drinking are lost in the mists of time. The most popular (and almost certainly untrue) legend is that of the merry berry-munching goats of an Abyssinian herder called Kaldi. Noticing how lively his charges were after eating the berries, Kaldi took them to a local monastery. The monks decided the berries must be evil and, in an attempt to destroy them, threw them on the fire.
The heavenly aroma they emitted as they darkened and caramelised in the flames had the monks feverishly raking out the now roasted beans and – possibly in response to divine inspiration – grinding them and mixing them with boiling water.
A more likely story is that the Chinese treasure fleets of the 15th century introduced tea drinking to Yemen. After the Chinese left and the Yemenis ran out of tea, they looked for a substitute. The Mufti of Aden, Gemaleddin, discovered coffee on a missionary trip to Abyssinia, and brought the leaves and berries back to Yemen. The Yemenis made a tea from the leaves, and a refreshing infusion called qish’r from the flesh of the berries. Qish’r is still made in Yemen and other parts of the Middle East.
It is unknown when they hit on the idea of roasting the hard seeds (which previously were probably discarded), grinding them and brewing coffee. But it was this serendipitous discovery that started the first wave of coffee drinking. Gemaleddin was a Sufi, and it is almost certainly this mystic branch of Muslims that first regularly drank something recognisable as the coffee we know today, using it to fuel all-night worship and the wild dances for which the whirling dervishes are renowned.
Knowledge of Good and Evil
In its early history, coffee was tightly tied in to religious ritual – Christian, Pagan and Muslim, including Sufi. So it’s not that far-fetched to suggest that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that Eve plucked in Eden was coffee. Think about it. Humans evolved in Africa, so it’s not too much of a conceptual leap to imagine almost-humans reaching out for the beautiful red coffee berries in the Eden of Olduvai and – yes – learning to think, to talk, to challenge the status quo, and to become human. How’s that for a conceptual leap?
The Second Wave
The second wave was when coffee spread from the Middle East into the non-Muslim world. No one is really sure when coffee first hit Europe, but the most commonly repeated story is that Europe’s coffee culture started in Vienna in 1683, when Ottoman forces retreated in a bit of a rush and left behind hundreds of pounds of coffee. An entrepreneurial Polish spy who had spent some time in Constantinople acquired the coffee, and started Europe’s first coffee shop. It wasn’t long before they were springing up in Paris and England.
The advent of coffee drinking irrevocably changed European life, thinking and history. The concept of drinking unadulterated water was quite foreign to the European mind, so, until the arrival of ‘the wine of Araby’, as coffee was called, most people drank beer or wine all day – wandering around half sozzled all their lives. So it’s not surprising that the arrival of coffee coincided with a flowering of intellectual activity – much of which took place in actual coffee shops. Some of the most lasting and influential institutions, including Lloyds of London, the London Stock Exchange and the Royal Society, were founded in coffee shops.
Coffee is inextricably entwined with the idea and the planning of revolution. Although some of these stories may be a tad embellished – or downright apocryphal – they are interesting. Three of the best involve the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution.
It was in the Green Dragon Coffee Shop in Boston that plans were laid out for the dramatic and heavily symbolic protest that catalysed the American Revolution. And the well-known American patriotic predilection for coffee over tea dates to the ongoing boycotts of tea consequent to that protest – the Boston Tea Party. Does make you wonder about guerrilla marketing, doesn’t it?
At the other end of the political spectrum, in 19th-century Vienna, the Cafe Central became a hotbed of intellectual and political discourse. During World War I, the café was frequented by many European luminaries, including an intense young Russian called Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, who was to become better known to the world as Leon Trotsky. A much-quoted and possibly apocryphal story relates that, when the foreign minister of Austria-Hungary was warned of the possibility of a revolution in Russia, he shrugged and – with alarming irony – replied sarcastically, ‘And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr Bronshtein sitting over there at the Cafe Central?’
An equally bizarre story concerns the Marquis de Sade – the somewhat explicit novelist who inspired the coining of the word ‘sadist’. Imprisoned in the Bastille in early July 1789, de Sade was infuriated because his jailors would not bring him coffee – surely something that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment (although in the context of de Sade that would require some inventiveness). Anyhow – de Sade shouted out through the bars that the guards were slitting the throats of the prisoners. The subsequent storming of the jail to rescue the imperiled prisoners is commemorated by French people every year as Bastille Day. Not sure how the prisoners fared, or whether de Sade got his coffee, but the storming of the Bastille yielded a large cache of arms that contributed significantly to the success of the revolution, and irrevocably changed European history.
As the demand for coffee grew, the colonial powers started looking for ways to get around the monopoly. This was not as easy as it might sound, as the Yemenis, who controlled the trade and still got most of their beans from Ethiopia, would not sell raw beans. They sold them lightly roasted or boiled in order to ensure they would not germinate.
So European history eulogises the ‘brave’ and ‘noble’ men who virtuously smuggled raw (stolen) coffee beans or coffee seedlings out of East Africa to be planted in tropical colonies. It seems that the concept of morality and heroism really does depend on your point of view.
By the beginning of the 20th century, coffee was readily available in most parts of the world, and a few decades later it was practically ubiquitous, but (not to put too fine a point on it) pretty horrible.
In South Africa, most people drank either anaemic instant coffee or moerkoffie, a pitch-black brew you had to strain through your teeth and could probably float a horseshoe on. Coffee in the Middle East remained pretty much what it had been for centuries – thick, black and ritualistically brewed by dark, mysterious men in small cabals prior to the discussion of deep, dark ideas, while the Americans had entrenched the habit of leaving a glass pot of filter coffee on a hotplate till it turned into syrup. The worst, though, were probably the French, who through a deep sense of patriotism drank their coffee heavily laced with chicory, which could be grown in France by French farmers. A glimmer of light was the invention of the espresso machine, exploiting the newly discovered steam power that was utilised for everything from pumping flooded mines to spinning cotton.
But, lurking in the background, and leaping up to take the unwary by surprise, was what can only be called Hot Brown Liquid, and goes by the name of instant coffee, much of which contains very little coffee. Like many things, this hideous substance was ‘invented’ more than once, but the person who takes the credit is George Washington – no, not that George Washington, another one. He concocted his diabolic brew in 1909, and found a willing market in trench-bound soldiers in World War I – it was almost certainly better than chewing boots.
The Third Wave
The third wave was a backlash. As the 20th century started drawing to a close, and communications improved, people started questioning everything – including why coffee had to be so damn awful. It didn’t start in Seattle, but Starbucks certainly perfected the art of marketing good coffee. Even if they weren’t making the best, they were certainly marketing the best. It wasn’t long before the unashamed Starbucks-clone, Seattle Coffee Company, brought the same idea to South Africa, followed shortly by a slew of speciality coffee chains, and soon every yuppie in the country was walking around with a cardboard cup of sweet coffee-flavoured froth in their hands, and wouldn’t buy a car if it didn’t have a gimballed coffee-cup holder. Like many things, it really did start off well. But, also like many things, once the marketing had done its trick and people believed the hype, they just carried on buying the coffee even as the standards dropped and dropped.
The Fourth Wave
Until the fourth wave. The 20th century is but a memory – and 21st-century coffee culture is gentler and a lot more sophisticated. As we become more concerned about the effect of our lifestyle on the planet, we have started to question the way we have been doing things. As stated earlier, coffee is big business, and it’s hugely profitable – but not for the growers. The average price of coffee paid to the producer has decreased significantly over the last few decades, while the price of the finished product on the supermarket shelves has increased. That seems weird, so let’s look at the mechanics of actually growing coffee.
The best coffee has been found to come from coffee trees grown at high altitude in the shade of the forest canopy. So traditionally coffee farmers have planted the trees in the forest, or at least interplanted coffee trees with fruit trees that provide shade, as well as sustenance and an alternative income. But that’s not the case any more. The controversial green revolution of the 1970s and 1980s had first-world advisors advocating large-scale destruction of highland forests to grow coffee, especially in Central America, Brazil and – as post-conflict aid – Vietnam.
But there are two kinds of commercially grown coffee – arabica and robusta. Arabica is smoother, tastes much better and has a naturally lower level of caffeine. Robusta has only one advantage – you guessed it: the plant is robust. So, that’s what’s grown in the huge monoculture plantations where the forests have been cut down and the people displaced. Here’s an interesting thing. Most of the coffee grown in the world is robusta, but most of the coffee sold in supermarkets claims to be 100% arabica. Weird. But it’s a lesson that, if you buy mass-produced coffee or – even worse – instant coffee, you are imbibing a product with no provenance.
You have no idea where it comes from. Also, if you want to be frightened out of your knickers, bear in mind that Vietnam is the second biggest producer of coffee in the world. And most of the vast coffee plantations are on land that was conveniently ‘cleared’ during the Vietnam War by the use of Agent Orange. Oh – it was used in Colombia in the ‘war on drugs’ too. Hmm, would you like one spoon of dioxin or two with that cup of instant, Sir?
Okay, enough of the scaremongering. Here is the good news: the fourth wave is about the fact that it is impossible to produce good coffee in an environmentally unsustainable way, and real coffee nerds – as well as pretentious wannabees – pay attention to where the coffee comes from, how it is processed, and what its special characteristics are. Out of this grew the emphasis on organic coffee and Fairtrade coffee – both of which are definitely good things, but they are top-down and expensive. So the new trend is Direct Trade – buying coffee in microlots of single origin – coffee grown by known and identifiable people on small, sustainable farms, harvested by hand and sold at fair prices to speciality roasters and importers. This is the future of coffee – coffee with body, but also with heart and soul.