History of Coffee

We sit down to a cup every morning and perhaps enjoy a few more throughout the day. Here's the backstory with some juicy tidbits:

The modern coffee drink was invented at the end of 15th century, when roasting and crushing the coffee beans over open fires before extracting them with hot water became the accepted methodology. The Turks claimed coffee to be an aphrodisiac and husbands kept their wives well supplied. If the husband did not supply coffee, it was a legitimate cause for a wife to divorce. Coffeehouses became the social centers, competing with mosques for attendance. As gathering places for political activity and sedition, they banned several times over the next few decades, but they kept reappearing. Eventually a solution was found when coffeehouses and coffee were taxed...

At one point in the mid-16th century, Sultan Murat IV closed them all; they were to remain dark until the last part of the century. But as soon as the Sultan’s edict went into effect, the coffeehouse owners packed up and re-opened their businesses elsewhere, including Venice, Greece and the European continent. Ever notice how Greek coffee is exactly the same as Turkish coffee? The Viennese, not enjoying the grounds in their coffee, invented filtration...

Nevertheless, the Arabians closely guarded their coffee production in order to maintain their complete monopoly. Government policy forbade export of any fertile beans, so that coffee could not be cultivated anywhere else. (The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, but when stripped of its outer layers it becomes infertile.) The Dutch eventually acquired some live shrubs or beans in 1616 and brought them back to Holland where they were grown in greenhouses. Another story tells of a Moslem pilgrim from India named Baba Budan, who secreted seeds out of Arabia in 1650 and planted them in the hills in Mysore, India where they flourished...

The Arabs were known to drink so much coffee that the Christian church denounced it as “the hellish black brew.” But Pope Clement VIII found it so delicious that he baptized it and made it a Christian beverage, saying “coffee is so delicious, it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

At first coffee was mainly sold by lemonade vendors and was believed to have medicinal qualities. Coffeehouses appeared as meeting places for men. The first opened in Oxford in 1650, in London in 1652, in Paris in 1672, in Vienna in 1675. The first coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1683... But then, coffee houses spread quickly across Europe, becoming centers for intellectual exchange. Many great minds of Europe met in the forum, over the beverage.

The largest insurance company in the world, Lloyd’s of London, began as a coffeehouse. It was started in 1688 by Edward Lloyd, who prepared lists of the ships that his customers had insured.

Generational Views of Vietnam

There's a special section on Vietnam in last week's Economist, which made me think about the time I visited there in the summer of 2000. I was traveling with my mother and Vietnam was our last stop during a 3 week trip that focused on China. In China, neither of us had expectations of what we were going to see, and we were both delighted. Vietnam was another story.

Of course I know from textbooks and TV specials and a general knowledge of history about the Vietnam war, but I was too young to know the emotional, political and cultural turmoil that it engendered. My most immediate sources on Vietnam were friends who had gone backpacking there after college in the mid 1990s.

On the other hand, as we were driven from the airport in Ho Chi Minh City to our hotel, the guide casually pointed out the old American Embassy. My mother immediately recalled news footage of people clinging to that last helicopter leaving the embassy roof, knowing that anyone left behind certainly was in terrible peril of death or awful re-education. As we drove into Ho Chi Minh City, I was excited to see a new place and she felt deep shame/guilt about how the US had failed to protect the South Vietnamese who had worked with/fought with the US. Those few days in Vietnam were difficult for her in a way that surprised me. I had never heard her talk about the subject and she was not a hippy or a war protester, but clearly she had very deeply held feelings, which were so different from my own because of our different generations.