Considering the alternatives, Balzac believed that separate rooms are desirable because they suit both those couples who are so passionately devoted to each other that distance is no obstacle, as well as those who are indifferent to each other, in which case distance doesn’t matter. He describes “the twin bedstead”—that is, single beds under the same canopy—as a “Jesuitical way of sleeping” and remarks that in the early days of marriage “the distance between heaven and hell is not more impassable than the space which divides your two beds.” He warns that this state wears off and a bed will resume its primary function, namely for sleep—and, eventually, for death. In due course, the Victorian age would become coy about sex. It would compensate with an elaborate pornography of death. Our exhausted culture has swung the other way: it has a tired and restless prurience about sex and goes to great lengths to sanitize death and keep it out of sight. We think we are superior to the Victorians without realizing how ridiculous we look in our own sleep.
When Balzac died, he had just turned fifty-one. He’d crammed a lot into those years: hundreds of books and hundreds of thousands of cups of coffee. Balzac began his addiction to coffee while at school and drank sixty cups a day, brewed as thick as oil. It was coffee that enabled him to maintain his unsocial work regime: he slept in the early evening, rose at midnight (dressed in the monk’s robe that became his hallmark), and then wrote in feverish stretches of twelve or fifteen hours, kept awake by caffeine. To some extent, this lifestyle was necessitated by his complex financial and business arrangements. He was often dodging creditors, staving off ruin, paying fortunes to keep up sunny appearances in the shadow of bankruptcy. Balzac knew how to spend money: his bedrooms, extraordinary productions that reminded some visitors of brothels, didn’t help. Yet he spent little time in them, saying that “too much sleep clogs up the mind and makes it sluggish.” One of his biographers, Graham Robb, describes coffee as “the corrosive fuel of Balzac’s fictional world.” He depended on coffee and couldn’t live without it. But he didn’t love it. He described himself as a “victim” of coffee:
Coffee is a great power in my life: I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.
In the end, it was coffee that killed him. Balzac had a long list of symptoms, many of which would have taken other mortals a much longer time to acquire, but Dr. Nacquart, his physician of thirty-five years, wrote finally that “an old heart complaint, frequently aggravated by working through the night and by the use or rather the abuse of coffee, to which he had recourse in order to counteract man’s natural propensity to sleep, had just taken a new and fatal turn.” Coffee, it appears, can be lethal.
Coffee is the most popular and readily accessible form of caffeine, a substance that is used on a daily basis by three-quarters of the people on the planet. It’s everywhere. You see people carrying their morning coffee to work in paper cups, holding them out like lamps to light their steps, a personal talisman. Disposable coffee cups have become ubiquitous.
It’s a funny mark of modern society that so many cities pride themselves on their coffee culture, as if it makes them unique. What they don’t know is that so does everywhere else. If you go to Toronto, the people will tell you that the thing that makes Toronto unique is its love of coffee. In Budapest, they will tell you the same thing. Same in Cairo. Same in Seattle. Or New York. Or London. Most cities have virtually ten thousand places where you can buy a cup of coffee. (And that doesn’t count the rivers of cola that flow through supermarkets and fast-food stores, nor the caffeine tablets some people wash down with the cola.)
All this caffeine has one primary purpose: to cheat sleep. It turns night into day. Of course, there are social rituals, and it’s great to meet people in a coffee shop and even better to escape from them in one. But it’s a curious culture that allows you to relax as long as you spend the time loading up on stimulants. Besides, those people being steered to work by disposable coffee cups, those people holding on to a Coke bottle like it’s a handle on something, hardly look like they’re relaxing. Caffeine is a potent stimulant, a psychoactive drug domesticated to the point that it is used to punctuate the day.
Caffeine was isolated in 1819 by a Swiss chemist named Gustav von Runge, the man who also discovered quinine. He was put up to the task by the German poet and erstwhile alchemist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was at that time such a megastar that even chemists did his bidding. Goethe is best known for his telling of the Faust legend, a story of how the devil makes deals with the sleepless in the dead of night. Caffeine works by blocking the access to brain receptors of a substance called adenosine, an inhibitory neurotransmitter whose job is usually to tell the brain to slow down and get ready for sleep; caffeine cuts that brake cable. Caffeine doesn’t do anything about tiredness; it simply disguises its symptoms for a while.
Coffee accounts for half of the 120,000 tons (yes, tons) of caffeine consumed around the globe every year. There are about 60 milligrams of caffeine in a cup of instant coffee and roughly 120 milligrams in a cup of espresso; in other words, the world’s caffeine consumption is two trillion cups of instant or one trillion cups of espresso per annum. That’s enough that roughly every single person on the planet, including babies, could have a cup of coffee every single day of the year.
Of course, there are dozens of plants that can provide caffeine; among them are tea, cocoa, and guarana, all with various subspecies. The drug is found in many plants because it is a natural insecticide. It evolved to stop the plants being eaten, and with characteristic perversity, humans are among the very few creatures who regard the stuff as anything other than a poison or, at least, a deterrent. This is handy in some ways because the presence of caffeine, say in a water source, is a good sign that humans have been there. There is so much caffeine flushed through the pipes under the United States that it can be measured in the oceans on either side of it. Perhaps the fish are sleep-deprived as a result.
All the elaborate ways and means of getting caffeine into the bloodstream have developed attendant rituals, some of them beautiful. A Japanese tea ceremony can hardly be described simply as a means to access the drug 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine—a name you don’t see much in lights on the menu board at Starbucks, but it’s the real star of their show. There is a lot of money at stake in maintaining a mystique around coffee. Coffee is the second most valuable commodity traded in the world; only oil is more significant in the global economy. The difference is that the countries that produce oil tend to be rich. The countries producing coffee tend to be considerably poorer.
While the Western world likes to make a fuss about its coffee obsession, while there are prizes for making art in the milk froth on top of your coffee, there are real justice issues lurking in that delectable black drink. Consider this one scenario: over the last twenty years, Vietnam has come from nowhere to emerge as the second-largest coffee producer in the world, specializing in the cheaper and hardier Robusta varieties that tend to find their way into the tins and jars of instant coffee that, despite the efforts of connoisseurs, still account for far and away the lion’s share of the market. After large parts of Vietnam were defoliated with Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, the Washington-based World Bank arranged for the place to be replanted. Sounds nice so far. But it was replanted with cheap coffee. The point was that this new source of cheap coffee was created to keep the traditional suppliers of coffee to the United States, mostly in Central and South America, on the ropes. The international coffee business, from East Timor to Colombia, from Brazil to Kenya, is murky. It developed through slavery; there are many producers who have not progressed much beyond that.
Antony Wild, author of Coffee: A Dark History, points out that the top two tea producers in the world are India and China, in that or
der. The top two tea consumers are India and China, in the same order. So tea is more likely to be produced in the same market as it is sold, giving the farmers a better chance of a reasonable deal. On the other hand, the top-ten coffee-producing nations are all in the Third World, but the top eight consumers, with the exception of Brazil, are either the United States or in Europe. The basic law of international trade is that just because someone is able to pay a fair price, it doesn’t mean they are willing to do so. The Fair Trade Coffee movement is starting to make a dent in this, guaranteeing a price to producers. But next time you get a chance, just check out how much shelf space in your supermarket is devoted to fair-trade coffee as opposed to the other types. And remember that when you open a jar of instant coffee and get that satisfying aroma, a gas has been packed into the top of the jar just before it is sealed so that you’ll get the whiff. It doesn’t come from the coffee.
Coffee excites rare passions. Kopi Luwak, a type of coffee produced in certain parts of Asia, including Sumatra and the Philippines, is highly prized among sophisticated drinkers. The beans of the coffee are gathered from the dung of the Asian palm civet, which eats those beans; the civet’s digestive processes imitate the finest coffee preparation techniques, leaving the perfect bean vacuum-packed in a turd. In Vietnam it is called fox-dung coffee. But ask yourself who it was who first went poking around in civet poo on the off chance of a better cup of coffee. There you have a real coffee lover.
The entire history of coffee shares something of this strangeness. It’s a wonder that coffee ever made it to the cup in the first place. Raw coffee cherries, the fruit in which the beans (or seeds) are found, are so unappetizing and the method of extracting the beans from the cherries, before you even start roasting and grinding and brewing them, is so involved that it’s a mystery how anyone thought of doing it. Coffee cherries are like olives: you can’t just pick them and use them. They need to be educated.
Legend associates the origin of tea with Asia, of chocolate with South America, and of coffee with northern Africa. One popular story, if you can believe it, concerns an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi who noticed his flock chewing on the coffee cherries and then getting frisky. So he tried them himself and felt pretty good as a result. He reported this to the head of a monastery, who was wary of this devilish intoxicant and ordered the bushes to be thrown on the fire. The delightful aroma of the burning bush—the world’s first roasted beans—convinced him that coffee must be more divine than satanic, and before long, the monks had enlisted coffee in the service of God, using it to stay awake for prayers.
Whatever the story, there is a fair chance that coffee-drinking originated within Sufi communities near Harar in Ethiopia; the process of preparation appealed to the Sufi interest in alchemy. Sufism wanted to work the raw material of humanity into something divine, and drinking coffee began life as a form of communion with God; it was used in nocturnal rituals for much the same reason it is still used—that is, to apply a little pressure to nature in the hope of transcending it.
Like Arabic numerals, coffee (the “wine of Araby”) is one of the many gifts of Islamic culture to the west. The emigration of coffee began from the Yemeni port of Mocha, and it had found its way to Constantinople, the fulcrum between east and west, by 1555. There’s a legend that coffee was approved for Christian consumption by Clement VIII (pope from 1592 to 1605), who thought coffee was too good to be the devil’s drink. He obviously hadn’t tried the cheap stuff.
Coffee was unknown to Shakespeare at the time of his death in 1616. By 1621, Robert Burton—an an Oxford clergyman and one of the great magpies of intellectual history—described it as a curiosity in his omnivorous masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy, a work that remains among literature’s most strenuous attempts at self-understanding. Burton was prone to depression and thus was drawn to means to help “drive away the time.” Burton defines sleep as “a rest or binding of the outward senses and of the common sense, for the preservation of the body and soul.” Sleep is, for Burton, the time when “phantasy alone is free,” and this was, for him, a frightening prospect. He speaks of coffee as a kind of rumor from the east, a possible respite from melancholy:
The Turks have a drink called coffee … they spend much time in those coffee houses which are somewhat like our alehouses or taverns, and there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away the time, and to be merry together, because they find by experience that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity.
Another coffee legend arrived in 1626, when an early coffee adopter, Sir Thomas Herbert, traveled in Persia and returned with a story that the angel Gabriel had used coffee to keep the prophet Muhammad awake while he was dictating the Qur’an.
Within fifty years, coffee was no longer a novelty in Europe but a way of life. Writing in the Spectator in 1711, the essayist Richard Steele noted that “the Coffee-house is the Place of Rendezvous to all that live near it and who are thus turned to relish calm and ordinary Life.” Ironically, Steele saw coffee as a calming influence, enjoyed by men “in quiet Possession of the present Instant, as it passes, without desiring to quicken it by gratifying any Passion, or prosecuting any new Design.”
In fact, caffeine led to many new designs. It changed history. The Boston Tea Party is a perfect example: an event that helped create the modern world by establishing an enduring demarcation whereby the English prefer tea and the Americans coffee. Numerous ideas, firms, deals, and revolutions were fermented (or perhaps brewed) in coffeehouses in Europe. Voltaire was part of the furniture of a café in Paris called Le Procope; in the same city, two hundred years later, Sartre was a fixture in the Café de Flore. There’s a fair argument that, in a period when only a fool would consume the water, the entire Enlightenment owes its existence to the availability of something to drink other than alcohol. Coffee became an alternative to grog. As the name of the Enlightenment suggests, the world was suddenly awake.
These days, it is struggling to stay that way. Oceans of coffee have become part of the struggle. Ironically, people trying to become more alert during the day are often better off divorcing themselves from what may have become a dependent relationship. This is easier said than done; caffeine is a drug of addiction, which means it takes prisoners. Withdrawal symptoms include headaches the size of the Sahara. Caffeine hangs around in the body for a long time. But without it, you may sleep better and hence wake better.
When I saw an advertisement for a course to become a barista, I decided to give it a try. The instructor introduced himself to the eight of us taking the class, most of whom were young people looking for speedy access to part-time work, and announced that the single day of the course would acquaint us only with how much more we needed to learn: it would take a lifetime of practice and experience to be able to make a decent cup of coffee.“You need to give your life to master this art,” he said solemnly.
I wasn’t convinced, but we were clearly in the hands of an enthusiast. For him, espresso was “expressed,” just like mother’s milk.
“See this,” he said, rubbing the side of the espresso machine. “You can have some beautiful moments with this machine. Beautiful moments.”
It soon became clear that the course was not so much about how to make coffee as how to become better people, using coffee as a prop.
“The greatest day in the history of this city was May 1st, 1954,” he said. “That was the day they opened Il Capuccino at 61c Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda. It was the day the first espresso was sold in this town.”
In fact, coffee was well and truly available from overnight street vendors in Melbourne in the 1870s and ’80s. By the turn of the century, coffee palaces were a significant part of the temperance movement, some of them built rather grandly to resemble the hotels to which they were designed to offer an alternative. But espresso was something different, and although early espresso machines may have done a sly trade from grocer’s stores in Carlton, there is no doubt that 1954 is the key year in the coffee
habits of the city. When a family called the Bancrofts imported the first espresso machine ever seen in Melbourne for Il Capuccino (spelled with one p in contrast to Il Cappuccino, the London establishment on which it was modeled), the event made news in the afternoon paper.
The instructor paused for a moment of reverence. “I am sorry that Il Capuccino has closed now.”
Some of the participants in the course were starting to look agitated, a bit like people who’ve responded to a flyer for a free vegetarian meal and find themselves expected to join a cult. We were told to never, never buy coffee in the morning because it takes a machine half a day to properly warm up. This would seem to me to defeat the whole purpose of coffee, but here was a man who could be passionate about coffee for an entire day and never once mention caffeine. Nor did he refer to the circumstances under which most of the world’s coffee is produced. But several times he reiterated the vital importance of serving latte in a glass, not a cup, and of tying a napkin around it to act as a handle.
“Coffee is something which engages all your five senses,” he said. “If you want to make good coffee, you have to learn how to trust your senses. You have to listen to the coffee talk to you as it brews. You have to look at the color of the crema on top. And throw away those thermometers. If you want milk to froth at the perfect temperature, you have to learn to trust what your hand experiences as it holds the jug.”
We learned about the fifty species of coffee, which fall largely into two types: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is the better-quality coffee, grown at higher altitudes and providing a lower yield per acre. It is the coffee used in espresso. Robusta coffee comes from hardier plants that can be grown at a greater range of altitudes. Robusta varieties are the mainstay of instant coffee. It was clear we wouldn’t be spending much time worrying about Robusta on this course. Each cup of coffee requires about six or seven grams of roasted beans.
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