Our favorite coffee heroes
Since the 1500’s coffee has been served pretty much all over the western world.
Tea drinkers would argue that tea has been around longer, and it’s probably true (looking at you China) but most people don’t realize that some of those more famous tea regions originally started out as coffee regions (especially in places like Ceylon). Ceylon was covered with coffee until a nasty disease (coffee rust) decimated every plantation and forced the Dutch and English colonizers to plant tea instead. That’s why the Brits drink tea. Without that plague of coffee rust, they would have still preferred coffee, as they did before tea became the only game in town.
The first coffee houses opened in Vienna in the early 1600s, and first coffee house opened in England in 1652. Throughout history there have been some real heroes of coffee drinking, here’s a few of our favorites.
Pope Clement VIII
Papacy from 1592-1605 and the first Pope to drink coffee. Coffee aficionados often claim that the spread of its popularity among Catholics is due to Pope Clement VIII's influence. Of course this being a drink from a Muslim country of infidels, you can only imagine how controversial his position was, but he loved it enough to o figure out a way around the problem… by baptizing it.
“Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, drank a lot of coffee and had a strange way of preparing it. According to the biographer Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard would seize hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.” Then he gulped the whole thing down in one go.
Honore de Balzac
Honore de Balzac created some 1,500 characters in his 15 plus novels, and did all that because he drank 50 cups of coffee a day. He reportedly woke at 1 a.m. each day and wrote for seven hours. At 8 a.m. he napped for 90 minutes, then wrote again from 9:30 to 4. He is quoted as saying “As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”
Louis XV
Ok so maybe he didn’t have the best grandson and he might have been not so great with his countries finances (which ultimately led to his grandsons beheading) but he did love coffee and he ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, so for that King Louis XV makes our list of heroes. In fact he actually grew his own coffee beans in greenhouses on the Versailles Palace grounds. He handpicked the beans, roasted them, and ground them himself. He loved to serve his own coffee to guests of the Palace.
During his reign there were 600 cafés in Paris. At the close of the 18th century there were more than 800. With the invention of the first percolation system coffee maker, “La Débelloire,” by Jean-Baptiste de Belloy, Archbishop of Paris (1802-1808) the number of cafés increased to more than 3000. In 1855 the Paris Exhibition provided a showcase for an invention by Edouard Loysel de Santais: the hydrostatic percolator. It was a machine that produced large quantities of coffee by extraction pressure. This was the real starting point that would enable Italian inventors to create “the espresso machine” a century later.
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was very energetic – but there might have been something fueling his energy. As a sickly child, he was given strong cups of coffee—along with puffs of cigar—to ease his terrible asthma attacks (I wish I had that doctor growing up). As president, he was so devoted to the stuff that his huge custom coffee cup was described by one of his sons as “more in nature of a bathtub.” The president drank about a gallon of coffee every day.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven is remembered for a variety of personal peculiarities – his wild hair, his explosive temper, his chaotic living arrangements (it is said that he changed residences between seventy and eighty times during the thirty-five years he lived in Vienna). His eating habits were distinctive as well. He loved salami as well as macaroni and cheese (parmesan was his cheese of choice).
His biographer and friend Anton Schindler once remarked, “coffee seems to have been the one indispensable item in his diet.” He always prepared his coffee himself, starting every day by counting out exactly sixty coffee beans and grinding them. Hot water would then be poured through the ground coffee via what has been described as a “glass contraption.” It is said that Beethoven’s sixty beans is about ten fewer than what would be used for a modern cup of coffee. Due to modern processing, though, the caffeine content in Beethoven’s coffee was likely far greater than that which we would enjoy today.
Benjamin Franklin
Aside from, you know, helping found the United States, Benjamin Franklin was one of the first well-known coffee-shop frequenters. There, he often held political meetings, played chess and engaged in lively discussions, and even had his personal mail sent directly to his favorite London coffee shop! Franklin eventually started selling his own coffee beans, and as legend has it, he never traveled on a boat without his own supply, for fear the vessel might run out. Smart man.
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet, known best as Voltaire, was a writer of the French Enlightenment, historian and philosopher, famous for his prolific poems, essays and satirical work. Prolific = 20,000 plus letters and some 2,000 books and pamplets. However, he is perhaps one of the most famous coffee drinkers of all time, reportedly consuming somewhere between 40 and 50 cups per day (even if the cup was only 4 oz that would still be 16 cups of 12 oz. coffee). Despite doctors’ warnings that his beloved coffee would kill him, Voltaire lived into his eighties – well beyond the average lifespan of men the 17th century, which was roughly 35 years. Of course he drank 50 cups of coffee how else can someone write 2,000 books?
Marcel Proust
While many of the writers and thinkers on this list seem to get more from consuming, Proust got his energy from a kind of regimented deprivation. According to his housekeeper, Celeste, the writer had two bowls of black coffee, hot milk and two croissants upon waking in the late afternoon, and then consumed little else. “I’ve never heard of anyone else living off two bowls of café au lait and two croissants a day. And sometimes only one croissant!” she wrote.
Sources:
15 Famous Coffee Fiends. (2016, April 4). Retrieved from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67232/15-famous-coffee-fiends.
Paul. (2015, November 20). Top 11 Famous Coffee Drinkers from the History Books. Retrieved from https://coffeemakersusa.com/famous-coffee-drinkers-in-history/.
Scherker, A. (2017, December 7). 9 Famous Geniuses Who Were Also Huge Coffee Addicts. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/famous-coffee-drinkers_n_5358495.
