In Praise of (Truly) Good Coffee

The beverage made from running hot water through the ground seeds of the Coffea plant was a driver of the Scientific Revolution.

There is good evidence that coffee played a major role in fueling the Scientific Revolution of mid 17th century Europe. Venetian traders started bringing it in from Ottoman ports in the early 17th century, but they initially struggled to overcome the prejudice that it was a Satanic beverage consumed by Muslims. They therefore sought the blessing of Pope Clement VIII, who proclaimed:

This devil’s drink is so delicious, we should cheat the devil by baptizing it.

According to Samuel Pepys, England’s first coffee house was established in Oxford in 1650 at the Angel in the parish of St Peter by a Jewish man named Jacob in a building now known as the Grand Cafe.

London’s first coffee house opened in 1652 in St Michael’s Alley, near St Michael at Cornhill’s churchyard, and run by a Greek named Pasqua Rosée. Pepys visited the London coffee house on December 10, 1660 and noted:

He [Col. Slingsby] and I in the evening to the Coffee House in Cornhill, the first time that ever I was there, and I found much pleasure in it, through the diversity of company and discourse.

Isaac Newton, Edmund Haley, and other scholars frequented the coffee house in Oxford, which was apparently the germ of the British Royal Society.

Caffeine lights up the brain by blocking adenosine, a neurotransmitter that signals tiredness. This allows dopamine and norepinephrine to become more active, producing greater focus, alertness, and energy.

Prior to the advent of coffee houses in Europe, the main beverage consumed at convivial houses was beer, which not only gave a pleasant buzz, but was also safer to drink than water (prior to the development of proper sewage and water treatment infrastructure developed during the latter half of the 19th century). Thus, with the advent of coffee houses, guys like Newton went from being drunk to wide awake.

To be sure, it is unlikely that Newton was able to obtain coffee beans when he was stranded on his family estate during the Great Plague of 1665-1666. This was his “year of wonders,” when he laid the groundwork for the calculus, his three laws of motion, and his universal law of gravitation. His productivity during this time was doubtless facilitated by having zero distractions. So absorbed was he in his work that he often forgot to eat meals and only did so because his mother forced him to the table.

The scientific name for the coffee plant, Coffea, comes from Arabic qahwah. The name may originate in the Kaffa region in Ethiopia, where the plant is native. The genus name Coffea was coined by Carl Linnaeus from the Arabic word qahwah.

To this day, nobody does coffee better than the Italians. I’ve had the good fortune of living in Florence and Rome for good stretches of time, and one of my greatest pleasures was frequenting coffee bars. A cappuccino made in a Roman coffee bar is a thing of glory. I’ve never found anything in the United States that even comes close to it. Most of the so-called “hipster” coffee bars that one finds on the East and West coasts can’t hold a candle to even the humblest, working class coffee bar in Rome.

A common and major error made by American coffee roasters is their silly preference for pure Arabica coffee beans. Truly great coffee contains ten to thirty percent Robusta beans (Coffea canephora), which have a more robust, punchy flavor and twice the caffeine content. The Robusta part of the blend is also what gives espresso its crema—that is, the he reddish-brown, foamy layer at the top of a freshly pulled shot of espresso. The crema consists of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide gas emulsified with coffee oils.

If you to start your morning lit up like Christmas, be sure to buy a good Arabica-Robusta blend.