Speciality coffee got me interested in the coffee industry. Note: I wrote this blog post before Christmas 2020 and never got around to publishing it at the time. Coffee, he says, 'had a very good impact in many ways on our civilization, even though it was, for a long time, grown by slaves.Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast Review In 1674, women in London were convinced that coffee made their husbands impotent.Īnd yet, in an age when beer soup was the breakfast of champions, coffee had one undeniable health benefit: 'Western civilization sobered up,' Pendergrast says. In 1511, for example, the governor of Mecca banned coffee because his medical advisers warned it was bad for people's health. Once the soil had been sapped, growers would move on to another place.Īnd then there are history's many coffee naysayers. In Brazil - where slavery was legal until 1888 - coffee plantations would use slash-and-burn agriculture, tearing down rain forests and planting coffee trees that depleted the nutrients in soil. 'On the other hand, that same coffee that was fueling the French Revolution was also being produced by African slaves who had been taken to San Domingo, which we now know as Haiti.' It sort of creates egalitarian places - coffeehouses where people can come together - and so the French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses,' Pendergrast says. 'One of the ironies about coffee is it makes people think. Europeans carried coffee with them as they colonized various parts of the world, and this frequently meant they enslaved people in order to grow it. He cites a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in which the Founding Father proclaims his love of tea but says he will have to learn to embrace coffee instead, because drinking tea had become unpatriotic.įor all the upsides coffee has brought the modern world, it also ushered in its fair share of downsides, too. 'There's a lot of truth to the story, I found,' Pendergrast says. It is often said that after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists raided British tea ships and threw crates of tea into the harbor, Americans universally switched over to drinking coffee.

Literature, newspapers and even the works of great composers like Bach and Beethoven were also spawned in coffeehouses. The insurer Lloyd's of London was founded hundreds of years ago in one of London's 2,000 coffeehouses, he notes. Coffeehouses became a spot not just to enjoy a cup but to exchange ideas. 'It actually had a major impact on the rise of business,' Pendergrast says. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Uncommon Grounds Subtitle The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Author Mark Pendergrast

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