Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them himself, he experienced the first caffeine buzz in human history. Despite almost certainly never having existed, Kaldi now lends his name to a variety of coffee shops around the world, everywhere from Addis Ababa to Seoul, where I live.
His story also opens the animated TED-Ed video above, “How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee.” We do know, explains its narrator, that “at some point before the fourteen-hundreds, in what’s now Ethiopia, people began foraging for wild coffee in the forest undergrowth.” Early on, people consumed coffee plants by drinking tea made with their leaves, eating their berries with butter and salt, and — in what proved to be the most enduring method — “drying, roasting, and simmering its cherries into an energizing elixir.” Over the years, demand for this elixir spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and in the fullness of time made its way outward to both Asia and Europe.
In no European city did coffee catch on as aggressively as it did in London, whose coffee houses proliferated in the mid-seventeenth-century and became “social and intellectual hotbeds.” Later, “Paris’ coffee houses hosted Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Voltaire, who allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day.” (In fairness, it was a lot weaker back then.) Producing and transporting the ever-increasing amounts of coffee imbibed in these and other centers of human civilization required world-spanning imperial operations, which were commanded with just the degree of caution and sensitivity one might imagine.
The world’s first commercial espresso machine was showcased in Milan in 1906, a signal moment in the industrialization and mechanization of the coffee experience. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, “about 60 percent of U.S. factories incorporated coffee breaks.” More recent trends have emphasized “specialty coffees with an emphasis on quality beans and brewing methods,” as well as certification for coffee production using “minimum wage and sustainable farming.” Whatever our considerations when buying coffee, many of us have made it an irreplaceable element of our rituals both personal and professional. Not to say what we’re addicted: this is the 3,170th Open Culture post I’ve written, but only the 3,150th or so that I’ve written while drinking coffee.
Related content:
The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life
The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650–1675)
“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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