Why I Love Coffee

You’re onto a bit of a winner selling anything that people are willing to get themselves addicted to,

the only downside being when some killjoy makes it illegal. Perhaps coffee will go the same way and a hundred years hence people will look back on us (whole workplaces so jacked up by four in the afternoon that we can no longer read or force a biro between our splintering teeth) with the same astonishment we direct toward those top-hatted people at the beginning of the last century who, when they weren’t quietening their babies and coughing spouses with heroin, were perking themselves up with cocaine wine.

The London coffee shop was born in 1652 when a Greek merchant Pasque Rosée began importing the bean from what are now Yemen and

Ethiopia via Istanbul. He opened a stall in a back alley so that others could share in his addiction which indeed they did with enormous enthusiasm. People of all stripes of society gathered in the London mud to get themselves jittery and gossip insatiably. The

real heyday of this initial burst of coffee culture would come through the first half of the following century, when there would grow to be eighty or so coffee houses within the old walls of the city. By the middle of that same century The East India Company had decided everyone should be drinking tea from their profitable plantations and slowly the promiscuous English taste buds began to be teased away from the bean and into their enduring love affair with the leaf. It may well have been the advent of electronic information transmission in the 19th century that finally did for the last of the London coffee house culture, the last of them closed or transformed into gentleman’s clubs around this time. London wouldn’t see another coffee shop until the espresso bars of the 1950s, springing up as a consequence of that second Roman invasion whose ambition, more modest than Caesar’s, centred on “Little Italy” in Clerkenwell.

As I write, I sit less than a mile from the Brighton house of Henry and Hester (Mrs.) Thrale, that lively 18th century daughter of Welsh gentry much visited by Samuel Johnson and I think even the good doctor would raise an eyebrow at the proliferation of coffee houses over the last couple of decades. As now, the first outbreak

I don't know if Munch enjoyed a coffee,
but it wouldn't surprise me

of the bean accompanied an insatiable general hunger for information as men (reputable women steered clear) would gather, pump each other for news and engage in over-stimulated discussions and debates. Although some of these reported were of the nonsensically existential variety familiar to anyone who has been buttonholed at a London party (the kind where no one goes to the bathroom in groups of less than four), much useful exchange was had concerning fashionable plays, politics, science (it is said that Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin on a table in the Grecian, near the Royal Society) and of course finance: the first stocks were traded in Jonathan’s near The royal Exchange and shipping (in fact, all) insurance was born at Lloyd’s (Hence the apostrophe, unlike the bank) which was situated on Tower Street, moving to Lombard Street three years later. The Thrales’ Brighton house is long demolished now, the site being occupied by the sort of bar where it isn’t possible to hold a detailed conversation with anyone, let alone a lexicographer with (probable) Tourettes and half a pound of coffee inside him.

Many attribute credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the present caffeine explosion to Howard Schultz and his Starbucks (no apostrophe, oddly) brand, which is either the symbol of the death of heterogeneity in western culture, the responsible face of capitalism or the propaganda arm of the Israeli Defence Force, depending on which web sites most fit your politics. The truth is the blue touch paper in Britain was lit before that when Sergio and Bruno Costa opened their shop in 1978 on Vauxhall Bridge Road, near Buckingham Palace, but it was slow burning; no one at the

time was prepared to be Italian until Italy had been sanitised through the filter of American culture. Now of course fashion craves authentic individuality and Starbucks is finding it difficult to turn an honest London dollar: we customers are fickle. Starbucks entered Britain in 1998 with the purchase of the 64 strong chain The Seattle Coffee Co. The word Seattle is a clue that one of the drivers of this second coffee revolution was the beginning of another information frenzy (I.T. folk, unlike telegraph operators, do love a stimulant). Like Pasque Rosée, Scott and Ally Svenson set up their Seattle Coffee Co. because they missed the coffee houses that fuelled the finest minds of their titular city. This time around, coffee was not a new concept for the people of Britain (we had Mellow Birds, for God’s sake), what the Svensons and the Costas were offering was good coffee. (Not even Rosée had that, coffee in the 17th/18th century tasted like shit - contemprary description - mixed with soot, only more addictive).

Having a good product wasn’t the clever bit, any fool with a kettle and an import licence can do that. The clever bit was selling it wrapped in added value. Because of the way associative memory works, there is a sort of cultural metatagging that comes with a heavily marketed consumable. It has, for a long time, been impossible to just “have a glass of wine” without also consuming the information that comes with it. Perhaps we are enjoying a single vineyard Argentinian Malbec, but in doing so we are also engaging in an unspoken dialogue with a winemaker we are unlikely ever to meet that transcends geography, time and language. Consciously or subconsciously we imagine the sun on the lush slopes of the vineyard in the foothills of the Andes, the leather faced artisan removing his hat to wipe his brow and worry about the night time temperature being too cool for the grapes. In actual fact the Mendoza plains are flat and the winemaker is just as likely to be female and/or a downwardly mobile investment banker, but that sort of detail doesn’t make it through marketing.  More recently, coffee has nailed a seat firmly to this bandwagon and we are encouraged to appreciate the

geography associated with the origins of our drink and the process involved in getting it to our lips, as well as - in more extreme cases - how the digestive properties of certain species of cat might affect the taste. It’s all part of inserting the mere sensual experience into a broader narrative, and we love it. We can’t not, we’re programmed to be drawn to narrative, it’s how we make sense of the world. Once we’ve been fed the information, we can make the connections and enjoy the resulting mini neural orgasm that is our dopamine reward system. We can sip at our Monsooned Malabar and picture the beans being raked around a South Indian warehouse, open to the weather (replicating the moisture absorbing journey in the hold of a 19th century sailing ship that mellowed the flavour). It makes for a much richer experience, we value it more and the more we value something of course, the more we will be prepared to pay for it, especially if we are sitting among the kind of cool, daytime caféeistas who can be not at work and yet still afford £2.50 a cup to rent a chair. Which is where I am.

                               AA