Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (35 page)

The retailer must also tickle his customers’ imagination. He will give his blends of coffee fancy names, which in most cases have nothing to do with the origin of the coffee that is being sold, or with its accepted destination in the trade. Most of the purchasers are women, and they are attracted by pretty names. To call a blend “pearl coffee” may tickle their fancy so much as to make them willing to pay a higher price.

The name “mocha” has a wonder-working influence. Arabia cannot produce nearly as much mocha as the public demands. Brazil has here come to the coffee-merchant’s aid. During the rainy season, coffee is shipped on old-style windjammers to Arabia, by the longest route, round the Cape of Good Hope. It reaches port as wet as a soaked sponge. The damp and the long voyage have spoiled its aroma. Doctored and dried under the Arabian sun, and rechristened with the money-making name of mocha, it is now shipped on steamers to be sold in the great markets of the West.

We are coming to the realm of jests and anecdotes. Of course coffee can be as sophisticated as wine. Even if the history of the coffee-trade were not fully known, one could guess as much. There are, indeed, as many jokes about humbugging with coffee as there are about the spurious labels on wine-bottles.

One of the greatest revolutions in the coffee-trade occurred in 1906, when a caffeine-free coffee was put on the market. What do we mean by “caffeine-free” coffee? Since, in the seventeenth century, coffee helped to wean the English from drunkenness, and the movement spread from England to Germany, Scandinavia, and the rest of northern Europe, coffee has often been styled “the puritans’ drink.” The enemies of wine, beer, spirits, and intoxicating beverages generally, had armed themselves with this puritans’ decoction.

Now, persistence as well as seriousness are characteristic of the puritan temperament. The waves of puritan thought flowed on. It was only natural that what had led the puritans, aided by coffee, to carry on a campaign against alcohol, should further lead them to attack the excessive craving of human beings for caffeine.

The self-composed epitaph, attributed by some to Balzac, and by others to Voltaire, “He lived and he died through thirty thousand cups of coffee,” though penned in jest, gave many people cause to think. Did the writer mean that coffee was a slow poison? Might it not be that the enormous expenditure of energy demanded by the new times, multiplying achievement, simultaneously cut short the life of the individual? Was not this tropical luxuriance of achievement, with a reduced duration of life, symbolized by caffeine?

During the first years of the twentieth century many began to entertain such thoughts. The friends of coffee tried to reassure doubters by reminding them of Fontenelle, a great consumer of coffee, who lived until he almost became a centenarian. But Fontenelle, said the objectors, had been an exception. The escape of one individual from the deleterious effects of coffee could not guarantee the harmlessness of the beverage for ordinary persons. In any case, far more coffee than ever was now being drunk as a spur to flagging energies. Doctors were almost unanimous in their condemnation of the speeding-up of modern life. Whereas those who died prematurely in former days had often died as victims of beer, wine, opium, or tobacco, in the twentieth century, despite its wonderful achievements, there were manifest the stigmata of nervous insomnia, palpitation, restlessness—in a word, pandemic signs of coffee-poisoning.

Superadded to these considerations was the desire that everything men did should be done by their own unaided powers. It was regarded by many, on general principles, as inadvisable that mental activity should be stimulated by drugs. Just as, at all times, there have been persons who demanded “intoxication without wine,” so now there were persons who demanded “wakefulness without caffeine.” The supply of coffee-substitutes, which began during the Seven Years War, reached its climax in Germany at the opening of the twentieth century. Those who could not afford to buy genuine coffee bought and drank the word coffee at least—“coffee” preceded by another word linked to “coffee” with a hyphen—some such word as “wheat,” “chicory,” “malt,” “acorn,” or “fig.” Generally speaking, the second component of this hyphened word was a phantom. The “coffee” element in the “acorn-coffee,” etc., was non-existent.

One point, however, becomes plain to those who study economic psychology. If it be possible to sell to millions a coffee which is not coffee at all and which is devoid of the stimulant trimethyldioxypurin, this must be because there is a growing repugnance to the stimulating effect of caffeine. The recognition of the fact guided the work now undertaken by a young merchant of Bremen, Ludwig Roselius by name. His attitude towards coffee was twofold. Being an honest trader, he did not wish to sell as “coffee” something that was not coffee. On the other hand, for personal reasons, he was an enemy of coffee. His father, a coffee-taster by profession, had died prematurely, and Ludwig ascribed the death to coffee-poisoning. As a safeguard against overdosage with caffeine, coffee-tasters and tea-tasters spit out the fluid when they have tasted it; but, willy-nilly, they are likely to swallow a little, and persons who are exceptionally sensitive to caffeine have sometimes to abandon the profession. Ludwig Roselius’ belief that his father had died from coffee-poisoning led him to study the possible deleterious effects of coffee in other persons—perhaps as the result of a fairly common idiosyncrasy. He came to regard coffee as one of the causes of heart trouble, gout, and, arteriosclerosis. In diabetes and liver troubles, doctors have long been accustomed to forbid the use of coffee. There can be no question that various ailments, major and minor, have become more common since the middle of the nineteenth century, when a great increase in the consumption of coffee began.

Influenced by these considerations, young Roselius set to work, with the characteristic German perseverance, upon an investigation which was to lead to great results. He wanted to produce a caffeine-free coffee. It was to be genuine coffee, with the aroma and other agreeable qualities preserved, but to be free from the trimethyldioxypurin which is dangerous to the continually growing number of neurotics.

Sufferers from coffee were to be relieved of their troubles without any decline in the consumption of coffee. Those who had abandoned coffee in favour of substitutes were to be recalled to the use of the Arabian berry. No one, henceforward, was to be compelled to renounce the enjoyment of coffee, or to adopt an ascetic life for reasons of health, or forced to accept an unsatisfactory substitute. Roselius was convinced that if he could produce a caffeine-free coffee, this new coffee would no longer be frowned upon by medical opponents of the ordinary beverage.

When, in the year 1820, Goethe sent Ferdinand Runge, the analytical chemist of Jena, a boxful of coffee-beans, the poet was giving away something for which he had no use. To the Dionysiac son of the antique world, the Black Apollo who was the spirit of coffee seemed repugnant. Goethe, as a lover of good wine, wrote several diatribes against coffee. Perhaps the most unwarranted of these is to be found in his last letter to Frau von Stein, under date June 1, 1789, in which he ascribes the loving woman’s distresses and reproaches to insomnia produced by coffee. When, thirty years later, Goethe sent a supply of coffee-beans to a chemist, it was certainly not done that Runge might have coffee to drink, but in the hope that his friend would analyse the beans. In actual fact, Runge discovered the demon that lurked in them; he was the first to extract caffeine from coffee.

This analytical feat caused considerable excitement in the early part of the nineteenth century. First of all for pharmaceutical reasons. Caffeine, the purified drug, was now made available for prescribers and was stored by apothecaries. The solution of the industrial problem, as far as coffee-salesmen were concerned, was reserved for a considerably later date. How could caffeine be extracted from coffee-beans without destroying the other qualities that made it possible to prepare an agreeable beverage from these beans? That was what Ludwig Roselius set himself to discover.

His new process for the extraction of caffeine from coffee produced the alkaloid in such large quantities that its price, which before the war was thirty-six marks per kilogram, has now fallen to six marks. But Roselius was even more interested in the other aspects of his process; the decaffeinized coffee was still coffee. That was the result he achieved after lengthy and laborious investigation.

Roselius set out from the fundamental experience that the taste and aroma of coffee are developed while the bean is being roasted. He therefore extracted the caffeine from unroasted beans. Since the grinding of raw beans is difficult, and since they have a very hard shell, he subjected them to a preliminary treatment, a “disintegrating process.” By this the cells were opened. He exposed the beans to superheated steam, which was acid or alkaline as their quality varied. When, after this preliminary treatment, the beans were subjected to the action of solvents of caffeine, about twenty-nine parts in thirty of the caffeine could be extracted without simultaneously extracting the aromatic substances in the beans.

Thereafter, they could be roasted in the usual manner to develop their aroma.

In the year 1906, Ludwig Roselius founded a joint-stock company to work his patents, with the result that by the year 1912, Bremen came near to challenge Hamburg as a centre of the coffee trade. From the Bremen factory a lively propaganda has gone forth throughout the world in favour of the use of caffeine-free coffee.

T
HE
historian of coffee will, down to 1850, be chiefly concerned with consumers. But from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, production was so mightily increased, and the problem of the coffee-growing lands became so serious, that our attention is perforce directed towards producers.

By 1850, the building of railways had made the Old World wellnigh uniform. There might still be differences in the way in which coffee was drunk in Palermo and in Stockholm. These differences, however, were unimportant. The decisive fact in the history of coffee is that, during the middle of the nineteenth century, this plant became synonymous with destiny for a whole continent.

In the story of coffee, the twentieth century—or, at any rate, the first third thereof—denotes the dictatorship of Brazil. Brazil is the largest state on the South American continent, comprising eighteen and a half millions of square kilometres, more than five and a half million square miles, sixteen times as large as France, and, as a dominion under one government, exceeded in size only by Russia, Canada, and China. In 1906 it produced as much as ninety-seven per cent of all the coffee grown throughout the world. The momentous result was the dictatorship of Brazil as a coffee-growing country; but in Brazil itself coffee was dictator. Coffee was master. Capricious as a volcano, a cyclone, or an earthquake, coffee was not wholly a blessing.

One who speaks of coffee in Brazil, of the last half-century of coffee-growing there, is compelled to use words and images that in other respects seem only appropriate to the taming of natural forces.

In 1926, the Brazilian government celebrated the bicentenary of the introduction of coffee-piantine into Brazil. The fixing of the date of the latter event by the choice of the year 1726 was somewhat arbitrary.

It seems probable that all the coffee-plants on the South American continent are descendants of the famous shoot brought by Lieutenant Desclieux from France to Martinique. We know for certain that Desclieux’s voyage took place in 1723. Since, as aforesaid, there are four barren years after coffee has been planted, we can hardly suppose that coffee-planting can have begun in Brazil before 1728.

By that time, the Dutch were planting coffee in South America. These plantations were in Dutch Guiana. Eastward of Dutch Guiana lay French Guiana, and the two colonies were so jealous of each other that the governors forbade, under pain of death, the export of coffee-berries. A foolish prohibition, since coffee, the “wonderful shrub,” was already being grown in Guiana under both the Dutch and the French flags.

Still, the prohibition had some sense as against third parties. Except for the French and the Dutch, no one was to grow coffee on the American continent. At this juncture, by a strange chance, when there was a dispute between the French and the Dutch as to the delimitation of their respective territories, they called in a Brazilian to adjudicate, an official from Para, Palheta by name. This gentleman made love to the wife of the governor of French Guiana. At a banquet, under the eyes of her unsuspecting husband, she gave Palheta a huge bouquet, in whose interior a handful of ripe coffee-berries was concealed. Thus Palheta was able to evade the prohibition on export, and to sail off with his treasure to the mouth of the Amazon, where the coffee-berries were planted, and flourished abundantly.

Such is the Brazilian saga. For those who are romantically inclined, the value of coffee is naturally enhanced by the thought that its introduction to Brazil was effected in so gallant a fashion. The only demonstrable fact, however, is that coffee-planting in Brazil began at Para, and spread thence southward.

Long before this, in the Far East, in Java and Indonesia, the Dutch had dispossessed the Portuguese. By one of time’s revenges, it was a Portuguese—for Brazil was then a Portuguese colony—who tapped a main source of Dutch wealth by transferring coffee from Surinam to Portuguese territory. Thenceforward, coffee began “to talk Portuguese.”

The southward march of coffee from Para to what is now the heart of the coffee-country, the plateau of São Paulo, took more than fifty years. That was a long time, even when we take into consideration how vast are the distances in Brazil. In truth, the Brazilians were not in a hurry to set about coffee-planting. Brazil cultivated sugar-cane, and in such enormous quantities as to dictate to the world sugar-market. During the eighteenth century it was sugar that “talked Portuguese.”