Episode Details

In 1674 a group of English women petitioned against coffee, claiming it left their husbands idle, gossiping, and impotent. That picture of coffee as a waste of time stands against its modern role as workplace fuel, and this episode follows the drink between those poles. It starts with Sufi mystics in Yemen using coffee for night long dhikr, a ban by religious leaders in Mecca, and a fatwa from the Grand Mufti Abu Saud Effendi that reopened the trade. Yemeni exporters boiled beans so they could not be planted, and the Dutch East India Company later manipulated supply by favoring Java over Ceylon.

The monopoly broke through smuggling: Baba Budan carried seven fertile seeds strapped to his body from Mecca to Karnataka around 1670, and Gabriel de Clieu shared his water ration with a seedling bound for Martinique in 1720. From there the episode tours national rituals: Italy's rule against cappuccino after 11 in the morning, Swedish fika, Albania's cafe density, and Hong Kong's yuenyeung. The modern coffee break grew out of Norwegian immigrant women in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and was popularized in 1952 by the Pan American Coffee Bureau.

• By 1675 England had more than 3,000 coffeehouses, and women were barred from entering them.
• Swedish King Gustav III ordered a coffee versus tea test on condemned twins, and both he and the supervising doctors died before the coffee drinking twin.
• Hong Kong cha chaan tengs created yuenyeung in 1936, mixing coffee, tea, and evaporated milk in one cup.
• Behaviorist John B. Watson helped embed the coffee break in American offices while working in advertising for Maxwell House.
• Nearly all arabica descends from a few smuggled plants, leaving the crop genetically narrow and exposed to disease and climate change.