Coffee: Common Man’s Gold
Coffee is the common man’s gold, and like gold, it brings to every man the feeling of luxury and nobility.
—Abd al-Kadir
Coffee’s origins are appropriately dark and murky. The coffee bush has been traced to the province of Kaffa in Ethiopia. Ironically, Kaffa has nothing to do with how coffee got its name, which derives from the Arabic qahwah , meaning wine. The Ethiopians knew how to brew the beans into a thick, dark beverage, but it took some time for it to reach other places.
The most common legend of how coffee’s invigorating qualities were discovered was first written down in 1671 by a Maronite Christian monk, Faustus Nironus Banesius. Banesius tells how the goatherd at a monastery in Yemen noticed his goats jumping around at all hours of the night. Deducing that their strange behavior must be related to their fodder, he followed them until they reached their grazing ground. There they nibbled on an unfamiliar bush with small red berries and white flowers. The goatherd took branches back for the monks to experiment with, and when they turned it into a beverage that kept them awake all night, they realized that their assumptions were correct. Knowledge of the miraculous new beverage flowed from the monastery throughout the Arab world.
Actually, the “goatherd story” was well established in Arabic and Turkish oral histories, and the beverage itself was quite popular. One version is even included in A Thousand and One Nights . As Muslims are not allowed to drink beer or wine, it makes sense that the Prophet would provide them with a substitute.
The first coffeehouse (kahvehane ) opened in Constantinople in 1554. From the beginning, coffeehouses were gathering places for well-read citizens like poets, who found their imaginations stimulated by the lively atmosphere and intense conversations, not to mention the caffeine. By the late 1500s, coffee began making appearances in Europe. Pope Clement III sipped his first cup of coffee in 1598 and proclaimed it “a truly Christian beverage,” taking the onus away from this most Muslim of drinks. His benediction cleared the way for Christians to drink coffee without guilt, and coffeehouses sprang up in Venice (around 1645, exact date disputed), Hamburg (1671), and Paris (1672). London’s first coffeehouse was opened by Jacob , a Jew, in 1652. A few years later, Edward Lloyd opened a café where he printed a newsletter with shipping industry news. This practice was the start of the Lloyd’s of London insurance company.
But coffee had not yet been embraced by the Viennese. The matchmaker, according to legend, was a Polish solider named Georg Franz Kolschitzky . However, recent research has shown that “legend” is the operative word, even though Kolschitzky ’s story is rousing.
During the terrible 1683 siege of Vienna, things were looking pretty bleak. Vienna had been weakened by the Black Plague and the Thirty Years’ War, and Mohammed IV saw another opportunity for conquest. The city’s 20,000 defenders were trying to hold off 200,000 Turks. The Viennese were desperate to get a message to the European forces gathering for the counterattack. The volunteer was Kolschitzky , who had worked among the Turks for many years and would be able to blend in. He succeeded.
A decisive battle was staged on September 12, and the Turks were routed. In their haste, they left behind many of their provisions, including five hundred bags of a strange bean, which the Viennese assumed were camel fodder. As they began burning the Turkish spoils, Kolschitzky smelled the familiar aroma of roasting coffee, which he had learned to appreciate during his years among the Turks. He quickly saved the coffee from the fire. Vienna’s government wanted to reward Kolschitzky for his bravery, expecting to hear the usual request for a sack of gold. Instead, he asked for the bags of “camel fodder,” and the imperial right to brew them into a beverage. The city fathers complied, throwing in 200 ducats and a house, too. It was said that Kolschitzky operated the first Viennese coffee business from his house on the Domgasse, where a plaque still commemorates the enterprise. Eventually, he opened another establishment, The House of the Blue Bottle, near the Belvedere Palace, which became the first coffeehouse built for the purpose. A street is even named for him: Kolschitzkygasse.
A nice story with lots of dramatic touches, but debunked in 1980 by Viennese historian Karl Teply , who discovered the old imperial license, dated January 12, 1685, granting the privilege of “sole purveyor of the Turkish beverage for a span of twenty years” to Johannes Diodato , a merchant who had learned how to make coffee in his native Armenia. Teply believes that Kolschitzky was a war hero but that he didn’t apply for his coffeehouse license until well after Diodato ’s. And the Blue Bottle didn’t even open until 1703, nine years after Kolschitzky ’s death.
Further, by the time of the siege, the Viennese were already well acquainted with coffee. In 1665, the Turkish “Grand Ambassador” Kara Mehmed Pasha set up an embassy in the Leopoldstadt section of the city. Soon, the ambassador began taking audiences in his impressively appointed salon, where he served brewed coffee as well as coffee sherbet (iced desserts being another Turkish culinary specialty) and other sweets. So it seems that neither Diodato nor Kolschitzky can lay claim to being Vienna’s first coffee brewers; that honor goes to the Pasha’s two Turkish kahveci (brewers), Mehmed and Ibrahim. When the Pasha set sail nine months later, he had planted the seeds for Vienna’s love affair with coffee.
The coffeehouse business really started perking up with the grant of a concession to another Armenian, Isaak de Luca , in 1697. In addition, the Turks returned to Vienna in 1700 on a peace mission, and they offered coffee tastings to the citizens, thereby increasing demand. The Turks’ friendly return prompted a fashion for everything and anything Turkish: smoking water pipes, wearing turbans and other Turkish garb, and music in “the Turkish style.” Coinciding with this, de Luca and three other Armenians opened other coffeehouses the city. These new coffeehouses were more comfortable and offered better service than their predecessors. When de Luca died in 1729, there were eleven cafés in Vienna.
The proprietors quickly learned that the Viennese didn’t like the bitter Turkish-style coffee. They adapted. First, the coffee grounds, a characteristic of traditionally brewed Turkish coffee, were filtered out. Next, the coffee was sweetened with honey, another improvement. But when the filtered, sweetened coffee was mixed with hot milk and cream, the city beamed with approval. This concoction was the first Wiener Melange , which to this day remains the coffee of choice for the Viennese. It is the ancestor of the cappuccino, latté, and other milky drinks in the coffee hall of fame.
Budapest fell to the Turks in 1541, beginning a 150-year occupation. It seems that the coffee first arrived in Buda in 1579, about a hundred years before Vienna. By the time the “infidels” were finally chased out in 1686, coffee still had not caught on. Hungarians originally called coffee fekete leves (“black soup”), perhaps derogatorily because of its Turkish connotations. In the elaborate Turkish dining etiquette, no business could be discussed during the meal. However, when the coffee was served after the meal, unpleasant subjects could be broached. When contemplating possible misfortune, Hungarians may still say, “The black soup is yet to come.”
Prague, which had not been invaded by Turks, had to wait for the Viennese fashion to trickle northward, and didn’t get its first coffeehouse until 1712. Both cities were under the direct influence of the Viennese court, and as coffee and places to drink it became indispensable in the capital, it grew proportionately in the outposts of the empire as well.
