Free Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity by H.E. Jacob Page A

they find it warming; yet it is the same drink in both cases, similarly prepared. They take long draughts of it, extremely hot, but not during meal-times, since this would remove their inclination to eat any more. It is consumed after the meal, as a dainty. It also promotes fellowship and conversation, so that there are few assemblies of friends where this beverage is not consumed. They call it ‘cahne’; it is the product of a tree which grows in Arabia, in the neighbourhood of Mecca. If we are to believe the Turks, it is good for the stomach and for the digestion and wards off colics and catarrhs. It is also said that, when drunk after supper, it prevents those who consume it from feeling sleepy. For that reason, students who wish to read into the late hours are fond of it.” We are told that when della Valle returned to Italy twelve years later, accompanied by a number of Orientals, he showed coffee-beans to the astonished Romans.
    Sir Thomas Herbert, a member of a distinguished English family, visited Persia in 1626, when he was twenty years of age, in the suite of Sir Dodmore Cotton, ambassador to the shah. Herbert reports: “There is nothing of which the Persians are fonder than ‘coho’ or ‘copha,’ which the Turks call ‘caphe.’ This beverage is so black and bitter that one might suppose it to have come from the River Styx. It is prepared from rounded beans which resemble the beans of the laurel. Drunk very hot, it is said to be healthy, dispelling melancholy, drying tears, allaying anger, and producing cheerfulness. Still, the Persians would not prize it so greatly as they do, did not tradition inform them that it was brought to earth by the Angel Gabriel in order to revive the flagging energies of Mohammed the Prophet. Mohammed himself declared that when he had drunk this magic potion he felt strong enough to unhorse forty men and to possess forty women.”
    These are perhaps the most admiring words which any Occidental has ever written about coffee, but their defect is their inaccuracy. No one but Sir Thomas Herbert—and he throws the responsibility on the Prophet—has ever been inclined to describe coffee as an aphrodisiac. Many, indeed, speak of it as having the opposite effect.
    Coming back to Kolshitsky, when that worthy opened the first Viennese coffee-house in the Domgasse, where the shadow of St. Stephen’s tower falls at noon, cultured circles of the Austrian capital were unquestionably acquainted with coffee by repute. But they had never drunk it. When they now made trials of the beverage, their first impression of the “Turkish muck” was unfavourable—no matter whether they were masters of art, doctors, clerics, or merchants.
    The Viennese were wine-bibbers. True, the lovely green-and-gold vines which, since the days of the Roman occupation, had flourished on the western outskirts of Vienna were now destroyed beyond repair. They had been fired together with the suburbs. The tough vine-stems had been cut to make palisades; the acrid urine of thousands of camels, asses, and oxen rendered the soil wellnigh as barren as the steppes of Central Asia. For years to come, the Viennese would not be able to get wine from their own vine-stocks, but would have to import what they needed at great cost. Still, even though deprived of the customary joys of Bacchus, they felt little inclination for the beverage of the Black Apollo.
    Yet the vast stores of coffee-beans that Franz Georg Kolshitsky had obtained as booty from the Turkish camp were a disadvantage to him by their very magnitude. Unless he were to make a bonfire of the lot, or commit suicide by having the coffee piled on him until he was suffocated, he must manage to sell his wares. “Well and good,” he said to himself, “if my customers don’t like Turkish coffee, we must make a Viennese coffee that they will favour!” He used a strainer to rid the beverage of the grounds which made the Viennese choke. The clear liquid thus obtained