Episode 31 Coffee Becoming an Everyday Drink Is a Story of Strange Bedfellows

[00:00:18] Kevin: Today's episode is about the global commodification of coffee. How coffee went from being a geographically limited, very expensive niche thing to global commodity that's dirt cheap, in most countries it's dirt cheap, and that almost everybody consumes on a daily basis. Like, how did that happen? That's the focus of today's episode.

[00:00:43] Emanuel: Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Curious Pundits podcast. Where you can hear bits of everything, because we are two curious co-hosts. My name is Emanuel.

[00:00:53] Kevin: My name is Kevin.

[00:00:55] Emanuel: And today we have a very special guest again. But before we let him introduce himself, just a note that you can find us on curiouspundits.com. That's where you'll find links to this episode, future episodes, previous episodes, links to all of our social channels, or Apple or Spotify, wherever you like to listen to your podcast.

[00:01:17] Please go there, follow us, like us, subscribe, and leave us a hopefully a positive comment, because we're gonna bring in more interesting guests, and this is probably the only place where you'll find the biggest diversity in topics. The Malcolm Gladwell of podcasts, as some previous guest has named us. That being said, Christian, welcome.

[00:01:39] Christian: Thank you, Emanuel. Thank you, Kevin. I'm Christian Robles-Baez. I am a PhD candidate at Stanford University. I am finishing my doctoral dissertation, which is precisely about how coffee became a staple, how it transformed into what basically it is today. I'm environmental and economic historian who asks how and why coffee come from being like sort of luxury item into an everyday article.

[00:02:11] Kevin: Would you mind starting Christian by giving us an overview of the history of the commodification of coffee?

[00:02:18] Christian: It's a long history, of course. Coffee is an ancient commodity. It's an ancient product. It's originally from Africa as far as we know. Particularly from Ethiopia is where there it's, oldest origins are recovered or registered. And then it had a long history also in the Arabic world places like today's Yemen, Ethiopia, Turkey.

[00:02:44] It was widely traded in that area before going to Europe. But then in seventeen, eighteen centuries, it arrives to Europe. And in Europe what happens is that it will acquire a very particular meaning. It will be associated with aristocracy, with the bourgeoisie.

[00:03:05] Coffee starts to be presented as something that is rare, it's exotic, it's something valuable, it's something that the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie is going to consume to adapt. And this symbolism, these sort of cultural associations that coffee starts to acquire are going to be essential for expanding its consumption particularly in the nineteenth century.

[00:03:29] These cultural associations that are creating in Europe, in places like France, places like Great Britain are going to travel to the US and in the US are going to be very important for expanding the consumption. I think the notions of commodifications on the demand side, are going to rise in Europe, particularly France and Great Britain are going to be places where coffee starts to be seen as attractive product.

[00:03:56] Kevin: I'd like to tell a story that I read somewhere and see if you stumbled across this story in your research.

[00:04:05] The story is, under Roman occupation, Europe was fairly stable and they had pretty good infrastructure. They had clean water, some parts had sewage systems.

[00:04:15] They had some semblance of a police force keeping the peace. And as the Romans withdrew from Europe, all of that crumbled away, and relatively quickly people came to realize that water was not safe to drink. And the reason was they were throwing their human waste in the lake that they were taking their drinking water from, and they didn't know that was a bad thing and that there were germs, right?

[00:04:37] They just knew you can't drink the water. It's probably gonna make you sick. But you could drink beer. They didn't know it was because the fermentation process created alcohol, alcohol is a disinfectant. But basically in Europe, this is how the story goes, people would get up in the morning and they would start drinking beer because it was safe.

[00:04:57] So Europe had a slight buzz on for about 1,000 years, right? And then coffee shows up, and coffee was safe. Now they didn't know it's because the water was boiled and that killed the harmful bacterias. So coffee shows up, sweeps all across Europe, and then a couple generations later we have, the scientific method is invented, the European Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration. Like, all of that happened after Europe sobered up. And I'm wondering if you stumbled across this in your research. Is this a true story?

[00:05:33] Christian: Yeah, I think a lot of parts are true. Yeah your description remind me of the book, Tastes of Paradise which kind of describe this transition from alcohol to coffee or to other sober beverages. Certainly around eighteenth century and particularly nineteenth century, there is a big concern about the effects of alcohol.

[00:05:56] You have a new type of economy coming up. It's a sort of more enregimented type of economy in which discipline, punctuality and steadiness, regularity are going to be more important for production. You don't want workers who will arrive drunk or late or that will not be able to stay for eight, ten, twelve hours in their place.

[00:06:22] So certainly they are searching for alternatives to alcohol. And coffee it's sober. Yes, it's a great alternative. It doesn't mean that coffee did not have any opposition. It certainly had, people identify that it was addictive, that it created sleeping disorders and other sort of effects.

[00:06:44] But that was certainly preferable than the effects of alcohol.

[00:06:49] Kevin: I heard it starts prior to the concept of workers being a thing. If you go back to feudalism, people didn't go to the factory yet and go to a job.

[00:06:59] And I can clearly see why once the Industrial Revolution gets into full swing and people move from the country to the city to get jobs in factories I can see why having workers show up sober is really important. The story as I heard it, though, is it started even earlier. People are out in the fields harvesting whatever they were harvesting, wheat, barley, et cetera. And that, that worked, but the ideas on how to make society better didn't start to gel until coffee spread throughout Europe.

[00:07:30] Christian: There's certainly rural consumption of coffee in places like the US. And for example one of the things that I found in my dissertation research is that it was consumed by enslaved populations in the South on the cotton and sugar plantations. There is regular and large consumption of coffee.

[00:07:49] And even though it's rural, it's a plantation, it doesn't mean that it doesn't operate with the kind of factory system logic, which is, they have to follow a schedule, they have to work for steady hours, they have to follow a routine. So even in these cases rural plantation work, it's going to be useful.

[00:08:11] And then certainly when coffee start to be consumed mostly in the cities in the 1800s, ninety-four percent of the people in the United States live in rural areas. And even in 1850, the percentage is still very large. So certainly coffee is mostly consumed in rural areas.

[00:08:31] But urbanization certainly is going to help the consumption of coffee because of what you say, factory system industries. But there's this precedent in rural areas and then slowly becoming more urban.

[00:08:45] So chronologically, late 18th century when coffee's already pretty well known in Europe it doesn't mean it's widely consumed in Europe, but at least people know about it.

[00:08:56] So in the United States also it's already a relatively known item people know about, and people have absorbed the cultural connotations around coffee, okay, this is a refined item. This is sober. But so by then late 18th century when the US is a young republic coffee is consumed mostly by urban elites.

[00:09:20] I would say although we don't have the quantitative evidence for coffee consumption during that time we certainly have information on imports, on prices on population distribution, and that makes us think that it's reasonable to conclude that coffee was still not consumed by most of the population in the...

[00:09:42] Kevin: I actually didn't realize that. So the stories I heard implied mass consumption by different people in different classes, but you're saying that for the longest time, or for a long time, it was an upper class product.

[00:09:55] Christian: Yes, by all means. The transformation occurs in early 19th century is when you have unprecedented supply, unprecedented production of coffee, when prices go down, in 20 years the price of coffee collapsed basically 80% in the coastal cities of the United States, like New York or New Orleans experienced a 80% decline of the price of coffee.

[00:10:22] And this is when it becomes accessible and affordable to most people. But before 1820 it's still very unreachable for a large segment of the population in the US and of course in places like Europe even more, maybe in Latin America, in the producing places like Brazil, probably it was consumed locally by the workers or the growers.

[00:10:47] But it's still, yeah it's very restricted. Its consumption is very limited before 1820s, 1810s.

[00:10:54] Emanuel: You said that it originated in Africa in the region of current day Ethiopia. I would be curious to see who is the number one producer of coffee right now, let's say 2026. assuming it's a country in Asia based on what I've read. And also, who's the biggest consumer in terms of coffee per population? And the third question would be, is coffee kinda used significantly in any other industry of some sorts or just for consumption for people? So three questions here. Start with which one you want.

[00:11:31] Christian: Yeah. So today, the world largest producing country is Brazil, and the world largest consuming country is the United States not per capita, but just in, in terms of countries. And this relationship was created in early 19th century, the time period I'm studying. And basically, my dissertation focuses on how these two countries in particular created the global coffee market or transformed the scale of the coffee market in early 19th century.

[00:12:00] And we see that today that relationship has not changed, in the sense that they still are number one producer and number one consumer. In terms of per capita the United States is not the world largest consumer. I think like the Nordic countries had a higher per capita consumption like Finland, Denmark, Sweden.

[00:12:23] I don't know exactly the figures, but the Nordic countries I think they have a higher consumption per capita. But in early 19th century, certainly consumption per capita in the United States increased dramatically, like in around 30 years from 1820 to 1850, the consumption per capita in the United States increased fourfold which is a very fast increase in just 20 years, 30 years.

[00:12:51] In these 30 years, the per capita consumption increased fourfold, and then from 1850 till today, it hasn't doubled yet. So basically, these 30 years from 1820 to 1850 is the period in which consumption per capita of coffee grew faster in the United States. Production grew as never before, and consumption also. The rate of growth of consumption and production grew faster than ever before in this time period.

[00:13:22] Kevin: So I have a question about the adoption of coffee. So is it the case that people knew of coffee, people maybe had an experience of coffee, people wanted coffee, but they weren't able to have it until the price came down?

[00:13:37] Christian: Correct. Yeah, I think that's the situation at the dawn of the 19th century, that's kind of the situation. The European population arriving to the United States are probably familiar with coffee in the sense that they would knew what is it. In the cities there are coffee houses in places like London or Paris or the port cities in Europe.

[00:13:59] But people probably were not able to access it in a regular basis. You might like it, you might be attracted to it, you might be curious about it but you just don't have the means to afford it. In this sense, there is still not a demand.

[00:14:15] Just because you might like something, but just because you are attracted to a particular product doesn't mean you will demand it, right? You might like Ferraris or Lamborghinis or something like that. I feel attracted, I might like them, but I will not demand it. It's so out of my reach that... why I will organize my life around demand of this sort of item.

[00:14:36] So I think something, of course, very different but with a similar logic is happening with coffee. People see coffee as too out of reach, is not regularly available, accessible, affordable. So even if there is a sort of cultural capital around coffee there is still not effective demand.

[00:14:55] I would differentiate between two types of demand. One is the latent demand. So a demand that is not active which is this kind of situation. You might feel attracted by a certain item, certain commodity, but you will not demand it because you see it as too out of your reach.

[00:15:15] And the other thing is the effective demand, which is when you effectively have the means to afford it, to demand it, to consume it. So what happened at this time is precisely that coffee is not just latently, if that word exists, demanded but it starts to be effectively demanded, does it make sense?

[00:15:34] Kevin: Yeah, it does.

[00:15:35] Emanuel: And also the cultural aspect of drinking coffee has influenced a lot. So we know, for example, Italians have influenced significantly the way we drink coffee today just by the names of them, espresso and all the other types of drinking coffee. The French have their own way of drinking coffee as well, as I've noticed since then.

[00:15:57] Kevin: Can I tell a story?

[00:16:00] Christian: Yes, please.

[00:16:02] Kevin: This is a woman I really met. So I was on a ski trip up in the Sierra Nevadas in California sometime in the 1980s, and I was in my 20s, and I met this woman who, she was a weird woman. She was in her 60s. So in the 1980s, she was in her 60s, so in the 1940s, she was in her 20s. And she was a logistics officer in the German army. She was literally a Nazi during World War II, right? And her job was to make sure that the right stuff got to the right place at the right time as best she could. And her story is one time she made a error with coffee, and the coffee that was destined for the French POW camp and the coffee that was destined for the German officers, got mixed up, and both groups complained.

[00:16:53] Christian: I can see why. Yeah the thing about coffee is exactly like it creates a sort of habit. It creates a routine, and we know, I'm not an expert on this, but there is scientific research about how our brains like routine, prediction, something that is familiar, regular, our brains like that.

[00:17:16] And then, of course, coffee also provides this feeling of relief, of energy, when you drink coffee, people get energized, which is like for most people, a good feeling. Not necessarily for everybody, but a lot of people like the effects that coffee produces. When you combine the two things you get a lot of potential for a product.

[00:17:38] At this time, early 19th century not all the effects of coffee were fully understood in terms of scientific grounds or all that. But certainly people felt energized. People felt that they need it in a regular basis. And these effects were identified even if they still did not have the whole scientific ground for that.

[00:18:03] Caffeine was discovered as a substance in 1809 around this particular time.

[00:18:09] Kevin: I was actually surprised. So I finally tuned into the World Cup after the round robin games finished and they started the single elimination games. I'm seeing a lot of players chew gum when they're not playing, and then on their way onto the pitch, they would spit their gum out, right?

[00:18:27] And I'm like "What's the deal?" Chewing gum is generally considered to be an American thing, and I've even seen them make jokes about this in movies. Some guys are, like, riding up to a US military checkpoint, and then the driver hands out gum to everybody, and the American's like, "What's this all about?"

[00:18:45] And the guy says, "Oh, it just makes us look American." So they even joke about it in movies, right? So I go to my favorite generative AI engine and I'm like, "Why are all these guys chewing gum before they go on the field?" And the answer was caffeine. Caffeine is not a banned substance, and they were chewing caffeinated gum.

[00:19:05] Christian: Yes. One important thing that, that we can trace historically from this experience is that sometimes we tend to think that coffee is like an intellectual beverage that favors, this type of office kind of work. But it certainly favors also physical work, physical activity. In early 19th century, a lot of people have jobs that imply a lot of physical effort, enslaved populations, workers in factories, people working on the fields, and that was a lot of physical effort. And coffee favored both physical and intellectual effort. So yeah. It also energizes you physically and not only intellectually.

[00:19:46] Kevin: Did coffee ever go through a period of mass marketing in order to stimulate demand, or was the demand just there and people needed it to be affordable?

[00:19:56] Christian: So it, I would say it's a lot of back and forth relationship. So early 19th century, you have this sort of cultural capital around coffee, but just people maybe did not have the means to get it or were not very concerned about it. But then when Brazil took the first step and start to massively grown coffee, US merchants start to take coffee from Brazil to the United States they now have an affordable article to buy it and then they start to create a routine.

[00:20:31] They start to insert coffee into their lives. They see that is useful for the physical work, it's relieving. Even planters in the South start to know that it's helpful not only to energize the enslaved workers they have, but also to keep them under control.

[00:20:48] So they would provide coffee as reward. They would distribute coffee as rations. And this, they thought, will help them to attach them to their plantations. They would make them less prone to run away, because they would need coffee, and if they would behave properly, they will get the rations of coffee or they with coffee rewards.

[00:21:10] And not only coffee, actually. It was also sugar, and there are stories with corn. They implemented this sort of reward system to keep enslaved people under control. But what coffee has is that it creates a sort of necessity, right? If you started to drink it in a regular basis, you wouldn't feel the need for it.

[00:21:30] Yeah. And so in one, the habit is formed. It's difficult to change. We see that countries or people in general don't change these sort of habits very fast or very often. You have people who drink tea usually stick to tea and people who drink coffee stick to coffee.

[00:21:50] It doesn't mean you cannot combine them. I am one of those people who combine or diversify its source of caffeine. But most people have a clear preference and it's because it creates a sort of habit. And what happens by the mid 19th century is that the habit is already formed.

[00:22:09] The demand for coffee is going to become less sensitive to prices. So now if you change the price of coffee people would still try to buy it because it's so important for their lives. So in early 19th century the demand for coffee is going to be very sensitive to price.

[00:22:26] The price decline and that activated the demand. A demand that is very sensitive to prices. People go there and buy because it's more affordable. But then actually you have a strong fluctuation in around the 1850s. There is cutoff supply in Brazil for environmental factors and other kind of factors.

[00:22:47] In Brazil, there is a smaller crop that year 1849, 1850, there is a smaller crop in Brazil. It combines with also the halt of the enslaved trade in Brazil. But different factors increase the price of coffee around 1850, significantly. And still people demanded it. So you have also a transformation in the very nature of the demand for coffee around this time, from something that is very sensitive to prices to something that is less sensitive to prices because people would demand it at any price mostly, or almost.

[00:23:25] Kevin: You mentioned, Christian, that in the 1850s there was a significant increase in price of coffee due to various factors. I'm really curious what those factors were.

[00:23:35] Christian: Yes. So around 1849 the Brazilian crop is smaller because of environmental factors the crop is significantly smaller than in other years. And then at that time also the slave trade is halted. It was illegal for around two decades, but it still operated with the complicity of Brazilian and American authorities, and even the British were kind of partners in crime of this also in some cases. But around 1850s, there is a push for actually halting the Atlantic slave trade. And apparently the change is very drastic around this time too. So effectively less people are coming from Africa to Brazil.

[00:24:21] Some people would still continue coming illegally and smuggling. But there is a significant change around 1850 that would affect the price of coffee. The labor and enslaved labor is probably the main input for coffee production in this time. So if you significantly increase the price of enslaved population, it would be reflected on the price of coffee.

[00:24:43] And also, different from the US enslaved population in Brazil was mostly coming from Africa in a regular basis. So Brazilian enslaved population did not reproduce itself as it happened in the United States. So Brazilian slave population needed like a regular inflow of people from Africa because the conditions were so bad, so poor that enslaved population did not have the means to reproduce itself.

[00:25:14] So Brazilian enslaved system depended largely on a constant inflow from Africa. So that was something that really affected the enslaved system in Brazil. Yeah, I would say those were two major factors that affected the price of coffee in the mid-century.

[00:25:30] So on the one hand, the Brazilian crop is shorter, and on the second hand the... maybe three, actually. The Brazilian crop is shorter. There is a significant halt in the slave trade, and then you have a financial crisis in Europe around 1848. There is a sort of panic. There is a credit contraction around this time.

[00:25:52] Different banks in Europe and the United States are going to cut credit for certain merchants. And one of the merchants that I study in my dissertation the pioneer one of the first and largest coffee merchants sending coffee from Brazil to the United States actually broke at the end of 1849 precisely because there is a sort of credit halt during this time.

[00:26:18] So yeah.

[00:26:19] Kevin: You actually-- This is a segue into an aspect of American history that I think should be better known. But you actually made casual reference of something that I think is super important. So I'm gonna segue away from coffee, and I'll get back to it in a minute.

[00:26:33] Your reference was that Brazilian didn't have a mechanism of reproducing slaves, and the US did.

[00:26:40] A lot of people don't realize what was happening in the US, even Americans. We don't teach this, right? So the US Congress outlawed the importation of slaves pretty early in the 1800s. So people in the United States literally set up breeding facilities for slaves, literally, like they were livestock, right?

[00:27:05] And that's why the United States... and I've read that poring through historical records and newspaper clippings, there had to be at least about 200 of these places. There may have been more, right? But at least 200. So this was a particularly... I was gonna use the word brutal, and that's an appropriate word, but, like, all of the various aspects of slavery were pretty brutal.

[00:27:28] So as brutal as American slavery was, being a slave on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean was, like, 1,000 times worse, right? But this aspect of these breeding facilities that was a particularly brutal aspect of American slavery that people just don't know about for whatever reason. But anyway, back to coffee.

[00:27:47] Emanuel: How addictive is it?

[00:27:49] Christian: Oh, how addictive. I learned that in the medical spheres addiction has a particular connotation, and I don't know if coffee would be part of this medical categorization of what addiction is or not. But in general, people on the street, like who are not doctors or who are not part of the medical scientific community would just use the word to something that you regularly need, that you feel the need for.

[00:28:18] And yeah I guess for some people it's a necessity. You would not make your quotidian regular life without it. For some others, it's a little bit less. I don't know. But I think it's the combination of two things that I briefly mentioned at the beginning.

[00:28:35] So on the one hand certainly our brains favor prediction, routine, stability, something that you don't have to think twice, "Oh, what will I drink this morning?" Or "What will I get once I wake up?" It's better if you do it, basically in automatic, right?

[00:28:52] Without thinking about it. You just go pour your coffee or press the button or turn on the light of your cooker, whatever without properly thinking about it. You're just thinking on the next step. So that's one of the things that our brains are rewarded by the routine that coffee creates.

[00:29:10] But then, yes, the effect of sort of dependency, the good feeling, the awakeness in the morning. I don't know in medical terms I would not be able to explain how addictive it is. But I would say there are these two spheres in which coffee certainly creates a regular need, the routine and then the caffeine effect on our brains that energizes, relieves us from this sort of tiredness or botherness.

[00:29:38] Emanuel: I'm probably as guilty as anyone else by saying at one point in our lifetime I would kill for a coffee right now, or I can't operate until I have my coffee, which I feel every morning, although I tend to drink decaf right now. Definitely there's something there.

[00:29:54] Kevin: Can I make a comment?

[00:29:55] Christian: Yes.

[00:29:56] Kevin: I am physically addicted to caffeine. And if I don't have coffee for a couple days, I get headaches, and complete withdrawal lasts about three days, and then I'm fine. But psychologically, I want my morning coffee, and I'm more than willing to re-addict myself quickly.

[00:30:12] Christian: Yeah. So I'm not sure if this situation that you, Kevin, and me, and Emanuel, and many other people who are listening to us would have is the need for coffee. I don't know if that would classify in medical terms as an addiction or not, or is something that the scientific community would say that's an addiction.

[00:30:32] But certainly, it's something that we need the need for that. Our brains get used to that and our routines. And so yeah, when we don't have it, we certainly feel the lack of it, the absence of it.

[00:30:45] Kevin: Oh, absolutely.

[00:30:46] Emanuel: I heard also that it's a nootropic. People are pushing more on the neurotropic part of things which enhances the brain's cognitive abilities and more. So you talk about the performance in physical activities. I know for sure that the right time, in the right amount, that's very important, for me at least.

[00:31:08] In the right amount, it can mean, I'm more... I'm at the top of my game, whatever it is that I'm doing at that moment. Mentally, not just physically. New studies, new research, new ideas on surrounding this aspect?

[00:31:26] Christian: I don't know of recent research on the effect of caffeine in physical activity. People know that very early, and the idea that coffee was used in offices and all that is mostly a 20th century phenomenon. In early 19th century, people used it mostly for physical work.

[00:31:45] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:31:46] Christian: It was already very clear. I have not seen recent research about it. If someone knows, it would be, really interesting. But, we can predict that certainly caffeine favored physical performance for sure, yeah.

[00:32:01] Kevin: I'm of the opinion that when you dig into the details of many of what I'm gonna call food studies, you find that the group of participants was so small that the study is meaningless. We ran a study of 12 people, right? And I'm like, "That's not a study," right? time someone runs one of those studies that proves that coffee is a benefit, I just latch onto it.

[00:32:22] It's like, "Oh yeah, I'm having my coffee," right?

[00:32:27] Christian: Yeah.

[00:32:27] Emanuel: Are those people from the same region or from the same city or have the same characteristics whatsoever, so...

[00:32:33] Kevin: Yeah. Food companies do this all the time. They publish the results of a study, but the amount of participants in the study is so small as to render the study just absolutely meaningless. Remember some years ago, all the news organizations were reporting that if you want to lose weight, eat a chocolate bar a day? Does that ring a bell? It was basically an intentional scam.

[00:32:56] Christian: Yeah.

[00:32:57] Kevin: A couple of guys monitored I don't know, 10, 12 people for two weeks and had them write details about their stuff, and then they looked through the data for the most absurd correlation they could find, and then they released that as a finding. And news organizations all around the world picked it up as if it was real. They were just trying to make a point.

[00:33:15] Christian: I've heard also studies around wine, that...

[00:33:18] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:33:18] Christian: Drink a glass of wine, your heart will be in a better shape and that's been...

[00:33:24] Kevin: Now, if it turns out that this is a result of studying 60,000 people, I'm interested. But if it was a result of studying six people, i'm skeptical.

[00:33:34] Christian: Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And, we know that there have been studies that today are not real anymore or that their conclusions were false and sometimes even frauded as in the case of tobacco. There were many studies in the '50s or '60s arguing in favor of the benefits of tobacco to health or on people's health.

[00:34:00] Emanuel: They were prescribing cigarettes to patients, right?

[00:34:03] Kevin: Yeah, but in defense of that, I know that we went way too far with that. But it's not uncommon that in the beginning our intentions are good, and then we just get carried away. So a whole bunch of soldiers came back with what at the time was called shell shock from World War I, like very nervous, everything ticked them off, and doctors are saying "Smoke". "That will calm you down." Well, it did provide short-term relief to these guys from the shell shock. We just took it way too far, way too fast. But this is what we do. We did the same thing with high-fructose corn syrup. It solved a problem, in the beginning. I don't think in the beginning everybody, anybody anticipated that we would put it in bread and everything, right?

[00:34:52] Christian: Yeah, no, but your point brings an important aspect, which is one might wonder whether people drink coffee because it's healthy or not. And in at the beginning, early 19th century medical discourses certainly play a role. So in early 19th century, you have medical treaties and medical spheres kind of favoring the consumption of coffee.

[00:35:16] They were not, presenting coffee necessarily as the ideal beverage. As I said, they identified some of its effects. They identified that it causes insomnia, and that it make people addictive and all that. But especially if you compare it to alcohol, it was certainly healthy.

[00:35:37] And, you have medical treaties defending the consumption of coffee on that grounds. It made people sober, energized, it created alertness, favored work. This was an important sphere that certainly favored the consumption of coffee around this time.

[00:35:56] There were other spheres too, that one might think were contradictory, but they actually converged on the demand side to spread the popularity of coffee. So we have the medical sphere, which is certainly favoring consumption of coffee. We have also the religious sphere. So we have the temperance movements promoting very heavily the consumption of coffee.

[00:36:22] Especially, again, it's not necessarily that coffee is the ideal beverage. They are not necessarily presenting coffee as the ultimate beverage, but especially it was presented as an alternative to alcohol. And if your options are whiskey, rum, or coffee, all these people are saying "Go for coffee" for sure.

[00:36:41] And then, the temperance movement are going to be very active. In England for example, they are going to be also very important in spreading the consumption of tea. So we have medical discourses, religion discourses, and then the economic discourses also are going to be very important.

[00:36:59] People who drink coffee are more responsible, are more rational with their finances. They will go to work punctually. They will follow the rules. They will be clean. They will be productive workers. And politically too, politically coffee is going to be also an important matter for authorities.

[00:37:18] We have to remember in 1832 coffee is put in the duty-free list of imports in the United States. So the government is going to make coffee and tea actually free of duty. This...

[00:37:32] Kevin: I never heard that. I didn't know that.

[00:37:34] Christian: Yeah. And this is going to make the United States an important destination for coffee because in Europe coffee is heavily taxed especially for Brazilian coffee.

[00:37:44] So that's why or that's an important factor explaining this relationship between Brazil and the United States. It was in 1832, to some extent this is a result of the growing flow of coffee from Brazil to the United States. It's not as often people say just the big cause of this flow because when it happened and it was somehow the consequence of this increasing flow of coffee from Brazil to the United States.

[00:38:15] But also, it was also the result of a dispute between the North and the South around tariffs. The North was promoting tariffs on imported and exported goods. They wanted to protect their industries, especially the clothing industry, the manufacturing industry. So the North was really on the tariff side, and the South was totally the opposite.

[00:38:37] They wanted cheap imported goods for their plantations including coffee and free duties for exporting their cotton or their sugar they produce or their produce. The 1832 duty-free policy for coffee was to some extent a sort of middle ground between the North and the South. They kept the tariffs for most of the imported goods, but they put a few in the duty-free list like coffee, which was very important for planters in the South. Professor Douglas Irwin has a book called Clashing Over Commerce, and he explained how tariffs were also a very heated factor between the dispute of between North and South of the US.

[00:39:22] Kevin: I can see that split making sense. The North was starting to industrialize. The American South was still largely agricultural, and yeah, I can see the... I'm looking for the right phrase here, the economic needs, the economic rules. I can see them wanting a different set of rules.

[00:39:40] Christian: I will finish with the political aspect of Brazil and the United States in early 19th century, especially after the independence of Brazil in 1822 are going to close a sort of political alliance. They are the two most populated countries in the Americas with vast territories under their control, and they both fear about their independence.

[00:40:04] We have to remember, in 1812 the United States was fighting a war against Britain and the US independence was at stake at this moment. And Brazil was just a recent independent country. It was just in 1822. So there are serious fears about the independence of these countries.

[00:40:24] Portugal was threatening to reconquer Brazil. Britain was expanding, and you have other empires in Europe expanding their territories. They are going to seal an alliance against Europe, and they are going to become very close political alliances on the one hand, to face European imperialism, but on the other hand, precisely to defend slavery.

[00:40:47] We have to remember these two countries are probably the two largest slave empires in the Americas, plus Cuba. But they wanted to protect slavery as an institution, something that Britain was threatening already at this time. So the coffee flow that emerged between these two countries was also part of a explicit political alliance between the two countries.

[00:41:11] They signed even a treatise in 1828 in which they would say they would protect each other, they would favor commerce between each other. So to summarize, you have political factors, economic factors, religious factors, medical factors, converging to make coffee appealing, to make coffee a thing in the United States.

[00:41:35] You rarely see the convergence of so divergent types of interests around a single thing. And that kind of explained the popularity of it and the rapid increase that it had. It was possible only because, very different spheres converged to make it appealing, to make it demanded and consumed.

[00:41:58] And we have similar factors, or we can search for the similar convergence of factors on the supply side too.

[00:42:05] Kevin: I'd actually like to segue a bit into what I'm gonna call the value chain.

[00:42:11] You're aware, Christian, of my effort to use OpenAI Codex to vibe code up a data set and a chart, an interactive chart showing global coffee flows in the value chain. So I've got it open in my other monitor. And according to the estimates, and basically I asked Codex if it could find empirical data sets out there about coffee flows.

[00:42:33] It said it could. It downloaded them, and then that was the basis of these charts. But basically, when I walk into a shop and I pay $5 for a cup of coffee, the grower of that gets eight cents, and the cafe that prepares the coffee and then provides to me over the counter, they get almost $4, right? And then in between there's everybody gets their little cut, but there's this entire... I'm looking for the right phrase, invisible infrastructure. Like between the coffee harvest and my cup of coffee, who's in that chain?

[00:43:10] Christian: Yeah, many people. Today it's even more complex, of course, than it was 200 years ago. But somehow the structure or the infrastructure, the commodity chain that is formed in early 19th century is similar in its logic than it is today. So yeah, we tend to think that, we have producers and consumers.

[00:43:31] Someone produce coffee in a place like Brazil or Colombia, and then it suddenly shows up in a coffee shop in the United States. But the middle ground is enormous. And in its origins in early 19th century, it was extremely difficult to bring coffee from Brazil to the United States.

[00:43:49] So this middle passage, between the two countries was very risky, was very difficult. If we consider the technology of the time, the environment of the time, the institutions, the context, it was very difficult. Merchants have to connect distant places, but navigating different cultures, navigating different languages, legal frameworks, et cetera.

[00:44:14] They had to navigate with all kind of risks. But I would say that the most difficult part in the early 19th century between the producer zone and the consumer, the final consumer, was to bring coffee from Brazilian plantations in the hinterland to the port of Rio de Janeiro in the coast.

[00:44:33] This was extremely difficult way or trail. This was pre-railway area. The Brazilian hinterland where plantations were were on the hills above somehow 700 meters. I'm not exactly sure how many feet is that but probably like above 2,000 feet of elevate.

[00:44:54] So it's not extremely high, but the steepness in certain points can be very high. Like the elevation took place in very small area. So at the end, the steepness could be very high in a lot of different areas.

[00:45:06] And there are not rivers connecting the hinterland directly with the port of Rio de Janeiro, so the system was based on mules. So there were enormous mule trains taking coffee from the plantations to the city ports. And you have professional muleteers transporting coffee from the plantations to the port.

[00:45:30] They have to navigate an environment that was still broadly chart. So large part of the Brazilian hinterland in this moment of Rio de Janeiro hinterland was still frontier. Indigenous people lived there. They still did not know exactly all the geography of that place. Indigenous people still resisted.

[00:45:54] There were communities of runaways, enslaved people living in the area. So navigating these geographies was very challenging. And they also have to face wildlife. There are a lot of accounts of muleteers facing jaguars and the fear that jaguars spread in the ways between the hinterlands and the city port.

[00:46:18] But there were snakes, mosquitoes rains, floods. It was very difficult to transport coffee especially, as I said, from the hinterland to the port of Rio de Janeiro. And then you still have thousands of miles from Brazil to the United States. Once it got in the United States, in many cases the coffee still had to travel to the hinterland, and the conditions I'm going off a little bit about here, but the condition in which coffee arrived to the consumers was probably very poor at that moment.

[00:46:52] If you consider that coffee had traveled on sweaty backs of mules or enslaved people, it had to cross rivers, it had to cross jungles, at this moment, there was not the technology to isolate coffee or properly packing coffee. It was exposed to all kind of things. Humidity in particular was something that really damaged coffee, and this is a very humid region in Brazil.

[00:47:20] So when it was stored in the city, in the warehouses, it was put side by side with other items like tobacco, with fish, lard, very smelly products. And coffee very easily absorbed these smells. One of the merchants said that actually coffee was, in that regard, very similar to butter because coffee and butter really absorb smells around really easily.

[00:47:49] So it gets into the taste of coffee or butter, what is around. And then when it traveled from Brazil to the United States it absorbed humidity, it absorbed the salty air of the sea. So at the moment in which it arrived to the United States, it was probably in very poor condition, and it could get worse because a lot of people just burned coffee while roasting it.

[00:48:13] The beans were probably broken, many of them. And then you would find even funny or interesting the different recipes of the early 19th century relating to coffee. People had coffee with fish skins, with eggs, with lard, with pork rinds. Different ways to either add taste or filter the coffee or make it more nutritious or whatever.

[00:48:43] But all this to say that maybe we are lucky to have the type of coffee we have today and not the early 19th century type of coffee.

[00:48:52] Emanuel: Now obviously the first thing I'm gonna do is get myself another coffee, from a more popular brand. I don't know, popular, less popular, I don't know exactly. It depends on the taste.

[00:49:04] Kevin: It seems to me that it would be the case that roasted coffee would be safer, perhaps is the right word, to transport because it's been roasted. Is that a true statement?

[00:49:16] Christian: No, actually not.

[00:49:17] The best way to transfer coffee is when it's green, dry. Yeah. In that way it will be preserved longer. And even in the early 19th century, people say you gotta roast the coffee and drink it as soon as possible because, once you roast it, it'll start to lose this flavor, this taste, this, you know, smell.

[00:49:41] Kevin: That actually explains something. There's a guy who has a coffee channel on YouTube and he was actually reviewing in-home roasters I was thinking, "Why would I want an in-home roaster?" But like that's probably why.

[00:49:52] Christian: Yeah, 19th century handbooks, domestic handbooks or manuals advised to roast your own coffee at home, do it properly. And this was very complicated actually, because beans had different sizes. People did not have all the utensils or all the technology to roast coffee properly.

[00:50:12] This was done in a very artisanal way. So yeah. But then it's only late 19th century that famous coffee roasters are going to emerge in cities. I think the first one appeared in New York the first coffee roaster in the United States. But it's still today, it's still today coffee travel from producing countries like Colombia and Brazil, green, dry.

[00:50:37] Yeah, that's the best way to preserve it. Yeah.

[00:50:40] Emanuel: Question... what will be the main idea you want the audience, the people who watch this episode to leave with after watching it? What's the conclusion?

[00:50:49] Christian: Yeah, I think it's many people would be surprised about how to say how little inevitable coffee consumption was. Today most people just drink their coffee without thinking about all the processes or different stages before it passed through to get to our cups or mugs.

[00:51:14] As Kevin was saying, there are many people involved in this today, many people are involved between the producer and the final seller or the consumer. So it's a very complex infrastructure that we rarely think about. And even less we think about the history of that, how that complex, sophisticated, and we can say efficient infrastructure was put into place.

[00:51:40] This was not, of course, automatic. This was not given, people have to build it with trial, error, with coercion in many cases, with experimentation, with negotiation. Perhaps something that people would find interesting is that some people would say we are lucky to have coffee today.

[00:51:58] Some people wouldn't see it in that way. But certainly it was something that was not determined to happen. The coffee market or the presence of coffee in our daily lives was not something that was determined to happen. It was in the very early stages actually something that was highly improbable.

[00:52:18] It has every reason to fail. If we consider the geography, the environment, the risks, the technology, the very weak institutions in both Brazil and the United States. You would certainly think twice about investing in this kind of market. If you are a transporter, you would think twice of transporting a mule train with 400 mules from the hills to the port.

[00:52:45] That was not an easy task, there were a lot of risks. There were jaguars, there were snakes, there was mosquitoes, there were poisonous vegetation, there were floods, there were rivers. All kind of dangers, all kind of risks. So I would say, coffee had every reason to fail in their early stages.

[00:53:02] People had to navigate different cultures, different languages, distant markets, exposed to all kind of human and non-human risks. And then as I just said, coffee was not an appealing beverage. It was awful actually, so how such an unpromising beverage was such a big success, it's a complicated answer.

[00:53:26] But I would say it's because there was a convergence of multiple and very different interests. Religious interests, economic interests, political interests, medical interests, all converging on this. And of course it also had its costs. It cost human lives, it cost expropriation of lands, expropriation of labor, expropriation of cultures, knowledges, practices.

[00:53:54] So it's important also to keep in mind that, we feel lucky, we feel blessed to have such an amazing beverage as coffee that makes our lives better, or at least in my case, and probably in your cases too, Kevin and Emanuel. But, it came with costs. It came not for free, millions of enslaved people worked for that. Indigenous populations have to surrender their lands because of that. They had to put their culture, expertise, knowledge into this. And of course, many merchants or investors also broke in the middle trying to make this business successful.

[00:54:31] So yeah, it's also good to keep in mind that this success came with costs.

[00:54:39] Kevin: I have a question that is like only peripherally related, and it's a personal question that I've been wondering about literally for maybe 40 years.

[00:54:47] At some point in the early 1980s, I spent about a week in Caracas for the company that I worked for, and they have a coffee preparation called café con leche.

[00:54:58] So it's like small little cups, and it is delicious. I loved it. I drank multiple cups every day. I even bought the coffee. I even asked people, "Tell me exactly what coffee is this made from, and where can I buy it?" I went to the store, I bought it, I brought it back to the States. I couldn't reproduce it, right? And then later, I happen to know that you're in Palo Alto right now 'cause we spoke previously, but there's a café in Palo Alto that hopefully is still there. It's called La Coupa Café on Ramona, and they actually had real Venezuelan café con leche. So I make a beeline down there. I order one. it's not right.

[00:55:36] So my question is, why can't we make it the US? What's different, right?

[00:55:43] Christian: Well, many things affect coffee taste. As I say, we tend to think coffee just one thing but there are many different types of coffee, and we increasingly learn about all the factors affecting coffee taste. Elevation transportation. Many things can happen in transportation process.

[00:56:05] Humidity, how you isolated the materials you used the temperature for burning it or for roasting it. Even the elevation of the city where you are roasting it will affect certain factors. The type of water you are using. We know that water tastes differently in different places, of course, you have to maybe have a train to distinguish those kind of difference in tastes. But, experts would identify. An expert on water, a water connoisseur would be able to differentiate the taste of water from one place to another. Also milk, of course.

[00:56:44] Milk sugar, all these, have different processes that affect their taste. And when you combine it, of course, you are incorporating all that. And it could happen, very early in the stage. I don't know. Rain somehow can affect or the type of earth you are using, the elevation.

[00:57:05] That might have an implication taste. Or the very last stage, the person who is preparing your coffee maybe put a little bit more of coffee or a little bit less that would affect the taste. The materials is using. We know with other beverages that the material in which you drink it would affect the taste.

[00:57:27] For example, if different if you drink in a cup of glass than in a cup of plastic or a cup of paper. All those things might affect the taste. And it would be difficult to identify where the perfect chain broke.

[00:57:44] Kevin: So basically if I ever want a good cup of café con leche again, I have to go to Venezuela.

[00:57:49] Christian: Yeah, I've heard that in Florida it's also good and popular. But I've not tried there. But I know it's a big thing in Florida. Yeah.

[00:57:57] Kevin: Okay.

[00:57:58] Emanuel: Do you have a website Christian, where you speak about coffee and its history and whatnot? Or where if people want to connect with you, where's the best place they can find you?

[00:58:06] Christian: Oh, yes. I have a website in yeah. Actually, I should put more things about coffee in my website because it's very academic so far. But yeah, I have an academic website. It's robles-baez, as my surname, robles-baez.su.domains.

[00:58:29] So you can contact me there. My email is [email protected]. I'm happy to share my findings on coffee basically, yeah how coffee transforming in basically what it is today right? Yeah, hopefully in the near future I would have more things out there published to share with people.

[00:58:54] I appreciate enormously the invitation and the opportunity to talk about my research, talk about coffee, to talk about, culture, economy, environment. Very interesting stories that we were able to talk here.

[00:59:09] Emanuel: I'm looking to learn more and perhaps have you back here on another occasion. And why not we recommend you starting a podcast on this topic since you already have the expertise and you already built it that amount of time. Maybe just do them over a coffee. Funnily enough, we always drink coffee during other episodes recording.

[00:59:25] You can see us drinking like a lot of them. I have a big mug.

[00:59:29] Christian: Yeah.

[00:59:30] Emanuel: Somehow I didn't make it through today, but...

[00:59:32] Christian: I have mine here. Yeah.

[00:59:34] Emanuel: Oh, That being said, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much our the people who watch and listen to us. Curiouspundits.com is the place where you can find us, find more about our podcast, previous episodes, future episodes and whatnot. Until the next time. My name is Emanuel.

[00:59:54] Kevin: My name is Kevin, and thank you for listening.