Coffee: a Stimulant That Made the Modern World

"Harmless and healing liquor" or "bitter invention of Satan?"

Here’s the latest in my series on the stimulants that got people wired enough to create the modern world. If you missed them, check out previous installments on tea, sugar, and tobacco.

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Unlike the other great early modern drugs, coffee was a genuinely new phenomenon in the 1500s. Tea, chocolate, tobacco, opium, and sugar had all been consumed in some way for centuries, at least in some parts of the world. But nobody seems to have thought of stripping the fruit away from coffee seeds, drying them, roasting them, grinding them up, and brewing them in hot water until the fifteenth century.

Nobody knows who first figured it out. Some argue that coffee originated in the forests of Kaffa, in Ethiopia. Others associate it with the area around Mocha, a po…