The World of Caffeine by Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg Page B

drunkards.” Remnants of this theory survive today in the prevalent but erroneous belief that a cup of strong coffee can make you sober. 2
    Nevertheless, people who drink coffee or tea throughout the day are more likely to be sober and efficient than those who drink beer. From Rumsey’s time onward, the energizing and sobering effects of the caffeinated beverages were emphatically contrasted with the laziness and impairment attending consumption of other available drinks—almost all of which were alcoholic because the drinking water was generally unsafe. Because of the pervasiveness of alcoholic drinks in the lives of medieval and early modern Europeans, the institution of chronic sobriety constituted a radical change of life. Beer, for example, in addition to being consumed, as it is today, at celebrations and holidays, of which there were many, or simply as a recreational intoxicant, was also a primary a source of nourishment, second in importance in the average diet only to bread, and its consumption was nothing less than unremitting. Johann Breschneider ( Lat. Johann Placotomus, 1514–76), German physician and educator, wrote of beer in 1551, “Some subsist more upon this drink than they do on food People of both sexes and every age, the hale and the infirm alike require it.” 3
    Schivelbusch asserts that a typical English family in the seventeenth century averaged three quarts of beer per person, including children, every day, and that brewing beer was part of a housewife’s usual duties. One of the reasons consumption was so high was that breakfast generally consisted of beer soup. If you are interested in trying a bowl, here is a recipe that survived in rural Germany at the end of the eighteenth century:
    Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cold beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together, whisking it well to keep it from curdling. Finally, cut up a roll, white bread, or other good bread, and pour the soup over it. You may also sweeten to taste with sugar. 4
    When each day began with a dish like this and when there were frequent drinking contests, in the course of which competitors fell one by one into an unconscious stupor, until a lone victor, like Socrates in the Symposium, rose and went home in singular awareness of his heady triumph, a nearly unmitigated state of alcoholic impairment was endemic.
    Eventually a new attitude toward alcohol, arising with and perhaps in part as a consequence of the beginnings of modern industrial society, began to predominate in Europe, an attitude that had less patience for drinking bouts or alcoholism as a way of life. Considered in the context of pandemic inebriation that plagued Europe before caffeine’s arrival, some of the more effusive claims made on behalf of the health benefits of the temperance beverages seem more reasonable; after all, simply curtailing alcohol consumption would have made millions feel better and work better from morning to evening.
    Old ways die hard, and the ascent of the three new temperance beverages and the decline of traditional alcoholic drinks sometimes occasioned complaint. Elizabeth Charlotte (1652–1722), often called Liselotte von der Pfalz, a German princess who, after her marriage to the duke of Orléans, was required to relocate to Paris, wrote frequently in her correspondence to criticize the new drinks available at the court of Versailles:
    Tea makes me think of hay and dung, coffee of soot and lupine-seed, and chocolate is too sweet for me—it gives me a stomachache—I can’t stand any of them. How much I would prefer a good Kalteschale [a cold soup made with wine and fruit] or a good beer soup, that wouldn’t give me a stomachache. 5
    To judge from her letters, all three, coffee, tea, and chocolate, could still be credibly referred to at the beginning of the eighteenth