I’m a confirmed tea drinker,
but I take a cup of coffee after an excellent meal, and I admit that a really
good coffee tastes better than my usual cuppa….
You may already know that
coffee was introduced from “Arabia” to London in the early 17th
century, and, as we now say, went viral.
By mid-century, there were
thousands of coffee shops in London , more or less everyone was drinking coffee
and talking in those first-ever chat rooms.
The “Vertue of the COFFEE
Drink” was proclaimed by a marketing-savvy coffee shop owner in St. Michael’s Alley
named Pasqua Rosee, who advised his customers that this “simple innocent thing”
was of good taste and would cure or prevent all manner of ailments, including
“. . . Fumes . . . Head-ach . . . the Cough of the Lungs . . . Dropsy . . .
Scurvy . . .Hypocondriack . . . Winds, or the like.”
Seems that drinking coffee took
up a lot of time. While men hung out in the coffee shops, the women of London
published a Women’s Petition Against
Coffee in 1674, arguing that “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable,
Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE” was the cause of a decline in England’s
birthrate. The coffee shop boys denied it, of course.
King Charles II tried to
suppress the coffee shops a year later, because he was afraid that treasonous
talk might start cropping up in the establishments of Pasqua Rosee and others.
But coffee was too popular by then….the
rest is history.
Mr. Rosee said it best: coffee “
. . . quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome.”
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