The earliest records of coffee consumption trace back to the early 15th century in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. From there, the ritual of drinking coffee is believed to have spread to Mecca and Medina, and by the 16th century, it had reached the Middle East, South India, Turkey, and North Africa.
The popular brew eventually made its way into the Balkans, Italy, and the rest of Europe as well as Southeast Asia. The word “coffee” derives from the Arabic “quwwa”, meaning “power”.
Many religious leaders across the world—imams in Mecca and Cairo, and especially priests of the Catholic Church—were among the first to try to prevent its spread. Even today, coffee consumption is prohibited for all members of the Mormon Church.
Coffee sales crossed a critical threshold and began penetrating the general population during the Enlightenment, aided by the rise of a new invention: the coffeehouse, or café. The European powers—France, Germany, and England—led the way in establishing small coffeehouses across cities and even in the countryside.
The first café in London opened in Cornhill, St. Michael’s Alley, in 1652. These early coffeehouses quickly became gathering spots for the public, where heated religious, philosophical, and political discussions took place. By 1675, more than 3,000 cafés had sprung up across England.
Coffeehouses gained immense popularity, but they also enabled various social conspiracies with rebellious intent. In response, King Charles II of England issued several proclamations in 1675 to ban coffeehouses and “curb” subversive conspiracies. Similar cultural processes took place elsewhere—most notably in Vienna about a century later—drawing in influential artists and thinkers such as Gustav Klimt, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud.
Caffeine has been used medicinally and recreationally through caffeine-bearing plants for over 5,000 years. Yet the chemical compound itself was not discovered, isolated, or synthesized until a young physician named Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge encountered the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe, also an avid botanist, gifted the young chemist a luxurious bag of Arab mocha beans as a token of friendship, urging him to discover what in the beans made people feel so awake, cheerful, and focused.
In 1819, Runge succeeded in isolating the white crystalline substance and identified it as “trimethylxanthine”. Because the compound was most easily extracted using chloroform from coffee beans, it was later given a simpler name: “caffeine”.
In recent years, sleep scientists such as Matthew Walker have warned that caffeine disrupts a key neurotransmitter in the central nervous system known as “adenosine”. Adenosine binds to receptors to transmit signals that promote tiredness—signals that caffeine effectively blocks.
Adenosine can be likened to an internal alarm bell telling the body, “You’re not on top, you need to rest!”—whereas caffeine acts like a silencer, muting or masking the warning signals entirely.
In 2011, Dave Asprey developed a new way of brewing coffee, inspired by his travels in Tibet, where he sampled tea drinks mixed with yak butter. By experimenting with ingredients like “ghee” and MCT oil, he invented his lab-tested “Bulletproof Coffee” and began popularizing the term “biohacking”: “The art and science of changing the environment inside and outside of you to gain control over your own biology.”
Many of history’s great artists and philosophers were known for their love of coffee and its effects. François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was likely one of history’s greatest coffee addicts. Frederick the Great of France claimed that Voltaire consumed around 40–50 cups a day—always mixed with a special, expensive chocolate.
Despite doctors warning that such excess might kill him, Voltaire lived to the age of 83. A remarkably prolific writer, he produced works in nearly every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and scientific expositions. Author of more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets, he was among the first writers to achieve international fame and success.
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven developed an obsession with the coffee ritual, insisting on counting exactly 60 beans per cup. His predecessor Johann Sebastian Bach even composed a short opera about his love for coffee:
“If I am not allowed
to drink my little cup of coffee
three times a day,
I’ll become so shriveled and dried up
that I will turn into a roast goat.
Ah! How sweet coffee tastes—
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscat wine.
Coffee, I must have my coffee.”
— Johann Sebastian Bach
According to biographer Joakim Garff, the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would daily pour a mountain of white sugar into his cup—so much that it overflowed the rim—before adding very strong coffee to dissolve the sugar. He owned 50 different coffee cups and required his secretary to choose one for him each day and provide a suitable philosophical justification for the choice.
And so it is said that caffeine and coffee—a kind of “biological hacking”—became the true fuel of the Enlightenment.
In the Spirit of Discovery, The Guide
