Coffee, Conversation, and Commerce

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I don’t know when I fell in love for the first time, but I am pretty sure it was in a Starbucks.

The Seattle-based chain had a location a few blocks from my Middle School and quickly became my after-school safe haven.

Whether it was the ice-cold frappucinos, the pleasant aromas of cocoa and cinnamon, or the 200mg of caffeine straight to the dome that drew me is hard to say.

Nevertheless, the downtown coffee shop was my favorite place on the planet at the ripe age of 13.

As I grew older, I realized that it wasn’t just Starbucks that I loved, it was everything it represented.

Around the globe today, the coffeehouse is the cornerstone of how we work, spend time, and exchange ideas with others.

It has been the constant in a changing world over the last four centuries, spreading religions, spurring innovations, and serving as the preferred meeting place of history’s greatest minds.

So what makes the coffeehouse so pervasive and enduring in modern society?

A New Way To Get Buzzed

What if I told you that the reason we saw the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment simultaneously unfold was not due to Thomas Edison or John Locke, but rather a change in beverage preferences?

In 16th-century Europe, every day was the weekend.

Due to water’s often unclean nature in the highly unhygienic urban hubs of Amsterdam, Paris, London, etc., beer was the preferred drink for every meal.

Not only was it the go-to beverage around the clock, but it was also a key ingredient of Frederick the Great’s favorite meal, “beer soup”.

If you’re wondering what it’s made of, here is acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell’s breakdown;

Yikes.

Seeing our organic, all-natural, grass-fed, non-GMO, plant-based, humanely sourced, lab-grown (did I miss anything?) diets today, we’ve definitely come a looooong way.

Unsurprisingly, the drink wasn’t great for productivity.

Beer’s depressant nature led farmers and urban dwellers feeling sluggish and unfocused from the minute they woke up.

Fortunately, the Turks invaded Hungary in 1526, bringing with them the bean water that would change Western culture forever.

While coffee’s initial integration to Europe was slowed by several rulers who saw the drink as “a bitter invention of Satan”, coffee eventually became the antidote to morning grogginess and the afternoon slump.

The transition from beer to coffee as the preferred European beverage reshaped worker productivity and longevity. When your entire populace is no longer intoxicated and instead firing on all cylinders, there is simply much more that can be done in a day.

As Gladwell later suggests in his Java Man essay, “One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.”

With the invention of the first coffeehouse in 1652, the time’s leading philosophers and idealists found the perfect place to spread the seeds of innovation and fuel revolution.

Caffeinated Curiosities

By 1739, there were over 500 coffeehouses in London, serving as the key meeting ground for thinkers of all disciplines.

The London Stock Exchange was born out of Jonathan’s Coffee House while popular auction houses today such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s originated as salesrooms attached to small coffee shops.

Revolutionaries such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau frequently bounced radical new ideas off one another in Paris while Isaac Newton formulated what would become his famous laws of gravity in London.

The coffee house was the hangout of the political elite, the common man, and the philosopher, where all could have daring conversations that transcended class or wealth.

Viennese Delight

When I spent a semester in Vienna, Austria during my senior year of college, I made it a priority to visit the city’s UNESCO-recognized coffeehouses.

Stepping foot in Café Central, I was enchanted by the velvety atmosphere frequented by Leon Trotsky, Sigmund Freud, and Joseph Stalin that appeared untouched since its opening almost 150 years ago.

All around me were students, friends, and families enjoying Viennese Coffee and Sachertorte amidst laughter and discussion. I pictured what it must have been like in 1876 when the Café opened, concluding that it was likely no different than how I saw it that day.

The coffeehouse has always operated as a refuge for people of all classes and creeds to pass the time.

In America, it has taken on an even greater role, threatening one of the world’s most powerful institutions: The Church.

Third Places

One of the most fascinating (and for many alarming) trends we have seen evolve around the globe, is the decline of religion.

As a country becomes wealthier and people become more educated, we tend to see fewer people affiliated with religious groups.

This has been the case with Shintoism in Japan and Christianity in England.

Even in Italy, where nearly 80% of the people claim to be Catholic, less than 20% of them attend weekly services.

Why does this matter?

Traditionally, churches and religious shrines have been the primary “third place” of people’s lives. Third places are special locations where individuals find community and spend time outside of their homes or worksites.

In his 1989 book, sociologist Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are, “the foundation for a functioning democracy” and are essential to the exchange of ideas.

With the United States becoming more secular each day, we have seen a gradual decline in people’s primary third place being the church in favor of other outlets, aka coffee shops.

As was true in 1652, cafes are those hubs where secular and radical thoughts are freely shared, with no official membership to subscribe to or domineering way of thinking limiting dialogue.

Interestingly, churches themselves have changed to meet the demands of caffeine addicts (like myself).

Over the last two decades, a startling amount of churches both old and new have integrated small coffee shops/bars in their worship places. Others have even gone so far as to open Christian coffee shops as an extension of the church itself.

Whereas coffeehouses may have originally served as the antithesis to churches and deep-seated ideologies, today, they act as a bridge between the religious and the secular world.

While a full Sunday morning service or Saturday night mass may reverberate to being a relic of the past, I imagine that coffeehouses will become an increasingly important forum for both religious thinkers and their opposers.

What’s Next?

Even though churches still outnumber coffee shops 10 to 1 in the U.S., thousands close annually, while the number of cafes continues to rise.

As Americans adopt new third places to spend their time, I predict that the coffeehouse will become an even more essential part of everyday life.

The acceleration of remote work has only generated more demand for job-friendly environments that provide a peaceful environment and free wifi as opposed to other commonly frequented third places like bars or recreation centers.

However, I believe the biggest challenge posed to coffeehouses today is not Zoom-friendly bars or WeWork, but online platforms like Reddit.

Coffeehouses were once the only public place where people could safely share what they thought with others and create radical change.

Parisian cafes were the gardens that sowed the seeds of the French Revolution and led to the storming of the Bastille.

The coffee-serving Green Dragon Tavern in Boston was the preferred meeting spot of the Sons of Liberty, eventually to be named the “Headquarters of the Revolution”.

Today, subreddits and tweets have monopolized these discussions and allowed people globally to organize faster than ever before. I fear coffee shops may lose some of their luster in this digitally driven ecosystem.

While coffee shops may not lead to the revolutions we saw in the past, they surely aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Today, the coffee market is worth 80 billion dollars in the U.S. alone, with more than 63% of Americans consuming coffee at an average of 3 cups every day.

So, if you’re feeling lonely, have a new idea, or simply need a quick buzz, hit up your local coffee shop.

And remember, drink responsibly!

-John Henry

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