Okay so maybe we piggybacked off Dr. Ian Malcolm’s famous quote from the original Jurassic Park: 🦕 🦖 ☄️ “God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man, man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.”
Regardless of which quote is more profound, the outcome is the same. Or, as Dr. Ellie Sattler so elegantly put it, “Woman inherits the earth.”
That’s a topic for another day, though. 😉
Let’s talk about the world women will undoubtedly inherit — a civilization created by coffee.
Imagine you live in a European city during the early 17th century. Life is good. Mass urbanization and industrialization haven’t started. The city isn’t cramped with too many people or tourists. Despite the occasional Black Plague outbreak, raging city fire, sewage flooding the streets, massive education gap and complete lack of suitable drinking water, you’re living on cloud 9!
But how? How could anyone experiencing these daily hardships actually be happy? Well, because everyone (including you) is pretty much drunk — or at the very least tipsy — 24/7.
As the saying goes… what does a bottomless brunch and life in the early 17th century have in common? You guessed it, nonstop drinking!🍹
At this time, the majority of drinking water in European cities was contaminated and would make you sick if you drank it. Tea was not very popular yet and coffee hadn’t been introduced from the Arab world. So that pretty much narrowed down hydration and nutrition to alcohol consumption.
Regardless if you were old or young, rich or poor, male or female you drank alcohol. Most people would start the day with a weak beer at breakfast, enjoy lunch with some wine, have dinner with gin, and relax with another glass of wine or beer before bed. Repeat this diet every day for a few centuries and what you have is a drunken European civilization.
Then came coffee and, boy, did it set a whole new pace of living.
As English Economist Tom Standage put it, “The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak ‘small beer’ and wine…coffee provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved… Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted centuries.”
Within a few decades, the Enlightenment blossomed. Coincidence? We think not!
With coffee flowing in city centers, civilization was quickly catapulted into a new era of thought and action. The quality of life around the world improved, the social playing field leveled, the poverty and education gap between the rich and poor shrunk, and great ideas — concepts that would bring about radical change — began to be shared.
No wonder Thomas Jefferson called coffee “the greatest drink of the civilized world.”
Perhaps the most impactful spinoff from coffee — and certainly the doorway into this so-called “civilized world” — was the introduction of the coffeehouse. As Mark Pendergrast, American freelance journalist and author, said, “The French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses.”
Coffeehouses became the place where ideas were shared, refined, and acted upon. Just being around the smell of coffee was enough to get synapses firing! Sure, ideas were shared in pubs over a few beers, but, as most of us have probably experienced, after a few beers ideas can get a little reckless and sometimes forgotten by morning.
That’s why it’s said the world’s liquid network of coffee was truly an idea network, and it was all linked by coffeehouses.
Don’t believe us? Then put it to the test…
Join us in the morning for an invigorating cup of coffee to see how productive and insightful you instantly become. Then hang out for Happy Hour specials at the Bar Next Door and let those ideas — and a bit of conversation with the stranger in the barstool next to you — run rampant. Who knows… maybe women’s takeover of the civilized world will be planned at BREW…just be sure to spare Dan. 🙂