There’s bad news for coffee fans: the price of your favourite beverage – which has already rocketed in recent years – is about to soar. A prolonged heatwave in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country after Brazil, is damaging the coffee crop and sending the cost of robusta beans – used in instant coffee – soaring. In Brazil, higher end arabica beans are being hit by greater than average rainfall. Such extreme weather events are coupled with attacks on merchant shipping bringing Asian coffee to Europe through the Gulf by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, disrupting coffee supply chains and further boosting prices.
All this will put extra pressure on Europe’s historic coffee houses – already suffering setbacks from the Covid lockdowns, as well as steeply rising rents on their premises. They also face competition from takeaway coffee chains such as Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero.
A prolonged heatwave in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country after Brazil, is damaging the coffee crop
One of the many differences historically between Britain and our continental cousins across the Channel is our lack of a cafe culture. Obviously our inclement weather and our devotion to tea are two reasons why we prefer to take our leisure elsewhere; including in the very different atmosphere of the pub. But it was not always so. As Monica Porter’s ‘A History of Europe in 12 Cafes’ details, the English were the greatest early champions of coffee consumption and one of Europe’s first coffee houses was founded not in Venice or Vienna but in St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill in the heart of the city of London.
The English were pioneers of coffee consumption and one of Europe’s first coffee houses was founded not in Venice or Vienna but in St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill in the heart of the city of London. The progenitor of the London coffee house was Pasqua Rosee, the Greek servant of an English merchant named Daniel Edwards. Pasqua had picked up the arts of brewing coffee from Ottoman overlords in his native town of Smyrna and brought the skills to London.
He opened his coffee house in the 1650s when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan regime held sway, and coffee was promoted as a healthy alternative to swilling beer in the taverns. Rosee claimed that the new drink could remedy a host of ailments from dropsy and scurvy to consumption and fatigue, and could even ward off miscarriages in pregnant women.
Before long, coffee shops were springing up across London, but, then as now, some women did not appreciate the time their menfolk spent in the new establishments. In 1674 a pamphlet titled ‘The Women’s Petition against Coffee’ appeared, accusing the brew of causing male impotence and contributing to a decline in the birth rate.
London coffee houses became indelibly associated with conducting business. Frantic trading in stocks and shares went on in them, and specific coffee houses were the HQs of political factions. Magazines such as The Spectator in its first incarnation, founded in 1711, were created to gather news from the busy coffee houses.
By the 1820s the heyday of England’s coffee houses had passed, displaced by tea which came cheap and cheerful from British-ruled India. In the rest of Europe, however, coffee continued its supremacy as the refreshment of choice for everyone from artists and cafe intellectuals to royalty and the burgeoning middle class.
One of Europe’s most famous cafes is Florian’s, which occupies one side of St Mark’s Square in Venice and opened its doors in 1720. Florian’s tables soon spilled out on to the Piazza that Napoleon called ‘Europe’s grandest ballroom’ and today’s tourists can sit on the square downing Europe’s priciest espresso just as the likes of Casanova and Goldoni did in the 18th century.
The capital of the coffee house, though, is undoubtedly Vienna, which has made such a cult of the drink that its surviving coffee houses were declared part of Austria’s ‘intangible cultural heritage’ by Unesco in 2011. Like Florian’s during the covid pandemic, when Venice became a ghost town, several Viennese coffee houses came close to bankruptcy and one famous house, the Cafe Griensteidl, closed its doors for good.
Around 1900, Vienna’s coffee houses were at their acme, and you could have met figures as diverse as Hitler and Trotsky, Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler, Klimt and Schiele at any of the scores of cafes that thronged the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire as it stood on the brink of dissolution.
The city was then the centre of all that was advanced and progressive in European culture and the prophets of modernism used their cafes as a clearing house of ideas and theories just when the continent was about to collapse in a welter of blood.
The next moment when the cafe became the standard bearer for the avant garde in the arts was Paris in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Cafes like the Flore and the Deux Magots were almost the permanent residence of writers like Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir as they swapped ideas like Marxism and Existentialism with the same rapidity as they exchanged sexual partners.
In contrast to the Viennese coffee houses of half a century previously, the cafes of Paris were not a male only preserve. Women like de Beauvoir and Juliette Greco were as welcome within their walls as their male partners, and black musicians and writers like Miles Davis and James Baldwin found a tolerance there that they weren’t used to back home in the USA.
If the coffee house with its ethos of leisure and pleasure is truly nearing its end, the victim of an age with no time to talk or think, we will all miss it when it’s gone. Coffee houses have been vital in the rise of the continent’s culture. What a loss to Western civilisation their disappearance would mean.
Europe’s coffee houses are in trouble
11
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18.04.2024
There’s bad news for coffee fans: the price of your favourite beverage – which has already rocketed in recent years – is about to soar. A prolonged heatwave in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country after Brazil, is damaging the coffee crop and sending the cost of robusta beans – used in instant coffee – soaring. In Brazil, higher end arabica beans are being hit by greater than average rainfall. Such extreme weather events are coupled with attacks on merchant shipping bringing Asian coffee to Europe through the Gulf by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, disrupting coffee supply chains and further boosting prices.
All this will put extra pressure on Europe’s historic coffee houses – already suffering setbacks from the Covid lockdowns, as well as steeply rising rents on their premises. They also face competition from takeaway coffee chains such as Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero.
A prolonged heatwave in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country after Brazil, is damaging the coffee crop
One of the many differences historically between Britain and our continental cousins across the Channel is our lack of a cafe culture. Obviously our inclement weather and our devotion to tea are two reasons why we prefer to take our leisure elsewhere; including in the very different atmosphere of the pub. But it was not always so. As Monica Porter’s ‘A History of Europe in 12 Cafes’ details, the English........
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