The guide

The history of caffeine: from an emperor's tomb to Red Bull

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 202620 sources

Between 1998 and 2005, archaeologists dug out a burial pit beside the tomb of Emperor Jing of Han, who died in 141 BCE near today’s Xi’an. Inside were bundles of dried leaves. In 2016 a lab showed they were tea, the oldest tea anyone has found. People have been brewing caffeine for more than 2,000 years, and in Europe and America the drink it pushed aside was often beer.

Most people think of coffee and tea as modern habits, a morning cup and an afternoon pick-me-up. Their history is stranger. Coffee was banned in Mecca and very nearly in London, a king told his people to drink beer instead, tea may have saved lives in England by accident, and the US government once took Coca-Cola to the Supreme Court over its caffeine.

Why do plants make caffeine?

Caffeine is a plant chemical, and several unrelated plants make it. When scientists decoded the coffee plant’s genes in 2014, they found coffee had built its caffeine machinery on its own, separately from tea and cacao. Evolution came up with the same molecule more than once.

One reason is that caffeine is bitter and works as a defense. Another is stranger. In 2013 researchers found caffeine in the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers, at doses too low for bees to taste. Bees rewarded with caffeine nectar were three times as likely to remember the flower’s scent as bees given sugar alone. The plant drugs its pollinators so they come back.

People found it too, in more places than most of us know. Around 1050 to 1250, at Cahokia, a large settlement in what’s now Illinois, people drank a ritual “Black Drink” brewed from holly leaves. Chemists found caffeine in the beakers it was served in.

Tea in China

The Chinese story says the legendary ruler Shennong discovered tea in 2737 BCE. That’s a legend. The first clear written mention of people drinking tea dates to 59 BCE, and Emperor Jing’s tomb shows Han emperors were drinking it around 2,100 years ago. By about 200 CE tea was being carried up the Silk Road onto the Tibetan Plateau.

Tea really took off in the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), when it spread across China and to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. That’s when Lu Yu wrote the Classic of Tea, the first book about tea, on how to grow it, pick it, brew it and drink it.

Europe came late. The Dutch East India Company brought tea to Europe in 1610, and tea went on sale to the public in England in 1657. The English took to it, especially after Charles II married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662, who’s said to have brought a chest of tea with her.

Coffee from Ethiopia and Yemen

You may have heard of Kaldi, the goatherd who saw his goats dancing after eating coffee cherries. It’s a legend too. It appears in a Latin book from 1671, the first book written only about coffee, and even the French scholar Antoine Galland, who studied the Arabic manuscripts on coffee, called the goat stories unworthy of belief as history.

What we do know is that the coffee plant comes from the Ethiopian highlands, and that in the 1400s it was being farmed at scale in Yemen. Its first big fans were Sufis, Muslim mystics who drank it during their nighttime chanting and prayers. By 1500 it was popular across the Arabian peninsula, and Yemen stayed the world’s main source of coffee for about 250 years.

Not everyone approved. In 1511 Kair Bey, the governor of Mecca, walked out of the mosque one evening and saw a group of men drinking something in a corner, getting ready to pray through the night. He assumed it was wine. When he found out it was coffee, and that the whole city was drinking it, he called a council and banned it. The coffee-loving sultan in Cairo reversed the ban.

In 1554 two men, Schemsi of Damascus and Hekem of Aleppo, opened the first two coffeehouses in Constantinople. The coffeehouse, a place to sit, talk and drink something that kept you sharp, was about to spread west.

The coffeehouse comes to England

England’s first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650, at the Angel, run by a man some accounts call Jacob. London’s first came in 1652, when Pasqua Rosée, the Greek servant of a London merchant who traded in the eastern Mediterranean, set up near St Michael’s churchyard off Cornhill. Within a couple of years he was selling more than 600 cups a day. Not everyone liked the taste. One early drinker compared it to “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes”.

It caught on anyway. By 1663 London had 82 coffeehouses inside the old city walls. Entry cost a penny, and a dish of coffee or tea about two, with the newspapers included. People called them penny universities, for the conversation as much as the price. A London coffeehouse worked like a newsroom, a trading floor and a group chat at once. Lloyd’s of London began around 1688 in Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, where merchants met to insure ships, and the stock exchange and the auction houses grew up in coffeehouses too.

That made the king nervous. On December 29, 1675, Charles II issued a proclamation closing every coffeehouse in London as a place of sedition. The outcry was so loud, from every party and from the traders whose coffee and tea paid taxes, that on January 8, 1676, eleven days later, he took it back.

Beer for breakfast

Before coffee and tea, the everyday drink for many Europeans was beer, often a weak “small beer” drunk from breakfast on. The historian Matthew Green writes that until the mid-1600s, most people in England were slightly or very drunk all the time.

You’ll often hear that people drank beer because the water wasn’t safe. Medieval historians say that’s mostly a myth. Towns built wells and conduits, London piped spring water to a public conduit in the 1200s, and doctors wrote advice on which water to drink. People mostly drank ale because they liked it better. A schoolbook from 10th century England has a boy answer the question of what he drinks: “Ale if I have any, or water if I have no ale.”

Coffee and tea pushed beer off the breakfast table. In New Amsterdam, now New York, coffee began replacing beer at breakfast around 1668. In Germany, through the second half of the 1700s, coffee took the place of flour soup and warm beer. Frederick the Great of Prussia hated the money leaving the country for imported beans, and on September 13, 1777, he issued a manifesto that said “My people must drink beer”. Even Prussian rule couldn’t enforce it, and by 1781 he’d settled for a royal monopoly on roasting.

Even the armies switched. Soldiers in the American Revolution got rum rations, and soldiers in the Civil War got coffee.

Tea, boiled water and fewer deaths

Water does come into the story later, and in a surprising way. In the 1700s England’s towns were growing crowded and their water was often dirty, yet deaths began to fall. The economist Francisca Antman at the University of Colorado wondered if tea had something to do with it, since you can’t make tea without boiling the water.

She looked at records from more than 400 English parishes from before and after tea became cheap enough for nearly everyone, which happened in the late 1780s. Places that started with worse water saw bigger drops in deaths once tea spread, and deaths fell more in years when more tea came in. Boiling kills the germs behind illnesses like dysentery, which people then called the “bloody flux”. Nobody drinking tea knew they were purifying their water.

Coffee becomes American

In 1773 Boston colonists threw British tea into the harbor, and Americans turned to coffee. Four years later, in a wartime shortage, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John about a merchant in Boston who’d hidden a hogshead of coffee to push the price up. About a hundred women marched to his warehouse with a cart, demanded the keys, hauled out the coffee and drove off, while a crowd of men stood watching in silence.

Caffeine gets a name

The molecule itself was found because of a cat. In 1819 a young German chemist named Friedlieb Runge showed the writer Goethe a trick: a drop of nightshade extract that made his cat’s pupil dilate. Goethe was so impressed that as Runge left, he handed him some rare coffee beans and suggested he find out what in them gave coffee its kick. Within months Runge had isolated caffeine. Later another chemist found “theine” in tea, and it turned out to be the same molecule.

Colas, courts and decaf

On May 8, 1886, the first Coca-Cola was served at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta. Its inventor, Dr. John Pemberton, made it as a tonic. After the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the government seized forty barrels and twenty kegs of Coca-Cola, arguing the caffeine was an added, harmful ingredient. The case was called United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca Cola. In 1916 the Supreme Court ruled that caffeine did count as an added ingredient and sent the case back for a jury to decide if it was harmful.

In 1906 Ludwig Roselius patented the first way to take caffeine out of green coffee beans, and decaf was born.

Energy drinks and sport

In 1982 Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian toothpaste salesman on a trip to Asia, tried a Thai tonic called Krating Daeng that locals drank for energy. It helped his jet lag. He went into business with Chaleo Yoovidhya, whose family sold it, and launched it in Austria as Red Bull on April 1, 1987.

Sport had its own fight with caffeine. It was banned in competition from 1984, until the World Anti-Doping Agency took it off the list on January 1, 2004. Athletes are free to use it now, and many do, since it works. Caffeine for training and focus has the doses.

Today

More than 80% of American adults have caffeine, and the average adult has about 165 to 230 mg a day, mostly from coffee. Most of that history was spent arguing about whether it was bad for us. The modern studies mostly settle it in coffee and tea’s favor, with the risks in what comes with them and in a big or late dose. Is caffeine healthy? has the whole answer, and is coffee healthy? has the studies. Coffee still won’t sober anyone up, though, and alcohol.guide explains why.