Worldbuilding Beverages: Coffee and Tea
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This is part four of my "Worldbuilding Beverages" series. Click here to see the whole series!
This week, we're continuing our exploration of how you can use Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses to inform your worldbuilding. Standage's book, for those of you just joining, takes on a broad overview of the arc of human history from Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern, globalized world, through the lens of six important drinks that impacted human civilization over time. The book is great and very informative, and I strongly recommend that you pick up the book for all the juicy history tidbits that we don't have time for on the blog. The links to the book in this article are affiliate looks for Bookshop.org – every purchase will give me a small cut (at no extra cost to anyone) AND will help support independent bookstores. You can also pick up the book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever else you get your books.
This week's article will focus on the fourth and fifth sections of Standage's book, which focus on the growth of caffeinated beverages, replacing alcohol as a primary daily drink. This section also focuses on the profound changes to the world sparked by the shift from alcohol to caffeine, with coffee and tea being key parts of industrialization.
That said, unlike some of the earlier chapters of the book, these sections are much more focused on the specific historical events associated with coffee and tea. A lot of time is spent charting British imperialism in Asia, for example; it's very interesting, but it is so much more specific than some of the previous sections that it is less useful in our fantasy worldbuilding on the scale that we're operating at. That's why I'm combining Standage's sections on coffee and tea into one post. We'll delve into how to use caffeine/coffee/tea as a part of your worldbuilding. I'll also give some examples from my homebrew world as to how I'm using what I've learned from the book.
History: Sobering Drinks
Both coffee and tea began as assistants for religious rituals. The caffeine in both drinks allowed people to be more alert as they engaged in long rituals. Coffee, particularly, took root amongst a particular religious sect in the Islamic world. Tea drinking developed a bunch of associated rituals–the tea ceremony–in Japan and China.
In all cases, part of the appeal of these drinks was that it was not alcohol. In debates over establishing laws regulating coffee and tea, the principle that these beverages helped with attention and alertness, and allowed one to be more spiritually aware was clearly established. These drinks had health benefits too, by purifying unsafe water, and thus were a good social substitute for alcohol's ability to purify water (even if the people making these drinks did not know why they seemed safer than water). Coffee does this through boiling, killing off any harmful bacteria in the water, and tea has natural antibacterial properties. The adoption of tea drinking accidentally helped drastically reduce cholera in London, for example. While these traits were not fully understood at the time, from a larger worldbuilding lens, these drinks can fulfill a lot of the roles that alcohol does in purifying water.
Coffee, even in the Islamic world, had a reputation for being a drink of information. Coffee shops were places for gossip and news to be shared. The alertness that one gets with coffee made it ideal for "information workers" rather than physical ones--scribes, clerics, and merchants. These information workers were also the most likely to be politically active members of society, and therefore coffee and political engagement tended to go hand in hand. Standage devotes half a section to the way that, once coffeehouses made their way to England, coffee was used as a sort of premodern social media. (Again, pick up the book! I really enjoyed learning how the Stock Exchange and the insurance system both had their roots in London's coffee house culture).
Tea, on the other hand, was far more of a drink for the elite. As we discussed in the article on wine, drinks that we associate with having a refined palate tend to be used for social exclusion. Tea definitely had this, with some members of the Chinese court claiming that they could discern the water source from which the tea had been brewed, as well as the particular place of cultivation of the tea itself. Once tea was being transported to Europe, its high price--due to the long voyage to import--kept it reserved for the elite.
Tea would because far more widespread in Britain and the British Empire as imperialism made it more accessible. It was certainly never as gatekept inside Chinese or Japanese society where they did not have to rely on expensive importation. Still, Standage's focus is on tea as a drink deeply linked to the British Empire.
Worldbuilding
For the purposes of our worldbuilding, these sections of Standage's book were far less useful. These sections were both deeply rooted in the particular context and history of the real world, particularly in England and Britain. While from a historian's point of view, I was happy to see Standage dig into a lot of content beyond Europe, there were less sweeping, broadly applicable points for worldbuilding purposes.
To some extent, this makes sense--particularly for tea. Standage notes that a huge part of the reason that tea became a dominant beverage in the world is because of the British Empire. France, Germany, and Spain never got as obsessed with tea as the English. In a different universe, tea could have filled the role of coffee and coffee the role of tea, and nothing that Standage describes about the beverages themselves goes against that. So for worldbuilding, we should not just think exclusively about tea and coffee; instead, I want to think about caffeine generally.
Caffeine can totally be a regional oddity in your world without having a more significant allegorical meaning. However, like we did with liquor, for the purposes of this blog where we're connecting to Standage's book, I want to focus on coffee and tea and caffeine as a beverage symbolizing a fundamental change in the world.
Something Standage notes that I think is really valuable is that part of why coffee took root in the Age of Enlightenment was that it was exotic. The same is true of tea. This is not a drink that the ancients could have consumed, and so drinking it meant surpassing and moving beyond the old. It is a drink of social revolution (and very possibly, literal political revolution).
That said, it does not have to be coffee or tea specifically. Any caffeine beverage, from a far-off distant land, could fill the roles that Standage describes for coffee or tea.
My World: Kenku Coffee and Empire
So that whole ancient human pseudo-Rome empire that I've talked about in the past entries of this series? In more recent history, they've expanded and established themselves, desperately trying to regain their ancient glory, in a distant land that is home to the Kenku. These Kenku eat berries, because they're bird people, and one of those berries is a stimulant: the coffee bean.
The human empire, through cultural exchange, essentially adopts coffee as an exotic drink. In very recent history in my world, this empire went through a cycle of trying to rebuild itself by abolishing the dominant church and elevating "logic" and "reason" and "modernity". I think, particularly given the religious underpinnings of mead and honey in my world, the reformed, post-religion empire would be a champion of coffee. Caffeine making people more alert makes coffee, in Standage's description, a drink of reason and rationality. Coffee lets the mind be unclouded compared to alcohol. Reason and rationality are the hallmarks of this new imperial era, and so mass adoption of coffee--probably previously something rare, shunned by the church for fomenting discontent (all that gossip can be threatening to the established order)--is something new in my world's history.
That said, the new regime is also still pretty absolutist. While coffee houses will be a new space for gossip and conversation, I can't imagine that their reputation for free speech is going to be tolerated for very long. This is going to limit the development of the more intense elements of British coffee house culture, because (as actually happened in France), surveillance of what is spoken in the coffee houses stifles their flourishing.
Given the international situation and the reputation that this empire has--an aggressive, expansionary empire--coffee is not about to become a major international beverage. It will be seen as a "human drink", and not something to flourish internationally, except where the anti-church attitudes take hold.
Conclusion
How has the growth and internationalization of caffeine altered your world? How does the shift from alcohol to caffeine impact society's thinkers? How has the government reacted to intellectuals meeting and talking more? Please share YOUR coffee/tea-equivalent beverage worldbuilding in the comments of the post.
This concludes the series for January! You can see the whole series here.
The book, however, doesn't end here; there is one more section, on Coca-Cola and the growth of the US as a global superpower, that doesn't really fit my blog's goals. If you've enjoyed this series and want a lot more detail of the real-world historical impacts of these drinks, I 100% recommend picking up Tom Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses on Bookshop.org--using this link will let you support me and the blog as well as local independent bookstores. While I had some gripes with elements of it, in part because it was written in 2005 and so is outdated in some ways and is pretty Eurocentric, overall I found it very interesting and highly recommend taking a look.