We have found that—and this has been pretty much statistically verified by people working at Silver Springs, Maryland, which is the official United States center for research with psychedelics—that there is no necessary connection between taking, say, LSD and having a mystical experience. It may happen and it may not happen. Because it depends on factors beyond the drug itself. It depends on to whom it is given, and under what circumstances it is given, and by whom it is given. In other words, the function of the chemical is purely instrumental.
-Alan Watts1
Far from being ascetic monks confined to monasteries and separated from the world, the Sufi mystics of 16th century Yemen were, as they still are today, regular townsfolk engaged in mundane life; husbands, fathers, merchants, craftsmen, who generally held day jobs. According to Hattox, this was one of the most important factors in the creation of the coffee house and the spread of coffee.2 In fact, Shaikh Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, the founder of the Shadhili Sufi order, was reluctant to take on a student who did not already have a profession.3 Thus, their dhikrs took place after work in the evenings, aided by coffee’s effects.
It appears that it was an easy logical leap for them to see the benefits these same effects might have in their family and work lives, and coffee soon made the short hop from the mosque to their homes and then to the streets and, ultimately, to purpose-built shops made, not for worship or ceremony, but for socializing, conversation, music, debate and other entertainments. As reported above by al-Ghaffar, “… the whole people – both the learned and the common- followed [al-Dahbbani’s example] in drinking it, seeking help in study and other vocations and crafts, so that it continued to spread.”
And spread, it did. Starting from the southern Arab city of Aden in the mid-to late 1400s, by the first decade of the 1500’s, coffee was being drunk in mosques as far north as Cairo and sold in the streets outside and nearby.
The moment that Sufis brought coffee out of the mosques and started selling it on the streets was a major turning point in the history of a plant that had, for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years before then, been used primarily for sacred, ceremonial and medicinal purposes.
Once coffee had been taken out of the context of the Sufi dhikr and introduced into general consumption, it was embraced by an entirely different group of advocates, and with them the associations and images connected with the drink changed. While it remained one of the props of the nocturnal devotional services of the Sufis, others, perhaps less spiritually inclined, found it a pleasant stimulus to talk and sociability. From this, the coffeehouse was born…”4
The solid walls of the mosque and more ephemeral but just as immovable walls of social and religious convention would determine the fate of coffee – and by extension the path of humanity – for the next 500 years. Inside the mosque: coffee as communion. Outside the mosque: coffee as commodity.
By an interesting quirk of history, right about the same time that coffeehouses were beginning to proliferate in the Arab world, the Ottomans invaded and overtook Yemen in 1517. An event that would help propel coffee out into the greater world.
With their control of Red Sea trade routes, vast network of trade representatives throughout the Muslim world, and their strong support of free-market economy, the Ottoman invasion provided a golden opportunity for Yemeni merchants, not to mention the Sultanate, and they quickly took advantage of it.
By exercising a strict prohibition on the export of live coffee plants and viable coffee cherries through the Muslim ports of Mokka in Yemen and Zelia across the Red Sea in what is now Somaliland, the Qasimi merchants of Yemen were able to establish a monopoly on world coffee exports through the port of Mokka that would last for over 200 years.5
Thus, in that time, coffee consumption spread throughout the Ottoman empire and into Europe. But, with a few very significant exceptions, coffee plants and viable seeds did not – a significant detail that has reverberated throughout the history of coffee and into the present. More on that later.
And so, during this critical period of coffee’s initial expansion throughout the Ottoman Empire and thence into Europe in the 15th-17th centuries, we find three key elements in play:
- Initially, outside of relatively obscure Oromo and Kafecho practices, coffee drinking was almost exclusively a Muslim activity.6
- Coffee growing, processing and export was strictly limited. Until the 18th century, all coffee consumed worldwide came from Ottoman-controlled ports.
- Except for the culturally isolated Oromo, topographically isolated Kafecho, and the dogmatically isolated mystic Sufis, the sole exposure nearly everyone else in the world had to coffee was via Muslim-style coffee houses, which were universally emulated as the practice of drinking coffee spread outside of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
Combined, these three factors had a massive impact on the methods and means by which coffee spread to the rest of the world, the venues and context in which it was consumed, the attitudes and expectations with which it was received, and the frame of mind of those who drank it; effects which have prevailed and still dominate modern coffee culture. In other words, the mechanisms by which coffee spread and the culture that spread with it dramatically shaped two elements first identified by Al Hubbard, popularized by Timothy Leary, and later supported by thousands of medical researchers and psychedelic explorers as the most critical mediators of psychedelic and entheogenic experiences: set and setting.
The importance of set – our frame of mind, assumptions, conceptions, attitudes; and setting – the physical location, environment, visual, auditory, and sensory space within which we experience the effects of psychoactive substances, has been well documented. Unlike other drugs, for instance common painkillers like ibuprofen and aspirin, whose effects are quantifiable and predictable based entirely on objective factors like dosage and body weight, the effects of so-called psychedelic or entheogenic drugs instead depend heavily on the subjective mindframe of the user and their experiences of everything from the person administering the drug to the physical space in which they consume it. The most potent effects of these drugs do not lend themselves well to passivity, but rather require active, conscious participation not only from the user, but from any others who may be present with the user while they are under the effect of the drug.7
The effects of caffeine, while far more subtle and less overwhelming than those of comparative heavyweights such as LSD and psilocybin, are nonetheless equally shaped by such subjective considerations8., the profundity of which effects are magnified exponentially through the lenses of general acceptance and mass consumption
Put simply, with this kind of substance, what you expect is what you get. Your experience is shaped by your conscious and subconscious expectations, which themselves are determined partly by environmental factors such as the stories you’ve heard, the venue in which you are introduced to and consume the substance, the social cues you receive from others who are using or who have used it, and also by the cultural context that informs your overarching relationships to all of these influences.
“Understanding the nature of the relationship between drug and context is the essential question, and assessing the effects of diverse cultural contexts is one way of getting at this.”9
Let’s return for a moment to the Ottoman empire. The Sufis of pre-Ottoman Yemen had a well-established understanding of the different roles coffee played in religious versus secular contexts, but the introduction to coffee experienced by non-Sufi foreign visitors and invaders, prohibited as they were from any participation in or knowledge of the sacred life and ceremonies of the Arab Sufis, was solely through Arab and, later, Turkish coffeehouses.
Moreover, once coffee was taken out of the mosque, its path was almost entirely driven by the dictates of commerce and a deep cultural need for a “third place”.
[NEED A SECTION HERE TALKING ABOUT THE DEEP NEED FOR A THIRD PLACE IN 16th C. YEMMEN – all they had was the mosque, and the home – needed a social venue that coffeehouses would soon provide. Antony Wild and Hattox both cover this pretty well]
The initial foray of coffee off the Arabian peninsula and into the rest of the Muslim world was a famously successful effort by two Syrian merchants, Hakim and Shams, who established the first Turkish coffeehouse in Istanbul around 1555.10 Their conception of the coffeehouse was heavily influenced by their Arabian forebears, and was thus a purely secular and worldly affair. Their enterprise was so successful and popular, that just eleven years later in 1566 there were over 600 imitators in that city alone.
In all of these establishments, coffee was presented and consumed as a social beverage, a stimulant to entertainment, conversation and expansive thought. Outside of Sufi ceremonies, which of course were only attended by and known to Sufis and known only anecdotally by other Muslims, “prayerful intent and devotion” were entirely absent. But it was within coffeehouses where, through incredibly successful commerce, but also through the crucible of multiple political and religious controversies and an unprecedented blossoming of new social opportunities afforded within coffee houses, that our modern conceptions of coffee as a socially acceptable drug were forged. And it was also from here that this secular relationship to coffee burst forth and took hold of the rest of the world’s coffee users. By the time coffee made the journey to Europe in the 17th century it had already completed the journey from the mosque to the market, from venerated devotional aid to treasured commodity. “Qahwat- al-sufiyya” was left behind in Constantinople, or perhaps in Syria or Mecca, over 450 years before I came looking for it at the SCA Expo in Portland.
With the setting for coffee firmly established within coffeehouses, and the mindset of coffee drinkers illuminated by the light of expanded social discourse and enlightened debate, and further driven by improved performance in “vocations and crafts”, it is no surprise that people’s experience of this psychoactive beverage was shaped by and closely followed the set and setting of these prescriptions.
This appears to answer at least part of my question about how we got here. But having followed the transformation of set and setting to their modern expression, I was still left puzzling over the Coffee Value Assessment, and wondered why so much of our modern obsession with coffee has come to focus on the olfactory experience?
When asked why they enjoy drinking coffee, the two reasons people most commonly report are flavor and increased energy[citation needed]. However both of these reasons are demonstrably specious, and mask deeper truths.
Coffee tastes bitter, which is a flavor that most species, including humans, are genetically programmed to dislike, as this provides a first defense against poisoning. However, we “condition” ourselves to like the bitter flavor of coffee via the action of biochemically driven psychological reinforcement. Caffeine suppresses the tiring effects of adenosine and stimulates production of dopamine, both of which make us feel good, and that in turn makes us want more of the drug. Through this trick of the mind, we come to associate the bitter flavors of coffee with the pleasurable experience of reward provided by dopamine, and thus acquire a preference for those flavors – although many modern coffee drinkers go to a lot of trouble to mask coffee’s flavors by mixing it with milk or milk-like additives, and flavored syrups, sugar or honey. The same action produces similar results for tea, cola, matcha and other caffeinated foods. The truth is that we don’t drink coffee because it tastes good, we drink coffee because it feels good.
But that blissful feeling does not come from any energy that coffee bestows upon us. Caffeine, the primary stimulating ingredient of coffee, has zero calories and does not provide one jot of energy. What caffeine does do, though, is mask the effects of adenosine – a chemical made by our bodies that regulates our experience of tiredness and our felt need for sleep. Our bodies make and release adenosine throughout the day as a byproduct of cellular activity. This chemical binds to receptors in our brains which trigger feelings of tiredness. The more receptors that are triggered, the more tired we feel, until, finally, we succumb to our bodies’ needs and get some restorative sleep. But it so happens that the molecular structure of caffeine is also just the right shape to fit into our adenosine receptors, to which caffeine binds, blocking them from the tiredness-inducing action of adenosine.
So, if indeed we consume coffee for its psychoactive and adenosine suppression effects, and not for its flavor, where did the industry obsession with flavor come from? I believe a review of the work of Kenneth Davids and other members of his cohort may provide some insight.
When Mr. Davids began writing in the 70s, coffee in the US and many other places was in an abysmal state. Driven by inevitable commercial exigencies, as well as the ravages of multiple international conflicts and environmental forces, the industry was dominated by cheaply grown, low quality coffee and freeze-dried pseudo coffee. A few pioneers like Alfred Peet in Berkeley had experience with roasting and brewing higher-grade beans, and began to work towards an expanded vision of coffee that they hoped would elevate it beyond what Kenneth describes as the “listless brown powder” that was ubiquitous in world markets. What these visionaries realized was that, in order to transcend coffee’s reputation, they needed to create a new culture of connoisseurship, focused on an awareness of the distinctive qualities possessed by different varieties and produced within different growing regions and through the employment of distinct processing techniques. Fortunately for them, they did not have to create this culture from scratch, as a similar model was already well developed and widely adopted. Working diligently and in concert over the ensuing two decades, they drew their inspiration from thousands of years of tradition and culture long embraced by the wine industry.
The evidence of the success of their efforts is plain. The past few decades have witnessed a profound shift in our habits and attitudes towards coffee, not to mention a veritable explosion of “second wave” and “third wave” coffeehouses, each vying for adoption of their own particular value proposition, each hoping to win consumer loyalty, each one an attempt to find that certain something that will assure them a treasured place in their respective communities, and some with even larger aspirations towards becoming a worldwide brand.
None of this enviable growth could have been possible without a tireless effort on the part of purveyors like Peet and writers like Davids to hone our awareness, raise our consciousness, indeed, change our mindset to associate with coffee the distinctive qualities they sought to promote.
Concomitantly, the success of these efforts was also no doubt largely made possible by the effects of coffee itself- by our chemically induced propensity to associate reward with the source of the reward. This is not to say that the fine gradations of flavor and sensory effects outlined in the Coffee Value Assessment are invalid or simply contrived. Quite the contrary, decades of research and careful cultivation of flavor profiling methodology has revealed heretofore unimagined realms of the coffee experience, and has been instrumental in fostering connoisseurship and a deep appreciation of the crafts of coffee growing, cultivation, processing, roasting and preparation, all of which has broadened appreciation of coffee and elevated it’s status. But, as Pollan points out, would we ever have spent so much time and energy teasing out these fine layers of olfactory experience were it not for the corollary feelings of bliss brought on by the action of caffeine? Can you imagine such exhaustive research into the flavor of say, milk or orange juice?
By placing our experience of coffee within a highly structured system of distinction, i.e. by changing our set, the revolutionaries of the coffee industry also encrypted the feeling of reward and bliss that caffeine, via dopamine, bestows upon us within that same system of distinction. In other words, we came to believe that if the purveyors of coffee (i.e. the guardians of the gateways to bliss) established a particular aspect of coffee as more desirable, then that meant that coffee that possessed that quality was somehow better or more rewarding, and that we were better, smarter or more savvy for choosing it. We became identified with our drug and with the specific delivery mechanisms we relied on for its dispensation. We were hooked, and for better or worse, this relationship now lies at the heart of our brand loyalty to this particular entheogen.
I believe this begins to unpack and answer the rest of the questions that were born from my experience at Expo. Despite evidence showing that coffee consumption is driven not by flavor but by the psychoactive experiences we derive from drinking it, the industry has become obsessed with flavor profiling, varietal distinction and traceability, not because of their actual value, but because of consumer perception of value carefully curated by the industry. None of the exhibitors at Expo were focused on how coffee feels because for them that metric makes no difference. From the point of view of the specialty coffee industry, as near as I could glean, since pretty much any cup of any caffeinated beverage can induce feelings of euphoria and a perceived increase in energy, then focusing on coffee’s psychoactive effects is a waste of time. Instead they put value only on metrics they believe can be reasonably quantified and manipulated to gain consumer confidence in their product, i.e. fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, sweetness and mouthfeel. By promulgating the notion that these metrics can be discerned (but only by highly trained experts), and also that different varieties and growing regions can be associated with distinct qualities within this “high resolution picture”, their control of value perception was complete.
Any attempt to ascribe value to other aspects of our experience of coffee have therefore become superfluous and unnecessary. As far as the industry is concerned, Waaqa’s tears have thus become an irrelevant historical footnote, an interesting cultural curiosity, hardly worth noting except as a politically correct nod towards the birthplace of the plant upon which their livelihood depends.
This is not to say that these efforts have somehow debased or devalued coffee. Far from it. Development of a burgeoning culture of coffee connoisseurship has, over the past three decades, driven significant quality improvements at all stages of production, processing and brewing in the Specialty Coffee sector, all of which have contributed to a much higher quality and better tasting cup for those who can afford it.
This has translated to real economic gains. According to a 2023 report published by the International Coffee Association, the world consumed 175.6 million 60Kg bags of coffee from October 2021-September, 2022 (thats 10,536,000,000,000 grams or 23,227,903,945.4 lbs)11. Furthermore, the 2020 Coffee Growth Dynamics Report from Euromonitor International reports that the total value of global retail sales of coffee was US$173.6 billion in 2018, US$180 billion in 2019, and was estimated to grow by another US$12.5 billion by 2023. They further predicted that 52% of this growth would be led by premiumization, in other words, through efforts led by the specialty coffee sector.12
Our shifting attitudes towards coffee over the centuries, and particularly over the past 30 years or so have thus had tremendously positive impacts on the beverage and have provided a boon for much of the worldwide coffee industry, as well as for the coffee plant itself. By appealing to our nature as social beings and our desires for reward and energy, the coffee plant has developed an extremely successful strategy that has allowed it to spread from an isolated plateau in central Africa to virtually every equatorial country worldwide, as well as to several sub-tropical areas where it never would have been able to thrive without the assistance of the humans whose lives and livelihoods have become so deeply entwined with coffee’s survival.
In his 2021 book, “This is Your Mind on Plants”, Michael Pollan most eloquently outlines this strategy, and the co-dependent relationship it has fostered with our primary sources of caffeine – coffee and tea:
“This astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself. For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help.”13
As Pollan alludes, the tremendous success of coffee has not come without cost and risk. These costs have come in the form of low genetic diversity amongst commercially grown coffee varieties, ecological decay caused by unsustainable farming practices, and economic disparities and social inequities embedded within the commodities sector of the coffee industry, all of which have been magnified through the lens of changes in our climate that have been largely driven by consumer capitalism in the industrialized world that caffeine helped to create. It has also contributed to a worldwide sleep deprivation crisis, fueled on the one hand by industrialized nations’ unquenchable thirst for increased output and greater efficiency, and on the other by the solution many have found to address this relentless drive: caffeine dependence.
Let’s return once again to 16th century Yemen. You’ll recall that coffee trade flourished under Ottoman control, and Yemeni merchants were enjoying a worldwide monopoly they created by ensuring that no viable coffee cherries or plants could escape from regions under their management. There were three notable cases where this prohibition failed, causing not only the eventual collapse of the Ottoman monopoly, but also setting the stage for an existential environmental crisis currently faced by the coffee industry.
The first of these breaches came from yet another Sufi, Baba Budan, a monk from Karnataka, India now revered as a saint, who learned the Yemeni Sufi’s practice of using coffee during a pilgrimage to Mecca in the 17th century and risked his life to bring back seven live coffee cherries which, depending on which story you read, he hid either in his beard or strapped to his stomach, and subsequently planted them on the slopes of the Chandradrona hills that now bear his name: Baba Budangiri. Descendents of these plants were later picked up by the Dutch who brought them south into Indonesia and Java where they became foundations for the Dutch East India Company’s trade in the region.
The second came in 1720 in the form of a French navy captain, Gabriel de Clieu, who through a series of machinations made all the more dramatic through his own telling of the tale, managed to bring a single coffee plant to the island of Martinique, the descendents of which were spread throughout the Caribbean to Brazil, Columbia, French Guiana, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Guatemala and Cuba, and others, and by 1780 accounted for no less than half of the world’s coffee production.
The third came from the island of Bourbon, now Reunion Island off the coast of Africa, where a variety from Yemen was introduced in the early 1700’s, and flourished until the 19th century, when it was brought back into Africa and into Brazil.
Combined, these three stems formed the genetic legacy for nearly all of the world’s coffee production well into the 20th century. This is problematic for three reasons: pests, pathogens and terroir.
Let’s talk about terroir first. In the book of the same title, author Jem Challender explains, “The environmental factors of climate and soil, combined with farming techniques, create the specific environment, or terroir, of a farm”14. Indigenous coffea arabica in South Sudan and Ethiopia evolved to thrive in the specific terroir of its birthplace. Thus, it is a fundamentally shade loving species that thrives at altitudes of 1000-2000 meters, sustained daytime temperatures of 17-20ºC, a minimum temperature of 4ºC to avoid frost, low wind, specific slope and aspect as regards to the angle of the sun, and ample rainfall (but not too much) during specific times of its growing cycle, but not at others.
One obvious problem faced by entrepreneurial farmers who wish to grow coffee in other parts of the world is that these specific conditions only rarely come together to form the ideal growing environment for the plant. Another is that, in order to maximize production, and thus profit, most farmers require a much greater yield than c. arabica would ever produce naturally in the 80% shade found in the understory of the Ethiopian cloud forest.
The primary solution to both of these problems was selective breeding. The first major effort to intentionally cultivate coffee happened in Yemen with the first forays of coffee out of Ethiopia. Yemen is a famously sunny place, and for coffea arabica to succeed there, growers looking to supply the needs of the Sufi dhikr, and later the demands of Yemeni merchants, Ottoman Sultans, and European illuminati, had to select and cultivate those plants that would thrive with far less shade. One commercially convenient side effect of this early breeding program was that the added energy provided by the intense sunlight caused these plants to produce a much greater yield. Two unfortunate effects were that these new varieties had less genetic diversity, and also required a lot more work to keep them healthy.
As these genetically thinned varieties were carried hither and yon, attempts to get them to produce in ever more diverse terroir required yet more selective inbreeding and concurrently greater inputs in the form of soil amendments and intensive management of sun, wind and water to keep them producing the ever-greater yields needed to sustain a profit and keep up with increasing world demand.
A major drawback of these strategies gradually became clear as the effects of pests and pathogens, some of which had never been encountered in the wilds of Ethiopia, began to have devastating consequences. With nearly all of the worlds’ coffee crops coming from this limited gene pool, in the past 50 years growers have endured multiple disruptions caused by pests and diseases which in a more genetically diverse agronomy would have affected only single farms, but instead have ravaged the production of whole countries or even entire regions spanning many countries, with massive economic impacts.
Compounding these effects, human-driven environmental shifts have created new challenges, particularly for farmers working on the edges of the viable range for c. arabica, requiring still more inputs and more intensive and agile management, all of which translate to both increased cost and higher risk at the production end of the coffee value chain.
Using the most advanced climate modeling tools available, researchers and scientists have been working with the coffee industry to develop predictive models to assist growers, buyers and others to look ahead at and prepare for future growing conditions. Unfortunately, the prognosis is grim: it is projected that by 2050 there will be a 49% loss worldwide of land that is compatible with the cultivation of c. arabica. These losses will not be equally distributed, but will be experienced most heavily in Brazil, Latin America and West Africa. Some areas in South East Asia may actually see an increase in viable land. Ironically, the area with the greatest potential for continued or increased production is in Ethiopia.15
Suitability changes by the 2050s in the RCP 6.0 scenario; A-D: Arabica, E-G: Robusta. Hatching indicates the current suitability distribution; Warm colors represent areas with negative climate change impacts and cold colors positive changes. Source: Bunn, C., P. Läderach, and O. Ovalle Rivera. 2015. “A bitter cup: climate change profile of global production of Arabica and Robusta coffee.” Climatic Change 129, no. 2015 (March): 89-101. doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1306-x.
Much effort is being put into finding solutions to insure the viability of the industry, and nowhere is this effort more visible and tangible than in the work of World Coffee Research. Led by representatives from most of the major names in the coffee industry, WCR’s efforts are primarily focused at the production or cultivation end of the coffee value chain and are divided amongst four main areas: breeding, field and quality trials, nursery and seed value chains, and global leadership through research and training in all areas of coffee agriculture and production. For those of us who don’t speak coffee, that translates to: breed plants adapted to changing conditions, prove they work, make the seeds available for everyone and teach them how to grow coffee most effectively in a challenging and quickly changing environment. It’s a tall order, the chances of success in any of these areas is far from guaranteed, and time is not on their side.
“The climate crisis demands the near-total transformation of global systems, and coffee agriculture is no exception. In order to meet rising coffee demand without increasing the GHG emissions within coffee management systems or through deforestation, coffee production systems must be radically transformed over the next 10-30 years in favor of more productive varieties that thrive in agroforestry systems and soil health. This level of transformation is not possible without technological innovation.”
-From the WCR website16
But even if efforts in breeding and transforming farming practices manage to maintain even current levels of coffee production, worldwide demand for coffee is still growing, as is the primary driver of climate change: carbon emissions. Obviously this is an issue that must be addressed by all industries, particularly within “developed” countries that are responsible for the lions’ share of carbon emissions. As it so happens, these same countries are also among the world’s largest coffee consumers.
Within the coffee industry, one sector of the coffee value chain accounts for more than 45% of the carbon emissions of the entire industry: preparation. 17Brewing requires heat and, in the case of espresso, high pressure, both of which are energy-intensive, and both of which are subject to high variability based on barista training and habits and the efficiency of the machines they use.
Fortunately, as energy prices skyrocket, this is an issue about which shop owners and other industry professionals are becoming increasingly aware, and I saw some indication at the SCA Expo that interest in energy efficient, insulated boilers is growing. Even still, it will take time for shop owners to train baristas and upgrade equipment, and many simply can’t afford to absorb the added cost all at once.
Issues of agronomy and environmental degradation are not the only existential crises faced by the coffee industry. Value inequity – the difference in the value people receive at different points in the coffee value chain – is a significant problem faced by producers and smallholders and remains a well known defining feature of the industry, despite having been well documented and publicized for decades. Writing in 2022, Kenneth Davids reports,
“…most coffee production in the world is still ruled by the iron hand of a pennies-before-people old fashioned commodity capitalism…. As I write, ordinary producers of decent coffees are suffering some of the lowest inflation-adjusted prices in history.”18
Furthermore, according to Fairtrade International,
“The current price crisis… is almost a perfect storm of conditions, including global oversupply and the increased activity of hedge funds, that have led to a truly unsustainable situation. According to a recently published market report from leading exporter Volcafe, nearly 61 percent of producers are selling their coffee at prices under the cost of production.19
….While the global coffee industry now generates more than $200 billion per year, the average farmer’s income has not changed in the past 20 years – or has actually declined when taking into account higher farming costs.”
As with the challenges presented by global climate change, organizations working within and outside of the coffee industry have developed solutions intended to address these issues. Before describing those solutions, we should first outline in broad terms the main methods by which coffee is traded, which distinguish the two sectors of the coffee industry: Commodity and Specialty.
As the name implies, coffee traded within the Commodity sector is bought based on a price known as the “C-Contract” set within the futures market and traded on the NY Commodities exchange. Most of the world’s coffee is bought and sold within this system. Given the nature of markets to scour the world for the moment-to-moment best price available, the traded value of coffee sold within this system generally has little connection to the actual cost of growing it, hence the disparity felt at the production end of the value chain.
As an alternative to the problematic C-Contract commodity system, Fairtrade International developed the “Fairtrade Minimum Price” benchmark and concurrent farmer training, certification, labeling, and consumer education programs as a means to insure that farmers selling within that system would be paid a fair living wage. However, while this constellation of efforts has had limited success, large inequities still remain and continue to grow within the commodity sector of the industry.
The Specialty Coffee sector grew from efforts to create a culture of connoisseurship that I described above. Coffee sold within this sector typically moves based on relationships developed between farmers and shop or chain owners or roasters. One value equity solution arising within the specialty coffee sector is Direct Trade. In this scenario, roasters and non-profits work directly with farmers and governments in areas likely to produce higher quality coffees and invest in training and agricultural improvements to produce beans that these roasters then buy directly and can sell at a premium price, a far greater portion of which ends up returning back to the farmers. While results are promising, for a variety of reasons, this solution also has had limited success, and, in the words of Mr. Davids, “Most of the coffee in the world still gets fed into the faceless maw of the commodity market and comes out at the other end packed in cans, jars, bricks or glass bottles.”20
Another crisis, happening somewhat tangentially outside of the coffee value chain, but still heavily connected to it, is within the area of human health.
The dopaminergic and adenosine antagonistic effects of caffeine come with a cost. You see, even though caffeine effectively blocks the action of adenosine, those effects are only temporary. All that adenosine is still floating around in our bloodstream, and once your body begin to metabolize the caffeine, that adenosine floods into those receptors, and you suddenly start to feel very, very tired. By then you’ve also used up all of that lovely dopamine, and what you’re left with on the other side of the famous caffeine high is the infamous caffeine crash.
For many, the solution to the problem of the caffeine crash is to consume more caffeine. We drink more coffee, more tea, more soda, in order to fix the problem that we created by drinking them in the first place. The effects of this negative reinforcement cycle are well documented. Over time, as we habitually consume more caffeine, our bodies grow more adenosine receptors to compensate, thus attenuating caffeine’s stimulatory effects. So to get the same “energy boost”, we have to drink even more caffeine, and experience even worse withdrawal effects if we try to stop. This creates a cycle of physical dependence.
It’s worth noting that this physical dependence is both reversible and manageable, a point that will become important when we begin to conceive of the revised value proposition for coffee in the next chapter.
Ironically, even as coffee is touted by many for its energizing effects, our habitual use of and dependence upon it is also one of the leading culprits behind a worldwide sleep crisis. According to the CDC, in the US alone, greater than one in three Americans are sleep deprived.21 And according to Matt Walker, leading sleep researcher and author of Why we Sleep, research suggests that “insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide and obesity.”22 And according to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
drowsy driving was responsible for at least 91,000 car crashes, 50,000 injuries, and 795 deaths in 201723. Thus, our use (or abuse) of coffee and caffiene appear to be excacerbating one of the key problems that our use was meant to address. We’re not actually gaining any more energy or more net alertness. In the end, our habit is bringing us down.
Certainly coffee is not the only cause of this crisis; anxiety, screen usage, abuse of alcohol and other drugs, increased noise and light pollution within cities and unrealistic work schedules all play a role in our loss of sleep, but it’s hard to escape the connection that, like the crises of climate change and global financial inequities listed above, nearly all of these factors are also byproducts of the performance-driven culture that consumption of caffeine has been instrumental in helping humans to create and sustain.
Perhaps, then, the point in the coffee value chain where individual human beings can have the greatest impact on all of these issues is the point that has had the least amount of attention paid by those in the industry who wish to address them, the place where it all began: consumption.
- Watts, Alan. “Drugs – Turning the Head or Turning On.” Alan Watts speaking in 1966 at San Jose State University. Alan Watts Being in the Way Podcast • The Be Here Now Network, 29 October 2021. The Alan Watts Foundation, Mark Watts, ↩︎
- Hattox, p.26 ↩︎
- Seidel, op. cit. ↩︎
- Hattox, p.28 ↩︎
- Matthiesen, Toby. The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism. Oxford University Press, 2023, p.182, also see Hattox, p.72 ↩︎
- Hattox, p.96 ↩︎
- Hartogsohn I. Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting. Drug Science, Policy and Law. 2017;3. doi:10.1177/2050324516683325 ↩︎
- Zancheta, Roberta, Ana P. Possi, Cleopatra S. Planeta, and Marcelo T. Marin. 2012. “Repeated administration of caffeine induces either sensitization or tolerance of locomotor stimulation depending on the environmental context.” Pharmacological Reports 64 (1): 70-77. ↩︎
- Nayak, Sandeep,“Cultural Context and the Psychedelic Experience.” MIND Foundation, 12 August 2020. Accessed 12 June 2023. ↩︎
- Wild, p.53 ↩︎
- International Coffee Organization. “April 2023 Coffee Report and Outlook.” ↩︎
- Euromonitor 2020 Coffee Growth Dynamics Report, as presented in “Understanding Coffee’s Global Growth”, Yannis Apostolopoulos and Jenn Rugolo, Specialty Coffee Association News, Issue 12, April 303 2020 ↩︎
- Pollan, Michael. This Is Your Mind on Plants. Penguin Publishing Group, 2022., p. 157 ↩︎
- Challender, Jem. Terroir: Coffee from Seed to Harvest. Edited by Matthew Perger, et al., Barista Hustle, 2022 ↩︎
- Ibid. p.129-134 ↩︎
- World Coffee Research. “Climate Mitigation.” World Coffee Research,. Accessed 1 June 2023. ↩︎
- Chandler 2022, p.143 ↩︎
- Davids, Kenneth. 21st Century Coffee: A Guide. CoffeeReview Books, 2022 ↩︎
- Kettler, Peter. “We love coffee. Are we willing to pay the price? .” Fairtrade International, 5 June 2019, Accessed 5 June 2023 ↩︎
- Davids 2022, p 11 ↩︎
- Paprocki, Jonathan. “CDC: More than 1 in 3 Americans are sleep-deprived.” Sleep Education, 28 September 2022 ↩︎
- As quoted in Pollan, Michael. This Is Your Mind on Plants. Penguin Publishing Group, 2022., p. 134 ↩︎
- “Driving While Drowsy Can Be as Dangerous As Driving While Drunk.” Sleep Foundation, 23 May 2023 ↩︎