It is recorded in the annals of history that a certain doctor once
told a certain patient to drink no coffee. Were you, perchance, the
patient? I know I was. But why did the doctor say that? Because if we
stopped there would be more coffee left for him?
It is also recorded that there once lived a certain Arab whose name
comes down to us as Chadely. Chadely is reputed to have been the
initial coffee drinker of the world and he drank an extract of the
berry to combat a continual drowsiness which prevented him from
attending punctually his religious devotions! In this others of the
Mohammedan faithful rapidly followed him, and the habit might well be
cultivated by certain church-going Christians with sedative pastors.
Now I am one of those most unfortunate persons over whom alcohol
has no appreciable authority. I confess this with shame and deep
humiliation. Right in this Prohibition Era when various nondescript
alcoholic beverages are held in higher esteem than ever before in
our history (for does not the lowliest shellac now become a sacred
and inviolate symbol of a personal liberty we would not recognize
in this collectivist country if we saw it?) I can drink one, two or
even three glasses of high voltage and yet remain placid, neutral,
passionless, taciturn and erect in posture. So far as I am concerned
even the dynamic and remorseless cocktail of these days is just so
much ill-tasting liquid. Isn’t this tragic?
But I would not prohibit the sale, ingurgitation or even the flagrant
abuse of these curiously synthesized beverages, or even of good
alcohol drinks. Not for one single prohibitive instant. For I want
my coffee and some day some bluenose wowser might seek to deprive
me of the cup that really cheers me. For I can arise in the morning
hopeless, misanthropic, pessimistic, with a strong suicidal impulse,
a feeling of uselessness and a Calvinistic conviction of sin--yet
one cup of good coffee completely reverses my emotions and stirs me
to optimism, confidence, cheer and incipient exaltation. I can be
induced to consider new fur coats and parlor rugs.
Or again, in the evening, I may have sunk into a mental stupor,
becoming in fact so definitely subhuman that I can only listen to
a radio or read a newspaper--but coffee at once changes the entire
universe and suffuses me with self-satisfaction, energy, will power
and complacency--jostles my brain cells rudely against each other
and clicks out of them what little useful information there is in
them. Indeed I strongly sympathize with any dull soul who momentarily
sweeps aside the stagnant miasmas of toil, monotony and misery with a
swig of ethyl alcohol--in varied disguise. Insensitive to alcohol I
do exactly the same thing with caffeine.
It is a most curious matter upon which to meditate. The entire
universe is not something static and permanently postulated by
definition. It is not even what I made it a moment ago. It is what
coffee makes me and makes me make it at this moment. Leaving my
entire environment, debts and all, and my complete mental and somatic
equipment _in statu quo_ one dash of caffeine completely reorganizes
the universe for me and as completely modifies my reaction thereto.
The final test in any scientific experiment takes place when one
variable factor accomplishes such results while all other factors
remain completely unaltered. I know my coffee.
But of course this is a world wherein doctors sound solemn tocsins
to pleasure. You go to them and they almost invariably admonish you
to quit smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, to have your teeth
pulled and your tonsils uprooted. Some years ago I myself suffered
from chronic indigestion. I was on a meticulous diet which lacked
meat and coffee and I was about ready to accuse coffee alone of all
my indispositions. But I met a hardy old codger of eighty who drank
eight cups of strong coffee daily and had but recently reduced his
consumption from a normal dozen and his vigor, which he attributed to
seventy years of strong coffee, greatly heartened me. I knew what the
doctor would say. I didn’t smoke. Teeth and coffee alone were left.
So I went soberly to the expert in exodontia.
He at first demurred and insisted that I had no teeth meriting
destruction. But I was desperate. I insisted. So he X-rayed around,
finally selected an inoffensive and courteous molar and drew it.
The shock or something proved beneficial. At least I had no more
indigestion and even learned how to drink two cups of strong coffee
and go to sleep on the draft. This is the final step in expert coffee
drinking. When you can perform that feat and outwit your imagination
you have come into the inner circle of The Sacred Coffee Drinkers’
Conclave.
But I remained curious. I wondered why doctors said drink no coffee.
I determined to find out something about this. Botany didn’t get me
very far. It simply declared “Coffee is the product of a rubiaceous
plant indigenous to Abyssinia of the _genus_ coffea; there are about
twenty-five known species, of which coffea Arabica is the most
important commercially.”
History was slightly more productive. It appeared coffee drinking
was of respectable age and that the substance derived its name from
K’hawah, or Kaffa, an Abyssinian Province, and that there it was
employed as a stimulant for centuries before its introduction into
Arabia. The Arab physician Khayes, who lived 850-922 A. D., wrote
on coffee and knowledge of the plant arrived in Europe by the late
sixteenth century. It is most interesting to remember that these
Arabian Mohammedans used coffee as an anti-soporific during prolonged
religious ceremonies. Yet the beverage at first underwent violent
protest because strictly orthodox and conservative priests held it to
be intoxicating and hence under the ban of the Koran.
At Constantinople certain dervishes also held that after roasting
coffee had become a kind of coal which the Prophet had denounced
as inedible. Thereupon the coffee houses were closed. But a lenient
mufti later proved to the satisfaction of the faithful that roasted
coffee was not coal and they were reopened.
The earliest European coffee houses were established, in fact, in
Constantinople and in Venice. The first one appeared in England in
1650; out of it grew the Oxford Coffee Club in 1655 and from that
sprang the Royal Society itself. But alas, convivial gatherings at
coffee houses became of ill repute; wives complained they could not
expect their husbands back from errands because they would loiter in
coffee houses and kings declared that their subjects met at coffee
houses, became garrulous and bespoke political rebellion. The current
Volstead, Charles II, therefore, sought to suppress coffee drinking,
but evidently Anglo-Saxons valued their liberties more then than now
for the King had little success. Frederick the Great, fearing coffee
drinking for the more thrifty reason that it caused too much money to
leave his domain, boldly attributed sterility to indulgence in the
berry and sought to restrict the use of coffee by a license system.
The medical profession came forward to denounce coffee for all sorts
of sins. The English Dr. Pecoke accused it of causing leprosy.
Dr. Duncan of Montpellier in 1706 wrote in opposition to all hot
beverages while James the I actually composed a royal “Broadside
Against Coffee.” The kingly book contained this gem--
Confusion huddles all into one scene,
Like Noah’s arks, the clean and the unclean,
For now, alas! the drink has credit got,
And he’s no gentleman who drinks it not.
Millingen in his “Curiosities of Medical Experiences,” 1837, said
that coffee in excess produced “feverish heat and a predisposition to
apoplexy.” But he did commend coffee and tea as beverages affording
stimulus without producing intoxication. Francis Bacon declared that
“coffee comforteth the heart and helpeth digestion” while Bach, to
offset this, wrote his Cantata No. 211 of the “Secular Cantatas” to
protest its use.
In 1792 Dr. Benjamin Moseley said doubt existed as to whether coffee
was a tonic or a sedative, but believed that it had intrinsic food
value. Every now and then individuals arise to denounce or to praise
an article of diet or a diet system and to declare that all men
should hear and follow because this idea was of benefit to them.
Such statements can have no standing in science, even when made by
a doctor and based upon his actual experiences with a few patients.
The only possible way to find out whether coffee, say, is beneficial,
or the reverse is to investigate the literature and try to poll the
authorities each one of whom has examined large numbers of individual
cases to see if any general statements can be hazarded. Even then we
cannot make final conclusions but we can assay general trends.
Is coffee harmful then? What do physiologists, pharmacologists and
medical men say? Coffee demonstrably enlivens the intellect, removes
the sensation of fatigue and makes the subject feel more comfortable.
These are gifts not to be sniffed out of court. But is coffee safe
and harmless enough that we may dare indulge ourselves in this
pleasant reaction in a world where the pleasant is so readily assumed
to be _per se_ the invidious--and so often is actually so? The
question is in dispute like most questions considered settled by many
people. There is no more reason to conclude one way than the other
in so far as average adults are concerned. All who say dogmatically
“No coffee--it is very harmful” are as wrong as all who state the
opposite of this.
In his “Personal and Community Health” C. E. Turner says coffee is
not harmful to most adults in reasonable quantities. G. N. Stewart’s
“Physiology” remarks that tea and coffee are safe stimulants because
they have no bad after effects. Stewart also cautions against their
abuse, but it may as well be stated at once that the question of
abuse introduces an altogether new factor. Water and salt are
absolutely necessary to life but the abuse of either is injurious.
We can produce true water intoxications and salt eaten to excess can
do us much harm. All articles of diet from parsnips and lamb chops
to caffeine and alcohol can harm if abused and we should assume when
speaking of them a sane, rational use and regard abuse as a harmful
condition of a different order altogether.
As C. E. A. Winslow well says in his “Healthy Living”--“The fact
that tea and coffee sometimes become tyrants does not mean that such
drinks are necessarily bad.”
In one thing medical authorities do agree, however, coffee and
tea are not beverages for children. Moralists to the contrary
notwithstanding, this is again beside the point when we are
considering the reasonable use of coffee by adults. Adults and
children are essentially different animals using their food intake
differently--the one for upkeep and repair the other for new
construction as well as upkeep and repair. They differ basically
in metabolism. They have different metabolic rates and different
expenditures of energy. The child is turning food into flesh and bone
and blood at a much greater rate than a fully-grown adult organism
is ever required to do. Diets which would amply sustain an adult may
easily be detrimental to or deficient for young and growing children.
We shall, then, restrict ourselves herein to the rational use of
coffee by average adults. What can coffee, or its active principle
caffeine, do to harm adults?
Caffeine definitely increases the force of the heart beat. Yet Wood,
“Notice of Judgment Under the Food and Drugs Act No. 1455 1912,” says
such an effect may be desirable since a slower rate and increased
force induce cardiac efficiency. Heavy coffee drinking may produce a
frequent, hard pulse and palpitations, but this again goes over into
the territory of abuse.
Coffee tends both to dilate the vascular system and to constrict it,
the net result being a mass movement of the blood without increased
blood pressure. Coffee has repeatedly been suspected of damage to the
heart and blood vessels but such suspicions are common in therapy
and evidence is entirely lacking to prove this point scientifically.
Suspicion is here probably no more legitimate than in many lay
superstitions. While patients with definite heart trouble should
avoid all stimulants the normal use of coffee by an adult cannot be
said to have an insidious effect upon the heart and blood vessels.
While coffee is a diuretic it cannot be convicted of renal injury as
yet. Indeed it is quite probable that the kidneys become accustomed
to caffeine while A. R. Cushny (J. Pharmacol. & Experimental Therapy
4 363) declares that caffeine does not injure the kidneys even when
given in large dosage over long periods.
But how about digestion? Years ago Fraser (J. of Anatomy & Physiology
184 13 1883) said that coffee and tea hindered the digestion of
protein foodstuffs with the exception of ham and eggs! This very
fortunate immunity renders the typical American dish a safe breakfast
in any case. In general, however, observations _in vivo_ indicate
that the amounts of the beverage usually taken have no evil effects
upon digestion. Indeed some investigators have found a pronounced
increase in gastric secretion following tea and coffee.
Hutchinson in his “Food and Dietetics” says that the digestive
disturbance caused by such infused beverages is negligible in health.
Others have held that the aromatic constituents of coffee, or the
“empyreumatic oil,” upset digestion. There may be some reason for
this; at least certain individuals tolerate much better coffee from
which these substances have been removed.
Caffeine is of course a stimulant to the central nervous system,
particularly that part of it intimately associated with the gastric
function. How far is its use as such a cerebral stimulant advisable?
Like all stimulants this will result in greater fatigue on excessive
usage. But as “The Medical Review of Reviews” once said, “When tea
and coffee are made moderate in strength and partaken of in sober
quantities they are gentle stimulants and their effect upon the
nervous system is salutary.” A too constant reliance on coffee as a
goad may of course result in nervous irritability.
Coffee speeds up the metabolism, increases the body heat and heat
elimination, and perhaps urges us on to greater activity. But, as the
English pharmacologist Dixon remarks in his “Manual of Pharmacology,”
“Caffeine decidedly facilitates the performance of all forms of
physical work.” Yet certain athletes are reported to have had their
performances injured by coffee drinking, while Osborn holds that
coffee interferes with the best muscular efforts. Take Hobson’s
choice here, you have an authority either way and we do love some one
to give our opinions an affidavit. It may be observed that coffee
also increases the rate and depth of our respiration.
The following gracefully and euphoniously named aromatics have been
found in roasted coffee--pyrol, quinol, methylamin, acetone, furfuryl
alcohol, a derivative of saligenin, phenols, valeric acid, pyridin
and trimethylamin. You are no doubt much surprised and edified to
know that. Some of these compounds are toxic, but they occur in
coffee in amounts far too small to be dangerous to health. Some have
accused these formidably named derivatives of bad effects but the
work existing shows caffeine to be the only coffee constituent of
importance in its physiological effects. It is agreed that caffeine
is very rapidly changed by the body into less active substances and
disposed of, so there can be no cumulative effect even of that. In
old age, as in youth, coffee, like other stimulants, should be used
in moderation if at all.
As a whole then what can we conclude about the use of coffee by
adults? Science has not found it harmful when taken in non-excessive
amounts. Heart patients, neurotics, the young and the aged should
avoid it. It has not been proven to cause pathological changes in the
heart, blood vessels or kidneys. It is a valuable cerebral stimulant
and antidote for mental fatigue, lacking as it does the bad effects
of most stimulants. It also stimulates respiration and speeds up
the metabolism, while its effects on digestion cannot be said to
be definitely deleterious. Tea, because of its tannin content, is
probably worse than coffee gastrically. Finally caffeine is rapidly
oxidized and has no cumulative poisonous effect.
Most important of all we must remember that individuals differ.
They are constructed of different proteins and have cellular and
glandular processes differing from individual to individual. What one
can do with impunity another will find bringing him nearer to the
undertaker daily. In this as in all other matters dietetic common
sense and sound judgment in appraising our own state of health and
the reactions of our organism to various stimuli will always surpass
slavish subservience to systems or morbid efforts to avoid all harm
and achieve an impossible all good.
Then if we are to drink coffee let us consider momentarily how best
to make it. One basic fact stands out--freshly ground coffee is best.
Ground coffee loses its flavor on standing. It also loses its content
of carbon dioxide. These two factors are definitely related but
exactly how and why we do not know.
In considering coffee-making precise scientific methods are
everything. Our mothers, more energetic than the decadent women of
today, made their own bread. They often appraised various flours by
such rude methods and declared this brand better than that. How much
could they have known about it? Did they keep every factor constant
except the flour when making their tests? You know they did not.
Go into the laboratory in the U. S. Bureau of Chemistry, where flour
bought by the government is tested, and what do you see? You see an
apparatus enabling the investigator to make bread from that flour
holding every factor constant except the flour. All other materials
used are precisely the same and all materials are carefully weighed.
The dough is kneaded mechanically and timed exactly. Fermentation
takes place in a cabinet at a constant temperature and for a definite
time for all loaves. The same holds for the time and temperature
of baking. The loaves are cooled just alike on wire meshes for
the same time. They are weighed and their volumes measured. Then
the investigator positively knows which flour makes the best loaf
of bread and the government buys that flour for its hospitals and
penitentiaries.
It is exactly the same with coffee. To test coffees they must be
infused in very precise ways. How is it done? In the first place
pulverized coffee must pass a 30 mesh sieve and be like fine
cornmeal, medium ground coffee must pass a 10 mesh sieve and be like
steel cut; coarsely ground coffee must pass an 8 mesh sieve and
appear like the rude, home ground bean of our childhood.
Then boiling, boiling with egg, percolation and filtration must be
tried on each by precise methods. A 40c. Mocha-Java coffee may be
used with 12 grams of coffee and 240 cc. of water, except in the case
of percolation which requires 480 cubic centimeters of water for
12 grams of coffee. In boiling with egg 10 grams of egg white were
added. The infusion must be governed precisely.
Boiling takes place in a seamless white enamel pot, cold water being
poured over the coffee, the whole brought to a boil and boiling
continued for three minutes; the infusion then stood five minutes
and was ready. It was strained through cheese cloth. Percolation was
carried out in the usual manner with an ordinary percolator, the
water being cold at the start and boiling being continued for five
minutes. In filtration a wire strainer was put across the top of the
pot covered with a piece of tennis flannel upon which the coffee lay.
Boiling water was poured through once.
The brews were tested hot, for strength, color, and flavor by various
people who did not know the methods of preparation. Six degrees of
strength were observed with specific gravities of the brew by test as
shown in the table--
Very weak 1.0045 Specific Gravity
Weak 1.0055 Specific Gravity
Moderately strong 1.0060 Specific Gravity
Standard 1.0065 Specific Gravity
A little too strong 1.0070 Specific Gravity
Much too strong 1.0080 Specific Gravity
The specific gravity was taken on the cold brew and a standard,
1.0065 was selected for further tests. The following table indicating
condition of coffee, method of brew, weight of coffee used and cost
per cup is of considerable interest--
S. G. 1.0065 Cost
Condition Method Weight Coffee per cup
of infusion Grams cents
Pulverized Boiling 12.05 .63
Pulverized Percolated 12.78 .71
Pulverized Boiled with egg 12.85 1.05
Pulverized Filtered 12.31 .72
Medium Boiling 15.89 .83
Medium Percolated 22.94 1.29
Medium Boiled with egg 16.71 1.29
Medium Filtered 30.00 1.73
Coarse Boiling 19.79 1.03
Coarse Percolated 27.52 1.54
Coarse Boiled with egg 21.27 1.56
Hence it is apparent that pulverizing is the most efficient method of
grinding. The best brew is made by filtration. Boiling with egg is
second best while plain boiling and percolation are the poorest of
all. In general, strength and color of the brew are quite independent
of the blend and price but depend upon the grind. The flavor,
however, varies markedly with the coffee brand and price. Java,
Sumatra and Bogota give weaker infusions under the same conditions
than do Mocha and Santos. The order of preference for flavor
stood--Java, Sumatra, Santos, Bogota and Mocha. It was also observed
that coffee which had stood long after grinding gave an infusion of a
lower specific gravity and hence of impaired strength.
The effect of adding sugar and cream to coffee is not well
understood. Some assert that the fat of cream and the fats of the
coffee bean form indigestible compounds, but there is scarcely
sufficient experimental evidence to justify this. The tannin
compounds in coffee are apparently not precipitated, as has
frequently been stated, by the addition of sugar and cream. Testing a
centrifuged cream from a beverage coffee gave no appreciable evidence
of tannin while the remaining coffee infusion gave the normal
positive tests for tannin. It is certainly true, however, according
to one authority that black coffee without any additional substances,
with the possible exception of a portion of sugar, is the most
beneficial form of the beverage.
Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_; those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=.
Obvious printing errors, such as partially printed letters and
punctuation, were corrected. Three misspelled words were corrected.