Coffee and tea have been banned, smuggled, taxed and wrapped in legend, and their histories are full of stories too good to check. These tiles check them. Meet the student who found caffeine thanks to a cat, the Milwaukee women who patented a tea bag first, the king whose coffeehouse ban never took effect, and the famous goatherd whose first printed telling could not decide between goats and camels.
Every tile in a Coffee and Tea game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Coffee
nine stories
1Coffee beans are not beans
On the tile: Coffee cherry
A coffee bean is really a seed. It grows inside a small fruit called a coffee cherry, whose skin turns from green to yellow to red as it ripens, and most cherries hold two beans. The National Coffee Association says an average tree yields about 10 pounds of cherries a year, which works out to just 2 pounds of green beans. In about 5 percent of the world's coffee a cherry holds a single bean, called a peaberry, and because some people think peaberries taste sweeter, they may be sorted by hand and sold separately.
Coffee drinkers often treat arabica and robusta as rivals, but the two are family. A 2020 study in Scientific Reports describes arabica as a hybrid of two wild species, one most closely related to Coffea canephora, the plant sold as robusta, and the other to Coffea eugenioides. The study traces arabica to a single hybridization event, and published estimates of its timing range from about 10,000 to 665,000 years ago. That lone beginning helps explain why arabica has extremely low genetic variation.
Coffee as a hot drink, the Folger Shakespeare Library notes, was introduced to the world by Sufi mystics in 15th-century Yemen. They drank qahwa to stay awake through night-long rituals of meditation and recitation. The coffee trade of that century centered on the Red Sea, with the Yemeni port of Mocha as its hub, supplied with beans from the Ethiopian highlands. The port's name lives on in the caffè mocha, just as Java and Ceylon coffees took their names from the places they were traded from.
Caffeine was found thanks to a cat and a famous writer. Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, a chemistry student at Jena whose classmates nicknamed him Dr. Gift, German for poison, was asked to show Johann Wolfgang von Goethe how a plant extract dilated a cat's pupils. Goethe was so impressed that he handed Runge a packet of coffee beans and suggested their chemistry was worth a look. Runge took the hint and soon discovered caffeine. He also isolated quinine, yet New Scientist notes his contributions are often overlooked.
The story goes that decaf began with a soggy accident. In 1903, as USC's Illumin magazine tells it, a freight of coffee beans belonging to German merchant Ludwig Roselius was soaked in seawater and lost much of its caffeine but little of its taste. The paperwork is firmer ground. In 1906 Roselius and two colleagues filed a US patent, granted in 1908, for decaffeinating coffee. The Roselius process rinsed green beans with benzene, and because of health concerns about that solvent it is no longer used.
Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a steam-driven coffee machine in 1884 and showed it at the Turin General Exposition, where, according to Google's tribute to him, it won a bronze medal. One boiler pushed hot water through a bed of grounds while a second added steam. He is usually credited with the invention that led to espresso, yet Smithsonian magazine notes it was a bulk brewer, no verifiable Moriondo machine survives, and there are not even photographs of his work. Apart from his patent, he was largely lost to history.
In 1908, brewed coffee often came with grounds and an unpleasant aftertaste. Melitta Bentz, a Dresden homemaker, experimented with a perforated brass cup and found her filter in her son's exercise book: a sheet of blotting paper. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office says she registered the design on June 20, 1908, one of the first women to have her own invention protected. Her company started with 72 pfennigs of capital in a room of the family apartment, and today it makes about 50 million filters a day.
Alfonso Bialetti introduced the Moka Express in 1933, a stovetop coffee maker that Luigi De Ponti helped develop. Sales lagged until his son Renato took over in the 1940s and launched a huge marketing campaign across Italy. The mustachioed little man printed on the pots is, according to the Bialetti archive as reported by The New York Times, a caricature of Renato himself. Fittingly, when Renato died at 93, his ashes were interred in an urn shaped like a large moka pot.
The story goes that Irish coffee was invented for travelers whose flight had to turn back. According to the Foynes Flying Boat and Maritime Museum in County Limerick, a flight left Foynes for New York late one winter night in 1943, flew for several hours through bad weather, and returned to wait for safer skies. Chef Joe Sheridan was asked to make something warm for the passengers and added Irish whiskey to their coffee. When one asked whether it was Brazilian coffee, Sheridan joked that it was Irish coffee, and the name stuck.
The tea bag is often credited to a happy accident: in 1908 Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea importer, sent samples in small silk bags, and customers brewed them whole. But on August 26, 1901, Roberta C. Lawson and Mary McLaren of Milwaukee had already filed a patent for a tea-leaf holder, a pocket of open-mesh fabric holding just enough leaves for a single cup. It was granted in 1903. Sullivan may have helped popularize tea in bags, but he was not first.
Carl Linnaeus, working from dried samples, classified green tea and black tea as two different species, Thea viridis and Thea bohea. The botanist Robert Fortune doubted it after his first collecting trip to China, which began in 1843: bushes in black tea gardens looked just like those in green tea gardens. He concluded that the difference came from processing alone, though his colleagues were slow to agree. Twinings now lists six kinds of tea, from white to pu-erh, all made from one plant, Camellia sinensis.
Most of the world's words for tea trace back to China, and most take one of two forms. In the World Atlas of Language Structures, linguist Östen Dahl explains that Dutch traders, the main importers of tea into Europe, dealt with Amoy, now Xiamen, in Fujian, where the local Min Nan word was te. Their thee spread across much of Europe, English tea included. The Portuguese traded through Macao, where Cantonese said cha, so Portuguese says chá. Of 230 languages mapped, 84 use te forms and 110 use cha.
Iced tea took patience in 1878. That year's edition of Housekeeping in Old Virginia, a cookbook edited by Marion Cabell Tyree with contributions from 250 women, gives a recipe credited only to Mrs. S. T. If the tea was wanted for supper, a quart of boiling water went over two teaspoonfuls of green tea at breakfast. At dinner it was strained into a pitcher to settle, and at tea time it was poured over goblets of ice with two teaspoonfuls of sugar in each. A squeeze of lemon, the book promised, would make it delicious and healthful.
The bubbles in bubble tea were first froth, not tapioca. The Taipei Times explains that 1980s Taiwan loved sweetened tea shaken with ice until foamy. Who added chewy tapioca pearls is disputed. Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan says founder Tu Tsung-ho did it in 1986 after spotting white tapioca balls at a market. Chun Shui Tang in Taichung credits Lin Hsiu-hui, then a 20-year-old employee, in 1987. The rivals went to court, but neither had patented the drink, and by the mid-1990s it was on teahouse menus across Taiwan.
The glass of chai sold on Indian train platforms owes a lot to marketing. The Hindu recounts that the Indian Tea Association, founded in 1881, launched its first major experiment in promoting tea on the Indian Railways, boasting that platform tea stalls served a better cup than first-class restaurant cars. Posters with tea recipes went up at stations in Indian languages. Vendors began adding large amounts of milk and sugar, and by the 1930s, the newspaper says, India had become both factory and market for packaged tea.
Earl Grey tea is said to honor Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey and a British prime minister of the 1830s, and a favorite tale has a grateful Chinese mandarin sending him the recipe. Foods of England finds that unlikely: bergamot flavoring was unknown in China, and in 1837 a tea company was in court, accused of selling tea artificially scented with bergamot. The first known advertisements naming Earl Grey's Mixture came from the London blenders Charlton and Co. in the 1880s.
8An emperor, a falling leaf and a cup of hot water
On the tile: ShennongLegendaryLegend
Chinese legend says tea was discovered by Shennong, the mythical emperor credited with inventing farming and Chinese medicine, when a leaf drifted into his cup of boiled water. Twinings sets the tale in 2737 BC. Buddhists tell another origin, in which the young Buddha, furious at having fallen asleep while meditating, tore out his eyelashes, and tea bushes sprang up where they landed. The truth is plainer. As Smithsonian magazine puts it, culinary historians know nothing about who first put leaf to water.
Japan's first recorded taste of tea came in 815, when Emperor Saga was served tea at a temple while traveling. According to the Urasenke tea school, it did not catch on. Tea then came as hard bricks shaved into boiling water with seasonings, and records fall silent for about 200 years. The comeback came with the priest Eisai, who brought back tea seeds and the Chinese method of powdered green tea now known as matcha. His treatise praised tea for fostering both physical and spiritual health.
Lloyd's of London started with coffee. Edward Lloyd's coffee house on Tower Street, first mentioned in the London Gazette in 1688, became a favorite of ship owners and captains because it specialized in shipping news. Tables called boxes were rented to men selling insurance against ships that might never return. In January 1713 Lloyd left the lease to his head waiter, William Newton, who married Lloyd's daughter Handy two days later. The insurers kept to coffee houses until 1774, when they moved into the Royal Exchange.
In 1674 an English pamphlet called The Women's Petition Against Coffee complained that the drink left husbands as unfruitful as the deserts the berry supposedly came from, and made men out-babble their wives. A reply, The Men's Answer, called the coffeehouse the citizens' academy. Both were jokes with a sting. Smithsonian magazine notes that historian Steve Pincus questions whether women wrote the petition at all, and suggests such satires aimed to make coffeehouses unpopular as places of political unrest.
Turkish coffee is a recipe and a ritual, and in 2013 UNESCO added it to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Freshly roasted beans are ground to a fine powder, then brewed slowly on a stove with cold water and sugar to raise the desired foam. It comes in small cups with a glass of water and plays a part in occasions such as engagement ceremonies. When the cup is empty, the grounds left behind are often used to tell the drinker's fortune.
Johann Sebastian Bach never wrote an opera, but around 1732 to 1735 he came close with a comedy about coffee. In the Coffee Cantata, performed by his Collegium Musicum at Zimmermann's coffee house, a father named Schlendrian threatens his daughter Lieschen with no fancy dress and no outings unless she quits. She picks coffee, until he threatens to find her no husband. In a twist the Bach Choir of Bethlehem says Bach apparently added himself, she plans to write her coffee into the marriage contract.
In January 1946, George Orwell published A Nice Cup of Tea in the Evening Standard, with 11 rules he regarded as golden. Use Indian or Ceylonese tea. Make it strong, because "one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones." Skip the sugar. Pour the tea before the milk, which he admitted was one of the most controversial points of all. In 2003 the Royal Society of Chemistry marked his centenary with its own recipe and ruled against him: the milk goes in first.
6Tea reached England before the queen who gets credit
On the tile: Pepys1660Myth busted
Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess who married Charles II, is often credited with bringing tea to England. Samuel Pepys suggests otherwise. On September 25, 1660, before she became queen in 1662, he wrote in his diary: "I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before." A University of Oxford research project on royal consorts adds that the legend of Catherine introducing tea is not significantly substantiated by any contemporary source.
The story goes that afternoon tea began with a hungry duchess. Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, found herself famished around four o'clock because her household dined fashionably late, at eight. She asked for tea, bread and butter, and cake in her room, made a habit of it, and began inviting friends. Historic UK dates this to 1840, other accounts to the 1830s or 1840s, and historians still debate whether she invented the meal or formalized an existing custom. By the 1880s, fashionable women dressed in gowns and gloves for it.
8The women's tea protest rediscovered in a barbershop
On the tile: Edenton1774
About ten months after the Boston Tea Party, a group of 51 women in Edenton, North Carolina, led by Penelope Barker, signed a resolution on October 25, 1774, vowing not to buy British tea or cloth. It was one of the first recorded political demonstrations by women in America. A London cartoon mocked them. The episode then slipped into obscurity until the mid-1800s, when William T. Muse, a naval officer from Edenton, came across that very cartoon in a barbershop on the island of Minorca.
Sen no Rikyu served as tea master to the warlords Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi and refined wabi tea, a style that prized simplicity and restraint. Among his best-known innovations, the Urasenke tea school says, was a low crawl-in entrance to the tearoom that erased distinctions of rank among those who entered. He also favored plain bamboo vases and Raku tea bowls. The post had its perils. At about seventy, Rikyu displeased Hideyoshi and was ordered to end his life in 1591. His descendants still lead the Urasenke tradition.
Coffee's favorite origin story stars a goatherd, usually called Kaldi, whose goats turned frisky after eating the berries of a certain shrub, and monks who then brewed the berries to stay awake through night prayers. The National Coffee Association sets it on the Ethiopian plateau. Yet the version Antoine Faustus Nairon printed in his 1671 Latin treatise on coffee gives the herder no name, places him in Arabia Felix and cannot decide whether he kept camels or goats. It is a legend, not a record.
When coffee reached Rome, the story goes, certain priests urged Pope Clement VIII to forbid it as an invention of Satan. The curious pope had some brought to him, found the aroma inviting, tasted it, and declared the drink far too delicious to leave to unbelievers. In the fuller version he baptized coffee to make it a truly Christian beverage. William Ukers passed the tale along in his 1922 history All About Coffee, but he introduced it as a much quoted legend.
3The officer who shared his water with a coffee plant
On the tile: De Clieu1720sLegend
In the 1720s French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu carried a young coffee plant to Martinique, and his own account is pure drama. In a letter written in 1774, he described a jealous passenger who tore off a branch, and drinking water so scarce that for more than a month he shared his meager ration with the plant. From its seedlings, William Ukers wrote, came most of the coffee trees of the Antilles. The romance has limits: the Dutch had already brought coffee to Surinam in 1718.
Brazil's coffee industry supposedly owes its start to a bouquet. The legend says Portuguese military officer Francisco de Melo Palheta went to French Guiana for coffee plants at a time when the French refused to share them. He charmed the governor's wife, and her farewell bouquet hid enough seeds, as the National Coffee Association tells it, to begin what is today a billion-dollar industry. What the record shows is that coffee first reached Brazil's Pará region from French Guiana in the 1720s.
Arabia's coffee growers once guarded their trade by letting beans leave only after they had been boiled or parched, so the seeds could never sprout. Indian tradition says a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan got past the rule, bringing seeds home and planting them near the hut he built at Chikmagalur, in the mountains of Mysore. The tradition's dates vary, from as early as 1600 to 1695. Writing in 1922, William Ukers said he had seen descendants of those first plants still growing there.
Cutty Sark was built in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1869 to carry tea from China, and the timing was terrible. Royal Museums Greenwich notes that the Suez Canal opened the same week the ship was launched, cutting more than 3,000 miles off the voyage to China. Sailing ships could not use the shortcut well, but steamships could, bringing tea to London at least ten days sooner. After just eight tea voyages Cutty Sark was forced out of the trade. It later sped from Sydney to London in a record-breaking 73 days.
The Boston Tea Party was not a protest against expensive tea. The Tea Act of 1773 let the East India Company sell tea in the colonies more cheaply than its competitors, even with a tax collected when the tea landed. According to History.com, smuggled tea soon cost more than the company's taxed tea, and some merchants who denounced taxation without representation also wanted to protect their smuggling. On December 16, 1773, men disguised in Native American dress dumped more than 340 chests into Boston Harbor.
In 1869, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was one of the world's largest coffee producers. Around that time, pale yellow spots began appearing on its coffee leaves: coffee rust, a fungus. NPR reports the island still exported some 118 million pounds of coffee in 1870, but exports were down 80 percent by 1886, and by 1890 about 90 percent of the coffee land had been abandoned. With coffee no longer profitable, the island moved over to tea, and NPR notes it made the switch very successfully.
9The coffee house that sold tea to the carriage trade
On the tile: Twinings18th century
Twinings began as a coffee house. Thomas Twining bought Tom's Coffee House on London's Strand and, to stand out, offered fine tea, soon selling more dry tea than brewed. Ladies were not expected to enter coffee houses, so, the company says, they waited in their carriages while footmen went in to buy. His grandson Richard later urged Prime Minister William Pitt to slash the tea tax that fueled smuggling, and the Commutation Act of 1784 cut it from 119 percent to 12.5 percent.