A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
This book is about six beverages that have shaped human history - beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea and Coca-Cola. It’s a real history of how drinks connected to our civilization as opposed to a humorous or quirky take on the topic. It’s relatively short - a tad less than 300 pages- a good thing for this reader.
The author starts out by reminding us that water is essential to life. You can last a lot longer without food than without water. For thousands of years, humans had to live near sources of water, which limited the movement of people to places with accessible water.
Beer
The first part of the book is about beer, which was probably discovered around 5000 BCE (Before Christian Era, known previously as BC) in Mesopotamia which today is Iraq and Kuwait. The area was also known as the Fertile Crescent because so much grain could be grown there. People noticed that grain that was left out for a long time sprouted and became sweet, a good thing in a world with few sweeteners. If the old grain got wet, it formed beer. By 3000 BCE, there were twenty different kinds of beer available in the region. Around that time, beer became a social drink. People called it a gift from the gods since it gave one a pleasant buzz, unless of course you got hammered. Beer was also used in religious rituals by the Egyptians, Incas, Aztecs, and others.
Since water was boiled to make beer, the brew was safer to drink than local water. It also was rich in vitamins and nutrients which helped improve the diets of people in the ancient world. Beer was good. Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization and the location of the world’s first big city, Uruk. (This ancient city was featured in the book, Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson, that I discussed on Bob Held Hostage Day 315, January, 2021.) Grain was important. It was the main food source as well as the main ingredient in beer. Grain was also used as currency. People in the region believed that the fact that they drank beer made them more civilized than the rest of the world. Beer was very popular and was often referenced in records – which were usually on clay tablets – from the period. In Mesopotamia, there were humorous references to people who got drunk. On the other hand, Egyptian writings expressed a strong disapproval of over-imbibing. Egyptians did enjoy drinking and they set up beer halls which were associated with having a good time. Over time, beer became a popular drink of all classes of people and was seen as the defining drink of great civilizations. One invention that really helped promote beer was the clay jar which could hold and store beer.
Writing was developed to keep track of things including grain, beer, and livestock. Clay tablets from the times show an intricate system of keeping track of who had what. Priests in Egypt and Mesopotamia were in charge of the record-keeping and often temples were used to store things as well as provide religious guidance.
Beer was a big part of the economy. People were sometimes paid with beer. The fancier your job, the more beer you received. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer, which also was a currency that could be traded for other goods.
The Egyptians used beer as a base for medicines. They added herbs and plants to the brew to make potions that did actually have curative properties. Since beer was essential to enjoying a good afterlife, distinguished people were buried with everything needed to make beer. Lesser folk were buried with jars of beer. Teenagers back then could do some grave robbing to drink underage.
Today beer is seen as the drink of the working man and of everyone else. People from ancient times would be amazed at all of the microbreweries we have today, but they’d know it was beer.
Wine
Around 870 BCE, King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria (now Iraq) threw a banquet to celebrate Nimrud, his new capital city. He invited around 70,000 people and fed them with thousands of cattle, sheep, lambs, ducks, fish and eggs. This was impressive, but what was unusual is that the king celebrated the event by drinking wine, not beer which was the drink of the realm. The invited guests joined him in drinking wine, which until then had to be imported from distant lands like Greece. King A grew his own grapes and brought wine-making to his land.
Wine probably came from what is now northern Iran where grapes were plentiful. Around 5000 BCE someone noticed that if you left grape juice alone for some time, it turned into a pleasant drink. Bob in or out of the Basement would have noticed that.
Wine production spread all over the Middle East. One of Egypt’s rulers was buried with 700 jars of wine, probably a tad more than he needed. Greece became a major center for wine production and soon the Mediterranean area was flooded with lots of affordable wine. As had been the case with beer centuries earlier, the consumption of wine became democratized to the point where all classes of people could quaff the drink. Wine, like beer, became a form of payment for work.
The Greeks organized symposia where they drank wine and impressed each other with how smart they were. They believed that their culture was superior to all others, and, after a jug or two of wine, that made sense.
The Greek climate was ideal for growing grapes for wine and soon farmers went from grain to grapes - which were much more profitable - as their main crop. Wine became the national drink but it was considered gauche to drink wine without diluting it with water. How much you diluted it depended on the nature of the event. If you were pontificating, you’d put a lot of water in your wine so you’d stay sharp. If you were carousing, you’d use less. That seems silly to me - diluting wine? - but I’m not Greek. There were rules about drinking wine, sort of like High Tea rituals in Great Britain. Adhering to the rules made you more sophisticated. Guzzling wine would not have gone over well in ancient Greece. Over time, the wine-infused symposia morphed into different kinds of events. Some people kept with the high-tone intellectual discourses that were punctuated by drinking wine; others preferred the orgy approach to symposia where sophisticated conversation was not the goal. On occasion, people drank too much and different groups would issue challenges to other groups to prove their manhood or such, sometimes resulting in violence.
Plato observed that the ideal drinker can drink through the night without becoming silly. Fun fact: Socrates could hold his wine better than just about anyone. Plato also thought that drinking wine would loosen your inhibitions which would give you an opportunity to not give into them, thus strengthening your character.
Symposia were a mainstay of intellectual life in ancient Greece but attendance was limited to the upper class, about 20% of the population. Plato wasn’t big on democracy, as you can see if you read The Republic – his take on politics. Democracy wasn’t good because it gave equal power to people who were not of the same class and breeding as the better folk.
Greece became the major wine producer in the world, exporting to many countries. One Greek shipwreck off the southern coast of France contained the equivalent of 333,000 bottles of wine. Wine replaced beer as the drink of choice for most people.
Rome vanquished Greece around 200 BCE and took up winemaking. Italy soon became a major wine producer. Rome used slaves to cultivate the grape crops, sharply increasing production. Wine became a universal staple in the Roman Empire, with slaves and freemen enjoying the fruit of the grape. Of course, the rich folk got the good stuff leaving the common people with what was left. Romans adopted the Greek symposia idea to some extent, but people who were not elites could participate in these wine-infused events.
The rise of Christianity helped wine become a staple in the culture of the day. Christ turned water into wine, so wine was a big deal. Wine was the blood of Christ, another marker that wine was important.
Today most countries in Europe consume a lot of wine. It is drunk at most meals, and Italy, France and Spain produce a lot of the world’s wine. Unlike beer, wine is seen as a classy drink, used at state dinners and other big events. They don’t do toasts with beer.
Distilled Spirits
Cordova was the capital of Arab Andalusia in southern Spain in the first century CE (that used to be AD). It was a center of learning and discovery at a time when the Arab world was leading the way in scientific and mathematical breakthroughs. One of the scientific advances of the day was distillation, the process of vaporizing and recondensing a liquid. Arabs didn't drink alcohol so the process was used to make perfume, but thirsty Europeans soon figured out that you could make potent alcoholic drinks through distillation. These new drinks became popular during the Age of Exploration as European countries fanned out all over the world to discover new lands. The ships carried distilled booze to keep the sailors happy.
Distilling wine produced brandy which was said to have curative powers, especially when mixed with certain herbs. Around 1400 CE, distilled beer became whisky, which was also thought to have medicinal benefits. In any event, if you drank enough brandy or whisky, you’d probably feel better even without being cured.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus’s trip to the New World opened up new commercial markets. Soon, entrepreneurs started trading goods from the newly discovered lands, and eventually the African slave trade developed as a source of cheap labor in the New World. Distilled spirits became a standard barter item when procuring slaves. Brandy was also liberally given to the crews who were happy to imbibe the spirits on the long voyages.
In 1647 rum was invented in the Caribbean island of Barbados, a major sugar producer. Wise wags figured out that if you distilled what was left over from the sugarcane after manufacturing sugar you got rum, which became a very popular drink. Ironically (tragically?), the slaves that worked the sugar cane fields were given rum, which helped overseers control them. Someone added lime to the rum to invent the first cocktail, and someone else figured out that sailors on ships that had this new drink – grog -– were less likely to get scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, which limes contained. Thereafter, British sailors were known as “limeys.”
For the first hundred years of England’s settlement of America, alcoholic beverages were in short supply. Grapes and grain of the day did not grow well in the cool climate of the first settlements so there was no wine or beer. By the time ships carrying beer made the trek across the ocean, the crew had consumed most of the brew. The discovery of rum, made from molasses which was easy to trade for in the colonies, brought great relief to the thirsty masses yearning to drink anything. The locals drank a lot of rum which was inexpensive to produce. They made rum toasts to just about anything. England passed the Molasses Act in 1733 which put a tax on the product. The law was pretty much ignored but was strongly resented by the colonists and helped set the foundation for the revolt against Great Britain 40 years later.
People liked to drink. When George Washington ran for the Virginia legislature in 1758, “his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider - in a county with only 391 voters.” He won, and the Father of Our Country was off and running, or perhaps off and rumming.
In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which got serious about taxing the sweet stuff. This one was enforced, which really fired up the colonists who didn’t want to pay anything to a distant government. “No taxation without representation” was the response of the people. John Adams wrote that, “Molasses was an essential ingredient of American independence.”
As settlements moved south and away from the coast, farmers could grow grain so they could make whisky. To raise money for the new nation, Alexander Hamilton put a tax on whisky which led to serious local resistance especially in the western settlements. Eventually the law was modified and enforced after 13,000 militia men were called in. Thomas Jefferson, who had a winery at Monticello, his home, was anti-whisky and thought that civilized people should drink wine. Of course, only wealthy civilized people could afford wine.
Distilled drinks were used in early America to buy slaves and trade with Indians, not good things; but brandy, wine, and whisky were the fuel that the colonists needed to move ahead.
During the 16th and 17th century great strides were made in understanding our world. The Scientific Revolution was part of the Age of Reason that captivated Europe for centuries. (Bob’s Note: Perhaps today we are living in the Age of Unreason?) Coffee was introduced into Europe just as people started to seriously think about science and art. It was considered the sober drink that sharpened the mind. A side benefit was that water had to be boiled to brew coffee which got rid of the nasty germs and bacteria that were often in the water people drank.
Coffee
This popular hot beverage came out of Yemen in the Middle East around 1500. It became a legal alternative to alcohol, which was forbidden to Muslims. Initially, some clerics saw caffeine as evil and outlawed the drink, but cooler heads soon prevailed. The coffeehouses that opened up in the area became centers of political discourse and playing board games. Europeans who visited the Arab world soon brought back the wonder of coffee to their home countries. Coffeehouses opened in England in the 1650s and soon spread to other areas.
Initially in England, coffeehouses were seen as a counter to taverns which were frowned upon by Oliver Cromwell’s conservative administration. Taverns were dark and dingy while coffeehouses were bright and cheery and had bookshelves and smart conversation. They soon became places to do business, especially concerning finance and stock trade. By 1700, there were hundreds of coffeehouses in London. Wives complained that husbands spent too much time in them, and English monarchs were wary of the political discourse that might be critical of their reign.
Coffeehouses opened in France around the same time but there was initial opposition from wine merchants who didn't want any competition. Coffee drinkers ignored them. Soon all of Europe welcomed coffee. The Dutch set up coffee plantations on their Caribbean islands and soon Brazil and Colombia started growing coffee beans to meet the exploding demand for the hot brew.
In the 1700s, the coffeehouse became an early Internet, with proprietors gathering the news of the day and writing it out for people to read. Coffee drinkers could see how their elected representatives voted in Parliament and financial traders could monitor the latest stock prices. Book lovers could discuss their favorite literary works with other readers. Scientists would go to coffeehouses to continue their discussions after public presentations. Edmond Halley, the astronomer who discovered the comet, hung out at the same coffeehouse for years. He and other scientists were fascinated by gravity and took their ideas to Isaac Newton at Cambridge University. Newton soon came up with his theory of gravity. He credits the coffeehouse conversations of his colleagues as important to his work.
Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse in London for ship captains, shipowners and merchants who would gather to hear the latest maritime news. Eventually Lloyd started insuring cargo. Lloyd’s of London, a major insurer to the world, started in a coffeehouse.
Coffeehouses in France were a bit different. They began to appear in the late 1600s but were more likely to be centers of political and intellectual debate than places to do business. And, unlike in Britain, the government regulated them. Any printed material was subject to censorship by the crown. The way around that was to just write things out in longhand - no government oversight! Coffee cafes, as they were called, became hotbeds for revolutionary thought, with legendary French thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu leading the way. As the king clamped down and tried to raise taxes to pay for debt incurred by helping us win the War for independence, the heat went up in the coffee cafes. In 1789, the French Revolution happened. The author says, “It literally began in a cafe.”
Tea
By the 18th Century, the British Empire took up 20% of the world. Many of the country’s colonies grew tea which became the symbol and staple of English culture. Tea was discovered in the Himalayas around 1,000 BCE. It became China’s national drink during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 CE). Besides tasting good, tea does have serious medicinal qualities. Soon Chinese merchants developed tea trade all over the world.
During the 13th Century, Genghis Khan took over most of the world, including China. The Khan was not a fan of tea; he liked the hard stuff. Tea wasn’t outlawed but it faded as the national beverage. Japan took the idea of tea ceremonies to new heights and to this day, formal tea-drinking rituals are big in the country. During the 16th Century, the Portuguese opened up commercial trade with China and brought tea to Europe. It was a very expensive drink, so, for many decades coffee was king. By the beginning of the 18th Century, tea was affordable and the British adopted it as their national beverage. It’s not clear why tea took off in England. However, monarchs, who often married royalty from other countries that enjoyed tea, no doubt encouraged the people to sip the hot drink. The British East India Company was the Amazon of the day and decided to bring Far Eastern tea to the masses in Britain. It worked and tea took off in popularity.
In 1717 Thomas Twining opened a shop for women where they could buy tea. The ladies were excluded from many activities back then - they could not go into coffeehouses - so tea sales took off as women gathered to buy tea and even “have a cuppa” at the shop. British women took a page from the Chinese and Japanese and developed intricate tea party ceremonies.Eventually tea became affordable enough for all classes to enjoy it. It was cheaper than beer. Since tea was served hot, it gave poor people the illusion that they were having a hot meal as they ate their cold food. Drinking tea reminded all of the loyal subjects of the realm that the British Empire was indeed all over the world, a situation that led to the abundance of tea for the people. As industrialization developed in Britain, entrepreneurs attracted workers with promises of frequent breaks to enjoy excellent tea. Tea kept workers alert during long shifts and helped fend off hunger pains. Its medicinal properties warded off diseases which were common in the mills. The demand for tea cups and serving crockery created new opportunities for manufacturers. Josiah Wedgwood got his start mass producing tea services. The company is still in business.
At one point, taxes on tea accounted for 10% of British government revenue. When the king imposed the Tea Act of 1773 to create a monopoly on tea distribution and raise money in the American colonies, things didn’t go so well. Americans were an independent bunch who didn’t want any limits on their choice of trade partners. As a protest, they dumped lots of tea in harbors all over the colonies. The Brits never sat down to figure out how to work things out, and what happened in 1776 is history.
Britain’s relationship with China, its main supplier of tea, became increasingly strained over the years, so the search was on to find places to grow the leaf in the British Empire. India fit the bill. After a rocky start, the newly established Assam Company began to produce vast quantities of tea so that by the mid-1800’s, Chinese tea was not needed.
Coca Cola
Author Standage begins this part of the book by describing the American system of manufacturing which went beyond the European model of dividing production into discrete steps. In the USA, factories utilized specialized machines to stamp out individual parts which were then placed in an assembly line that manufactured the product quickly and efficiently. The rise of mass consumerism paralleled the industrialization of America in the late 1800s so there was a growing demand for products which justified the use of more effective production methods. By 1900, this country had overtaken Britain as the largest economy on earth. Coca-Cola’s ascendance mirrored the rise of American commerce. “Just as the story of Britain’s empire can be seen in a cup of tea, so the story of America’s rise to global preeminence is parallel in the story of Coca-Cola, that brown, sweet, and fizzy beverage,” as the author writes.
In 1767, Joseph Priestley, a famous English scientist and clergyman, noticed that fermenting beer gave up bubbles of gas known as “fixed air.” He figured out how to make carbonated wanted from the fizzle. People liked the tingly effervescence of the bubbly, which soon was believed to promote better health. Jacob Schweppe in London commercialized the production of what was known as soda water, since some people added bicarbonate of soda to the liquid to improve its medicinal qualities.
Soon soda water moved away from being a health-affirming drink to just being a sparkling drink that people enjoyed. Someone invented wine spritzers with bubbly water and the new drink took off. Around 1830, soda fountains began adding syrups to the fizz. One guy from Boston had a thirty-foot high soda fountain that attracted attention. Other smart people developed kits that could produce a range of carbonated beverages and sold all of the support gear - bottles, stoppers, and flavored syrups. Flavored soda water was called “the champagne of the masses.”
In 1886, James Pemberton from Atlanta, Georgia, was a successful maker of patent medicines. Some of his brews contained a lot of alcohol, opium, or morphine so of course you’d feel better after ingesting his elixirs. The patent medicine business was wide open back then; you could claim that your product had super healing powers and there was no federal agency to check it out.
By the 1880s, Pemberton and his professional colleagues were looking at the coca plant - the source of cocaine - as the magic ingredient that would be used in the next great patent medicine. An Italian druggist had developed a coca-infused wine potion that was a huge hit around the world. Popes and presidents endorsed it.
Another popular elixir ingredient of the day was the kola plant from West Africa which added a distinctive taste to drinks. Pemberton took the recipe for the coca-wine drink and added kola to it. The new brew was a success and sold well until July of 1886 when local officials voted to outlaw alcohol for two years. James didn’t miss a beat. He concocted a new drink without the wine, added sugar to it and mixed it with carbonated water. Coca-Cola was the result.
Pemberton marketed the elixir as fresh and invigorating; he made no claims of healing powers in his advertising. He didn’t have to; people loved it. Since it was non-alcoholic, it was legal to sell. Soon he removed the cocaine/coca ingredient which didn’t change the taste. The drink was aggressively marketed by giving out free samples at public gatherings. Sales continued to grow.
Pemberton died of cancer in 1888 just as his drink was taking off. There was a fight over ownership of the brand which was eventually won by Asa Candler, a rival patent medicine maker. Coca-Cola was so successful that Candler stopped producing any other products so he could sell more Coke. He increased his advertising budget dramatically and educated druggists across the land about the promise of - and profits to be derived from - Coca-Cola. By 1895 the drink was being sold in every state. It was the national drink.
Candler figured out that the real money came from selling the syrup needed to make the drink. That dramatically cut down the cost of shipping the finished product. There was an 80% profit in every Coke sold which encouraged people to sell it. Atlanta was a key transportation hub so distributing the syrup was not a problem.
Another innovation was putting the drink in a bottle. That expanded the market to really small towns that didn't have a druggist with the equipment needed to make the drink. The distinctive Coca-Cola bottle, still used today, first appeared in 1916.
There were some bumps along the way. Initially the federal government taxed the drink as a patent medicine but soon determined that it was just a soft drink not subject to tax. Religious fundamentalists put Coke on trial because it contained caffeine which the church people claimed increased licentious sexual activity. That suit resulted in a settlement where the amount of caffeine in the drink was reduced and Coke went on its merry way quenching the thirst of people across the country.
Coke was marketed to children and also sold as an alternative to coffee. The advertising was relentlessly upbeat, painting Coke as the fun drink for all of us. The company was one of the first to put ads on radio, which was becoming more popular every day.
In the 1930's Coke was available in a few countries besides the US, but after World War II ended, the brand took off globally. During the war, Coke was provided to our soldiers, giving them a comforting taste of home wherever they were. Coke became a symbol of patriotism.When General Dwight Eisenhower was commanding American forces in North Africa, he ordered “three million bottles of Coke delivered twice monthly” for his troops.
By 1950, a third of the company's profits came from overseas. There was some pushback. In France, wine and mineral water producers fought against the building of Coke bottling plants, fearing that the cola drink would hurt their sales. In communist countries, Coke was attacked as being unhealthy for the masses. Despite these attacks, Coke continued to reach more and more people all over the world. Coca-Cola’s success reflected the increasing globalization of America’s economic outreach. “Coca-Cola” is the second most commonly understood word in the world, after “OK.”
The book’s last chapter is about another liquid that is having a tremendous impact around the world: bottled water. People in developed countries think that bottled water is safer or purer than tap water although it’s usually not. But people in developing countries with sketchy water supplies depend on bottled water to stay healthy. Water was the first drink in human history. Bottled water is the latest iteration of the essential liquid that keeps all of us alive.
Bob’s Take
Bob's gain. I gave this book to Caroline for her birthday but she had already read it so I got to read it. This was a fascinating book that has become a classic. It was published in 2005 and I’ve always wanted to read it. The author’s identification of essential beverages over the years is spot on. All of the drinks in the book were important in shaping the evolution of civilization.
Catalysts for revolution. Rum, tea and coffee were central to major uprisings. Rum fueled colonial debates in Boston and other cities about how to overthrow British rule. Taxes on tea and sugar and molasses motivated patriots and triggered the War for Independence. In Paris and other towns and cities, discourses about the cluelessness of the king and queen set up the French Revolution.
Beer and wine and social class. Beer historically has been blue collar and wine white collar in terms of who drinks what. Microbreweries have attracted high-income quaffers. The increasing affordability of wine over the past decades made the taste of the grape the drink of choice for a broad swath of people.
Business geniuses know what they’re doing. Josiah Wedgwood, Jacob Schweppe, Edward Lloyd, and Thomas Twining all figured out what the next best thing was going to be and brought it to the market successfully. The companies they created are mainstays of commerce today, hundreds of years after their founding. That is impressive,
